p.4 #1 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
FlyPenFly wrote:
Sorry the "cottage" software industry never really went away, it's back stronger than ever and is the fastest growing part of the software industry.
Sure, you could say Apple is the microstock-software big shot that everyone seems to be developing apps for at the moment.
p.4 #2 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
rscheffler wrote:
Maybe artificial scarcity is a bad thing, but isn't controlled scarcity part of the model that maintains high paying professions such as lawyers, doctors, bankers, etc.?
Correct for the "high paying" part :-) That's part of the reason why health care costs are skyrocketing out of control, by the way...
If you break down barriers to entry (and so get rid of the controlled scarcity) doctors and lawyers aren't going to disappear. They will be paid less, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing.
The markets do their thing -- adjust prices (wages) to match supply and demand -- very well.
p.4 #3 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
RustyBug wrote:
Ummm ... incorporate all factors ... yup, it really is, but that's way OT.
Which factors? The stock market represents claims on the assets of all publicly traded companies.
As the economy grows, the assets of the publicly traded companies grow as well. That means the shares of these companies become more valuable. What loses value at the same rate as the stock market gains value?
p.4 #6 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
KaaX wrote:
Which factors? The stock market represents claims on the assets of all publicly traded companies.
As the economy grows, the assets of the publicly traded companies grow as well. That means the shares of these companies become more valuable. What loses value at the same rate as the stock market gains value?
1) each transaction is zero sum and only represents a shifting of assets between seller, buyer & broker, predicated upon the perception of value of a company as partially indicated by assets.
2) the value of tangible commodities such as gold, or the purchasing power of the dollar via inflation
Beyond that ... too far OT. I'll have to let you believe as you will.
p.4 #7 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
Right on, FlyPenFly. That software comment would've been correct about five years ago, but the industry was turned on its head by mobile. Could the same thing happen for photography? I wouldn't rule it out, but the demand for paid photographers is shrinking, while the supply of people who are interested in making photographs has increased tremendously. For software developers, the situation is inverted.
p.4 #8 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
Digital photography and the advancement of really excellent cheap small cameras have lowered drastically the barrier to entry for high quality photos. Most importantly, taking an image and sharing it is essentially now free. That used to cost a $ amount per roll/printed image.
People are also getting better at composing and the camera is so automated now and pretty competent at that. Some iPhone camera apps can even overlay rule of thirds or the golden equation unto your viewfinder.
I think the hobbyist will never go away and if the mid to beginner level pro photographers don't find a way to offer more value, they'll go away as well.
Serious studio photography will probably never go away and I imagine that as 3D photography takes off, that can be an area of high growth although it's video now.
p.4 #9 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
FlyPenFly wrote:
Sorry the "cottage" software industry never really went away, it's back stronger than ever and is the fastest growing part of the software industry.
Not exactly. It did go away. But then right now it's kinda recreating itself (with completely new people, though, it's not like people who did it in the early 90's took a break and are now back).
However I think the history will repeat itself -- in five years or so this new cottage industry will be mostly gone. It exists because it's very very nimble and can jump into new markets before established companies figure out these markets exist. But I expect the same pressures to apply and the same things to happen -- small stuff will become free and complex stuff will become province of regular, established companies.
p.4 #10 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
KaaX wrote:
Perhaps it would be useful to look at the history of hobbyist computer programmers.
In the late 80s and early 90s there was a thriving cottage industry of small-time programmers putting out a variety of small software programs, mostly utilities. Very few made it big, but a lot were making enough for "reasonable living".
Fast-forward to now and... this cottage industry is gone. Completely. It was killed by many things including Microsoft getting better, but one major factor was free software. Completely free, as in speech and as in beer. Whatever remnants of that industry survived either went into deep deep niches or just went into the workforce as plain employees or, often, consultants/freelancers.
I think it's a good thing that this happened. Again, abundance (in this case, of free software) is good and scarcity is bad. ...Show more →
You do realize that 'Free Software' long predates the cottage software industry, right? And that the move to free software was largely due to retail computers finally acquiring the necessary features for running it (32bit processors with MMU's) which enabled the hobbyist market to move over to the largely more capable Unix-like OS's which they had not been able to run prior to then.
