VSL continues but KT Photo regroups. What's going on?

 It's been a long and profitable ride in the stretch limousine of photography for me. My first start in the business was back in 1979. Then came an interlude as the creative director and agency director at Avanti Advertising and Design. A regional advertising agency in Austin. When our biggest client was absorbed by Barnes and Noble back in 1987 I decided to quit the advertising business and start up again as a photographer in 1988. I can't believe that was 35 years ago. 

When I made my re-entry to photography the industry was vibrant and very profitable. I came back into it with ample savings from my advertising career and tons more knowledge about how advertisers worked with photographers on one side and what advertising clients wanted from their photo investments on the other side. I'd spent eight years working with both sides and it paid off for me in spades when the time came to negotiate and work with big clients. 

The two biggest barriers to entry back in the late 1980's were the need to have a large studio and the other need which was to have a well equipped studio. Sure, we did stuff on location, but we did a lot more stuff on our home turf. And spent zillions of man hours processing fun black and white work in our on site darkroom. I still remember the unfettered glee I felt when I purchased my Leica V35 enlarger. It sat next to my Omega D5 large format enlarger and both racked up many miles of usage in the seven years I spent in my downtown Austin studio. Throw money and knowledge at problems and you could mostly expect to make even better money doing it.

Starting in the 1990s and up through the 2010s we transitioned from a big studio to a smaller studio (much closer to home and much more manageable) and much more location work. We worked everywhere, from un-air-conditioned maquiladoras in Mexico to legendary museums in St. Petersburg, Russia. And lots of places in between. But starting in 2010 there were many changes to the industry. Some annoying and some existential. Throughout it all my business was buoyed up by having clients of long tenure, an ability to roll with the changes and adapt, and a certain sense of (maybe misplaced) optimism. Another secret has been having a "CFO" who was focused on moving any spare cash out of the business and into smarter and safer investments. Especially during the "gold rush" years.

It's March of 2023. To date I've booked three projects for the entire year. In years past we would have booked two or three projects in the first couple of weeks of January. The work of being a photographer is changing as rapidly as I would ever have imagined that it could. Printed brochures are becoming a thing of the past. 80% or more of advertising dollars are now spent on the web and of those dollars the vast majority end up supporting very small ads seen on very small screens on phones. Old guys seem to think that there will always be clients out there who will support the old status quo but I'm here to tell you it's not so. Just as no one went back and started a new trend of shooting 8x10 sheet film for magazines in this century no one is going to go back and start up more and more long form magazines that actually get printed. Or super glossy print ads. Or super sexy direct mailers. 

Most photographers plan their careers with a certain blindness, or on the strength of their own anecdotal experiences. I prefer to talk to people in the industry I work in. My son is a rich source of reality therapy when it comes to current technology company marketing. My spouse is a recent retiree (former art director) of an advertising agency that handles the 1st or 2nd largest computer maker's advertising. One of my swim buddies is a global strategist for a huge software/hardware icon. Another friend works in making predictions for a global company from Cupertino. They have different opinions but all their insight trends in the same direction. 

Eventually all meaningful advertising as well as visual engagement in the arts will take place on the internet, will not require huge files, acres of pixels, mountains and mountains of dynamic range or even very detailed photographs. The emphasis will almost always be, going forward, fast impact. Which means filling the frame with the main subject and using bright colors and high contrast. Easy work for phones and an ever accelerating move away from large and complex production. That's more and more reserved for video. Anything on a big screen will be high def video. Count on it.

Thinking long and hard about this I'm loath to spend the money, and especially the time, to continue jousting with the windmills. Or remaking lances with which to do so.  Especially as the population of windmills of merit are disappearing quickly. And not being replaced by profit centers I either recognize or really want to be part of. Could I learn to make interesting photos with A.I.? I'm pretty sure I could. But do I want to? Is that what I really signed up for? Not a chance.

I read yesterday on theonlinephotographer where Michael Johnston laid out his own financial situation and showed how the market for all things photographic (in traditional ventures) is shrinking and shrinking. How his income is reducing year over year. He's trying to find an exit strategy and I wish him luck and also send him my genuine condolences. It's like being wrapped up in a boa constrictor...squeezing, squeezing.

Reading of his business experiences and melding that information with my own view, and the predictions of well qualified friends and business partners, convinced me that commercial photography (as practiced by my generation) is in a death spiral and isn't going to recover in any recognizable way. At least not for me.

So, what to do now? My best guess is that I should spend more time photographing just for myself, spend as much time as I have routinely spent swimming and otherwise exercising, and spend more time traveling with B. And B. if he wants to tag along (pretty sure he's focused on the start-up...). I'm not "officially" giving up working as a photographer. I'll gladly accept any fun projects that come over the transom or through the genuine desire of smart and creative art directors to work with me. But the fervor to market myself and lock in work has fallen off the table as a priority. 

And it's important, I think, to say that this is not about aging or losing energy or stamina. It's about a market changing and shrinking and my lack of need to change with it. Am I still relevant? Frank counsels me that I shouldn't care and that sooner or later I will perforce need to embrace my own irrelevance as time goes by. I think he's right about that. He usually is. ( find a mentor to get older with.... ).

