Chicago Sun-TImes has laid off its entire photo staff: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-chicago-sun-times-photo-20130530,0,4361142.story
Looks like reporters with iphones are the new photojournalists. What's worse: THEY'RE NOT GOING TO GET PAID. In the digital universe, the main goal for corporate bean counters is to drive costs to zero. That 45 RPM Beatles record I bought in 1964 had to be etched in a piece of vinyl, with a printed label affixed, sleeved, boxed, shipped by truck, displayed in a brick-and-mortar record store that required heat, electrical power, maintenance, insurance, etc. All that had to be paid for by somebody. And if my buddy Joe liked the tune, he went and bought his own copy. Now, its just a digital file that cost almost nothing to bring to market, and stored in the Cloud for fractions of fractions of fractions of a penny, and downloaded to a buyer for less than a buck. And if Joe likes the tune, Ill burn him a copy, so the artist gets burned. Digital technology is the best example I can think of to drive home one of the basic tenets of Taoism: Every front has a back; the bigger the front, the bigger the back.
As for digital photography any more, naive young shooters who think "getting published" will somehow get their foot in the door have started feeding free content all over the place. And it will get almost all of them nowhere. And the experienced guys like me will have to join them, and justify it by seeing every image we release for free as a means to "generate buzz" about our studio. But "buzz" doesn't put food on my table or keep a roof over my head any more because there's so much free "buzz" going on (Flickr, Tumblr, Mayhem, Facebook, here, there, everywhere) that it sounds like midnight in August in Louisiana... 25,000,000 crickets at once is just background noise, none of them really stand out much above the rest.
Just think, in another year, every Canon pro will be shooting a 1D X or a Mark-3 and every high school teen will be shooting all the used Mark-2's, which are damned good cameras, and processing in Lightroom-4 (<$100) and PS Elements-11 (<$100). Meaning that for under a grand, kids living with their parents will have the same desktop power in their bedroom that it took the rest of us 20 years and $100k to build up to as we stepped through five cameras, ten PS upgrades, and speedlights and light modifiers that once cost 5-10 times what they cost now.
Next on the chopping block will be fashion photogs for the major publication houses. With the ability to take high-res quality images from movie clips, they wont need to pay photographers just set up movie lights, tether the camera to a computer, hire a model to just go through some poses while the camera is rolling, and the Project Manager and Editor will cherry-pick the best stills.
Take your place on the great mandala, kiddies.
Geo
abadon:
