Introduction

[SoylentGreen]

Yeah, it's slowly dying, and H.A.N.'s the box they're gonna bury it in. lol.

S.G.

[dieselfish]

I think part of the reason we don't see big businesses targeted is that really big businesses often hire large design houses to build their sites - and large design houses will have in-house photographers to take any images that are needed.  They aren't usually customers of stock photography.  The typical customers of stock photography are small to medium sized companies that don't have huge advertizing budgets (nor huge legal budgets for that matter...).

[Matthew Chan]

I was curious to see if there had been any articles written on professional photography dying. It turns out, there are a couple.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.html?emc=eta1

http://photocreative365.com/is-photography-a-dying-profession

[havenotreceivedaletter]

Oh my goodness, everyone has a digi cam and you can get great shots even with a cheap one.  I've gotten great pictures.  I think may happen is that most people will shoot their own photos for whatever they're doing.

[SoylentGreen]

I enjoyed the discussion here.

It occurred to me that photographers have also benefitted from technology; it's made them much more productive and has saved them money.

With film, one couldn't know what the actual photo would look like until development.
Now, you can see it on screen as you go, or in real-time on a laptop.
At one time, professional photographers would need their own lab, equipment and supplies to develop their photos.
That has been completely done away with.  Imagine the time and money that's saved.
In addition, any special effects (even subtle ones) would require quite a bit of lab work and materials.
Now, with some software knowledge, the same effects can be performed in minutes.

I think that the hardware is much less costly now than in decades past.
I know that some are stuck on the big names like Hasselblad, etc.
But, it's probably unrealistic to expect the customer to pay for such high-end brands, unless he/she can actually benefit from it.

That's just some of the recent benefits that photographers (both professional and otherwise) enjoy these days.

While the prices on stock imagery have fallen (aside from the high-end market, which is faltering), the cost of producing high quality photographs has also decreased immensely.
So, photographers aren't hurting quite as much as they'd lead you to believe.

S.G.