The French see life differently than Americans do. I just read about this in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. They see life in three chapters. Childhood, their work life (with which they keep at emotional arm's length) and the good years from 62 onward that provide time and security for enjoyment, hobbies, travel and fun. In the USA we seem to have a prevailing idea that once one becomes an adult the passion to work becomes overwhelming, all consuming and  for most very necessary. For many traditional retirement is not even an option. That written piece also gave me pause. 

From this point on I'll have to admit that my expertise on what's driving the photo market is slipping toward the muddled mainstream. That my visual style will be more and more at odds with prevailing commercial styles (if any continue to exist). I'm divorcing myself from the idea that I have to be a successful working photographer to be happy and fulfilled. 

I still enjoy writing this blog so now you'll just have to accept me as a peer and fellow participant. That's my new role and one I can get behind. I'm not willing though to accept the responsibility of becoming a geriatric influencer by any stretch. If readership falls off that's fine. I'm not monetizing this in any way now. Haven't for years.

Don't fire up a Patreon page for me and don't send me money. Smarter minds than mine have already taken care of all that detail work. From now on it's photography for fun and occasionally for profit. But without the laser like focus on profit I've maintained for the last 38 years of running a business. Time to cool my jets a bit and take a deep breath. 

More to come as I grapple with the future of the future. Nice and comfortable here. More time to walk around with a camera.

In a 2010 VSL blog post I predicted the future as we are just beginning to see it here. My take was meant as a joke. Now it's real. Take a look. Yes. Written in 2010.

 Here's the copy from the second paragraph:

"With these lessons learned we have adapted the device to serve as a verbal to visual translator.  Now I don't even have to take images.  I can describe them in various levels of detail and our Imaginizer 2020 will create visual images in the minds of the subjects who wear the devices.  So far, my verbal descriptions have been described as boring and mundane but I'm buying a thesaurus and I have high hope.  When it works right the subjects stop looking at me as subject #3210z is in the mind-o-graph above and they just get quiet, like this:"

Does this make me a futurist? Did I nail this about 13 years in advance? I think so.....

Here's the link to the full post: 

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/04/zero-to-60-in-one-week-camera-craziness.html

Just a refresher for all my friends who've purchased a film Leica M camera, a 28mm lens and who have decided to become "street photographers." You might have already read this one....

 https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/05/approval-tacit-approval-implied.html

It's from 12 years ago. But I think it's appropriate for the moment.

Just re-enjoying a photo I made many years ago when we spent more time playing and a lot less time arguing, posturing, competing and dissecting the things we were engaged with.

 Amy walked into my little studio in Westlake Hills with her good friend Renae. Renae was my assistant for a number of years and maybe I remember those years as "the Golden Years" of photography partially because of my collaborations with Renae and partly because we had both time and  optimism on our side. 

The studio space was perennially and almost permanently set up with lights just in case someone interesting/beautiful/wonderful dropped by. We didn't over think technique back then. We played more than we (collectively) do now. There didn't seem to be much on the line to prevent a certain insouciance and fluidity to our pursuit of things like spur of the moment portraits. 

I asked Amy if we could make a portrait and she, of course, agreed. She did a little touch up on her make up and then stepped into the sweet spot of a 40 by 60 inch softbox's glow. 

I focused as well as I could with an old Leica R8, stopped the even older 90mm Summicron (no APO or ASPH) down to f5.6, Renae did a quick check with a light meter and we snapped our way through a 36 exposure roll of Ektachrome or Fujichrome. Maybe it was Astia. Whatever. It was some ISO 100 slide film and when I got it back from the lab I thought it looked great. 

It's funny. Sometimes I post stuff to make a point about gear or technique but most of the time, at least with portraits, I'm posting stuff because I enjoy looking at it for a second, third or hundredth time. For me that's the real value of doing the work. 

And the joy of it.

Wanna Compete with stuff like this? Really? I'd rather take a walk or read something interesting.

 

Take a selfie or two on your smart phone and send it along to them. They'll use A.I. to make it into a "real photograph/headshot" and give you a bunch of variations to choose from in just two hours. For $29. Done.

And by "done" I mean the business of commercial headshots not a "task completed." 

This is all hitting right now. No reason not to enjoy taking photographs for fun. Just going to be a lot harder for a lot of folks to make a living competing.

Inflection points. The end of one era of photography and the beginning of another.

 

this is a prime example of the machines with which we used to create profit

by doing photography. No AF, no autowind, no endless buffer, no high res EVF, 

no cost free frames. But man! Could they convert vision to dollars!

and this was the work I liked to do with that camera. 

One thing we learned in the lightning fast transition from film to digital in the commercial world is that big changes to a culture, a technology or the acceptance of a new paradigm aren't slow moving events. Kodak's best strategic brains assumed that they would have years of film dominance even as late as the early 2000's only to see global adaptation of digital cameras happen almost overnight. By the same token, if you had asked industry "experts" back in 2010 or even 2012 what the future trajectory of interchangeable lens digital cameras was you would have heard, almost uniformly, that the growth of the industry was at its infancy and it was all clear skies and big profits ahead. Ask several of the computer companies a couple of years ago about desktop computer sales and they would have predicted a steady replacement rhythm instead of the 25% drop in purchasing, year over year (except for Apple whose computer sales dropped by little over 1%....outlier?). 

