ummm... I agree with Andrew.. All sounds a bit fabricated and anyway,
it's not the medium. A great picture is a great picture.
Photographs are made with the eye and emotions, not the hand and the
equipment. These are merely tools to make your image visible to others.
There are 19273 photographers that come and ask me what equipment I used
and what I did to the pictures in photoshop and whether Canon is better
than Nikon and what aperture and which shutterspeed and did I use a
tripod.... Most of them don't get it and never will.
We each have to do what it takes to make the images that burn inside us.
Some paint in oils, some in watercolour, some sketch, some set
themselves limitations, perhaps they feel it's more challenging, They
shoot "PURE" silver - no cropping allowed, some shoot silver but crop,
some shoot digital and only use certain tools for processing while
shunning others, some do anything they like.
I haven't heard a painter complain that "Everybody's making water colors
these days"
Herschel
On 9/21/11 10:03 AM, asharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
And 92.683% of statistics are made up. It is rather interesting that the
statement "the 20th century was the golden age of analog photography
peaking at an amazing 85 billion physical photos in 2000" has no
attribution.
And why should "professionals" "weep" if analog is deprecated? Many
"professionals" already use digital. Indeed, I'll bet many "professionals"
are overjoyed with digital, because it vastly reduces their cost.
Andrew
On Wed, September 21, 2011 4:34 am, John Palcewski wrote:
The article below (linked on The Dish by Andrew Sullivan), says every
2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took
in the 1800s. In fact, ten percent of all the photos that exist were taken
in the past 12 months.
Also, it's clear analog images are virtually dead, and the competition
is growing at a rate that defies quantification. Read it and weep,
professionals!
Text and link below.
How many photos have ever been taken?
By Jonathan Good September 15, 2011
http://bit.ly/qkKZ3c
Today we take photos for granted. They are our memories of holidays
and parties, of people and places. An explosion of cameras and places to
share them (Facebook, twitter, instagram) means that our lives today are
documented, not by an occasional oxidizing of silver halide but constantly
recorded with GPS coordinates and time stamps. However it hasn't always
been like this - the oldest photograph is less than 200 years old[1].
So how many "Kodak memories" has humanity recorded? How fast are we
snapping photos today? And how many of these treasured memories are
confined to our shoeboxes as lost relics of a pre-digital era?
First we quantify how many analog photos humans have taken. There is a
surprising dearth of direct data, but we can make some reasonable
estimates. It is safe to say that at most a few million photos were
snapped before the invention of the first consumer camera - Kodak Brownie
in 1901[2]. From that time we can use Kodak's employment statistics as a
reasonable proxy for how many photos were taken (Kodak’s dominance of
those "Kodak moments" persisted for most of the 20th century). More
physical photos needed more physical cameras and rolls of print[3].
Throughout this period photos became more and more
mass-market - by 1960 it is estimated that 55% of photos were of babies.
From 1984 onwards the Silver Institute and PMIA published
estimates of how many physical photos the world was snapping each year
(silver halide being an important chemical in film)[4]. Year after
year these numbers grew, as more people took more photos - the 20th century
was the golden age of analog photography peaking at an amazing 85 billion
physical photos in 2000 -- an incredible 2,500 photos per second.
At the dawn of the new millennium a new technology (that Kodak itself
invented) was reshaping the whole industry - the digital photo. When the
first few hundred thousand digital cameras shipped in 1997 their memory
was strictly limited (in fact cameras like the Sony Mavica took floppy
disks[5]!). Digital cameras are now ubiquitous - it is estimated that 2.5
billion people in the world today have a digital camera[6]. If the average
person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion
photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over
70 billion photos to Facebook,
suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there[7]. Already
Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion
photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.[8]
Even accounting for population growth the exponential growth of photos
is incredible (we take 4 times as many photos as 10 year ago). Today every
party, birthday, sports game and concert is documented in rich detail. The
combination of all these photos is a rich portrait of today, the
possibilities of which are illustrated by a tool like “The Moment�. As
photos keep growing we take a clearer and clearer snapshot of our lives
and world today - in total we have now taken over 3.5 trillion photos. The
kind of photos we are taking has changed drastically - analog photos have
almost disappeared - but the growth of photos continues.