Oh, and right now there's a massive cottage-industry software boom going on, in terms of iOS and Android apps (empowered in large part by the very Free Software you accuse of killing that industry, both iOS and Android are based largely on Free or Open Source software).
p.4 #11 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
mawz wrote:
You do realize that 'Free Software' long predates the cottage software industry, right? And that the move to free software was largely due to retail computers finally acquiring the necessary features for running it (32bit processors with MMU's) which enabled the hobbyist market to move over to the largely more capable Unix-like OS's which they had not been able to run prior to then.
Why, yes, I do know something about the history of free/open source software.But free software is considerably more than Unixoid OSes. Emacs, for example, a very important piece of software, runs on most everything under the sun.
I would also argue that Linux and friends became popular noticeably later than processors with MMUs became widespread. This is because it took a fair amount of time for Linux to mature to general usability and grow out of the realm of neckbeards.
mawz wrote:
(empowered in large part by the very Free Software you accuse of killing that industry, both iOS and Android are based largely on Free or Open Source software).
...accuse? I think it was a very good thing (and I explicitly said so: read more carefully :-) )
p.4 #12 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
Right around when the internet became more than AOL for most Americans at least, cottage software firms were pretty abundant with Shareware. That sort of small business niche software didn't really die out, it just didn't grow nearly as fast as other sectors.
p.4 #14 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
What, you mean like car photography? Yeah, lots of that is now CGI. The interesting thing though is that photographers are hired to shoot the environments in which the fake cars will be placed, especially so that the reflections can be realistically rendered. But I guess eventually CGI will improve here as well...
As for studio product photography - I thought that as already long gone?
p.4 #15 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
rscheffler wrote:
As for studio product photography - I thought that as already long gone?
It exists, but not necessarily in the form that you'll think of as "photography" :-)
"... [Amazon] is shooting 3,000 fashion images a day in a photo studio using patent-pending technology. ... The company has also made a “disproportionate” investment in photography, said Cathy Beaudoin, the president of fashion for Amazon. The photography studio, in Kentucky, can shoot more than two images a minute, allowing the company to post new items daily on the Web that were photographed hours earlier." (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/business/amazon-plans-its-next-conquest-your-closet.html)
p.4 #17 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
KaaX wrote:
It exists, but not necessarily in the form that you'll think of as "photography" :-)
"... [Amazon] is shooting 3,000 fashion images a day in a photo studio using patent-pending technology. ... The company has also made a “disproportionate” investment in photography, said Cathy Beaudoin, the president of fashion for Amazon. The photography studio, in Kentucky, can shoot more than two images a minute, allowing the company to post new items daily on the Web that were photographed hours earlier." (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/business/amazon-plans-its-next-conquest-your-closet.html)
Wow that sounds like fun, do they use robots? There's probably enough wannabee photographers around so they can replace the ones that jump off the roof every year or two easily.
p.4 #18 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
dennishh wrote:
Wow that sounds like fun, do they use robots?
I suspect they use cameras tethered to computers and a bunch of software :-) The role of humans is probably limited to putting objects in front of cameras and taking them away. Well, maybe there's someone who presses the button and whose job description says "machine operator" :-/
p.4 #19 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
rscheffler wrote:
What, you mean like car photography?
No I meant that studio photographers who know what they're doing in business as well as their trade are still around and just as healthy as automobile makers. Lots of customers, lots products being manufactured. The economy may be down a bit but boutique startups are not drowning them - again IF they know what they're doing.
BTW, CGI has already surpassed product and architectural photography in terms of both IQ and dynamic versatility. That's my field and I know it well. It has it's place in landscape photography too.
p.4 #20 · "Professional" Photographers , sold artwork hanging in buildings and Nikon D800E
For what, though? Built work or envisioned work? Bifurcator wrote:
BTW, CGI has already surpassed...architectural photography in terms of both IQ and dynamic versatility. That's my field and I know it well. It has it's place in landscape photography too.
It has it's place in landscape photography too.