I would have thought that DP Review would have chugged along until at least a couple of big players took Samsung's cue and exited the interchangeable lens camera market altogether. But I guess declining sales, bloated and costly staffing and a failed strategy toward maintaining profitability snuck up much quicker and more decisively than any of us imagined. 

Photography is being re-invented yet again. I swam with a technologist from a major, major technology superpower company this morning. After our workout we got into a long discussion about all the disruptions taking place across many markets. He makes a living strategizing about technology trends. His take is that we are at an inflection point not just for photography but across a number of industries and we are never going back to the way it was only a few years (or even months) ago. And he was predicting that the disruptions, changes and creations of new tools (Dall-e, Chatbots, ChatGBT, A.I., Machine learning) and so much more is starting to look like the massive shift that occurred with the 2007 introduction of Apple's iPhone. But on a more diverse and expanded group of technologies. And across an even bigger playing field.

It's wise to remember that pre-iPhone we needed computers to function in the work space. We needed laptops for mobile computing and communication. We needed stand alone cameras. We needed music players to enjoy our music with. We needed hulking big video cameras to make movies with. We needed ATMs to do our banking. We needed maps to get to new locations in our cars. We needed phones to call people and to do primitive texting. Think ahead to now and how our phones have wiped out the need for so many peripherals we once thought to be necessary and practical. And so many services (banking, shopping, etc.) have been de-peopled and streamlined. 

I wrote a blog post while flying back from the NYC Photo Expo in 2013 (also shuttered as no longer relevant) about societal change in photography and parts of the post were prescient. Here's a link: The Graying of Photography.  Read it. It might make more sense now.

But it's not as if we didn't have clues and telltales about the onrushing inflection point we seem to be in the middle of right now. Here are two subsequent articles, each written eight or nine years ago pointing to exactly what is unfolding right now: 

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2015/10/some-observations-after-speaking-to.html

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/09/after-gold-rush-where-is-photography.html

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that commercial ($$$) photography as we know it is going to cease to exist in a couple of years. No one will be monetizing the work being created at anywhere near the scale we were able to in the past. But a new understanding and market for photography will emerge. We just have to be open to understanding it and willing to take part in it. Or....we can keep copying work like Ansel Adams landscapes and Robert Frank street photography, and considering a paper print to be the gold standard, until we all die off and head to visual Valhalla to commiserate with the buggy whip makers, the floppy disk engineers and the people checking to see if anyone left their change in a payphone booth. Me? Oh I'll be hanging out by the cigarette machines looking to pick up models for after-life retro portrait photography.

The closing of DP Review is just one of many sign posts and they weren't the first to go. Not by a long shot. They held on as long as they did because they were better capitalized. Not because they were better. 

A quiet walk up and down S. Congress Ave. looking for pix and enjoying a cappuccino. A mid-afternoon cappuccino.

 

Sent this photo to my spouse who is out of town taking care of family....

I was looking for something a bit different this afternoon. I'm sure these are a radical departure from my usual style but I was using the little Sigma fp and the matching 45mm f2.8 Sigma lens. I even went with the camera fully stripped down. No finder, no hood. And it worked just fine even out in the daylight. But I did have to wear my eyeglasses to see the screen well enough. 

This part of South Austin has become tourist central. There are nice restaurants and endless boutiques up and down the street. But it's lost most of its "rougher" charm. I keep hoping that the downtown area gets a dose of rejuvenation; but just enough.

Walking around with the little fp and the small 45mm lens was relaxing and with them as my casual cameras I don't set unreal expectations. The pair work really well together and the colors are nice. I was lazy today so I went with .DNG files instead of Jpegs. When I shoot Jpeg I'm always riding the white balance settings with the intention of getting as close to accurate color as possible. I also "cheated" and used Auto-ISO. 

I really love vintage trailers. They seem so 1950s. Largely replace by Airstreams and big RVs these days but the charm of a small trailer or even a "tear drop" trailer is not lost on me.

Still. I have no idea with "Leaf Porn" is and little to no inclination to find out.

That's a whole lot of "No-s" for a retail store. Maybe that's why I've never been in

even though they sell candy and I love some kinds of candy...

Austin's love affair with Willie Nelson continues unabated. And South Congress seems 

to grow a new mural every week...

 I was walking through the famous Hotel San José when I bumped into famous 

photojournalist and educator, Don Winslow. We had a great chat about Rome.

We both wished we were there right now photographing. Fun to see famous icons

sporting cameras around town! 

One of my favorite S. Congress mural destinations. It's a Home Slice Pizza. 

It's good pizza and way popular but closer to home I get better pizza

at Baldinucci Pizza. Love the Roman style crust.

Seemed like an unprovable brag but the cappuccino they whipped up for me

today puts them into the running. Yeah, It's Jo's Coffee. All outdoor seating, but covered 

in case of rain, hail or snow.

The backdoor at Amy's Ice Cream. Another Austin original that's spread across the state...