DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN AN ECONOMY IN CRISIS

Over the holiday season the mass media’s pundits, columnists, and political soothsayers dusted off their crystal balls and polished their moral compasses to spin their usual self-serving conventional wisdoms while obfuscating carefully not to embarrass any of their benefactors. The same exercise as any New Year brings out, but this 2008 to 2009 passage involved factors that deserved much more insight and candor, but apparently the courage and fortitude of journalistic celebrities remains tempered by the fact the mass media is the mouthpiece of corporate America and it is never wise to bite the hand that feeds one. I don’t get paid enough by a long shot to be restrained in the same manner, but at the same time I have not risen to a level of celebrity that induces an audacity to think I can see into the future.

So lets consider what we do know presently and what is happening in the marketplace to see if 2009 will look much different from 2008. For sure with Circuit City already a thing of the past the number of retail outlets for digital photography products will be fewer, in part because the pie in terms of consumer spending has shrunk, but then the stores that remain will have a larger share of the pie if there are fewer stores. In other words it will be easier to shop around for a digital camera because you won’t have to visit as many vendors, and the really low-ball prices will probably disappear because the stores cutting the margins too close will not survive a reduced volume of sales and will likely disappear. Sadly in my view, the one store chain I would like to see disappear from the scene, WalMart will likely survive, but that is because it has been dragging America down to the bottom of the barrel on every front and too many just can’t resist the lowest price regardless that the product quality is second rate.

At the manufacturing level I don’t see much change in the immediate future, and I think the MacWorld show in San Francisco this week will bear me out. My rationale is a simple logic that all the new stuff has been in the pipelines of the big producers for 2, 3 or more years, so the investment in development has already been made, so not bringing a new model or an evolutionary upgrade to market would save little and cost more in no sales at all, and the hype of the new will help preserve public awareness and market share. So what I am looking for are possibly several new Apple evolutionary model upgrades, and one rumored one in particular I think digital photographers should take very seriously. I have been using Apple Mac Mini computers since they were first introduced about 3 years ago, and with great satisfaction in the performance and reliability of a really modest cost computer with unique advantages, one being it is just a 1/10 the size of a typical PC tower. The new Mac Mini is said to have much improved video support including possibly two interface connects for dual displays, and very likely it will have a faster processor and in the top-of-the-line model maybe even a single Quad Core processor. But MacWorld isn’t just Apple products it is also heavily invested in all kinds of graphics hardware and software, some of which will support PC Windows use as well as the Mac crowd. So beginning tomorrow look for digital photography news out of Moscone Center in San Francisco.

I don’t think the excitement and enthusiasm will be any less in 2009 for those latest and greatest new goodies that are offered, but the realities of an economic environment 2008 brought us will have a large impact on individual’s thinking and consideration of making a purchase decision. That is reflected in what you see in the personal for sale advertisements in newspapers and on-line for the largest SUV’s both in the huge numbers for sale and the actual prices they are selling for. But I think there are many more gas guzzler’s sitting not driven in driveways because more is owed on them than they are worth. Reality has had its impact and mindless expenditures just to satisfy one’s self image may be set aside for more realistic and practical choices. Will so many tack a couple of $1,000 plus lenses to their dSLR kit so readily, or will they realize they can obtain just as sharp an image with a lens that is a fraction of the cost of the super XXX model. No one has listened to me in the past that optics are much less a factor with digital SLR’s compared to 35mm film SLR’s, because no one has taken the time and effort to examine a true unsharpened raw digital camera file to see on a computer display just how soft and low contrast what is captured by a dSLR camera is. On the other hand a frequent correspondent who is even older than I, (if that possible) am and still shooting just got a Canon G10 and sent me some prints from a small segment cropped from an image made with his G10 - he was literally cooing about the results he was so pleased, and for good reason I could see in the prints - better acutance and detail definition than anything I have seen from a medium speed 35mm film frame, plus no grain.


I think 2009 will not be that different in digital photography, in part because momentum will keep the business percolating, although with slightly fewer players. But after the mortgage shoe dropped in 2008; if the other shoe, credit card debt, causes more big financial institutions to go belly up, 2010 may be a very different situation. In the meantime with a little more time on our hands in a slower economy even more digital pictures may be taken, it is a time to stop and smell the roses and shoot a picture or two.

WHAT IF IN 2009?

Quite a few weeks ago I was invited to contribute my prognostications for photography in 2009, an annual feature in Shutterbug I usually participate in. In early fall of 2008 what I was seeing of the world, I was loath to say what the next day would bring much less the next year, so I declined to participate as usual. Today with 2009 just a few days hence, I am no more inclined to participate in prognostication of what the future next year will bring. Although I would like to indulge in the hope change could produce, but every time I turn on the TV news or read the newspapers I hear the same prayers to the ideological economic gods that have been worshipped for the last 30 years and brought us to where we are today. Being a poor relation of the media myself, and although I try to serve a useful mission to the community of readers I serve, all but a few magazines today are the communities of people they once were, and now just cogs in a corporate conglomerate wheel that turns only to grind out a bottom line profit. For most whether on-line, on the tube or still on the newsstand, those who are still speaking continue to voice the ideas of the past, and to me it reflects a lost generation in time since 1980, that thankfully came to an end in this last election and economic crash of 2008. To me the question is will the old-fashioned ideal of an editorial purpose be renewed to make what is espoused by those in the media again serve the community of people who are the listeners, the readership of a magazine or will there only principle remain the number at the bottom line of a corporate ledger.

Of course reading this some of you will think I am being too idealistic and old-fashioned. But age for me does afford some perspective, and looking at the history of photography in the roles it has played in society and culture since 1890, I still believe photography’s most significant function was and is it is the folk art of our times. Enthusiast photography is the vehicle of visual expression of the common people recording and preserving what is important to the lives of those ordinary folk who are the community culture of our world. Some say change, like what we are now experiencing, is really opportunity. To many that opportunity is to restore the immediate past they enjoyed, which I find self defeating, putting us back on the same path that took us over a cliff. But the opportunity change provides can also bring progress. But to me that is not some alien new world I would not recognize, but one that conserves the positive human values over a longer history, like the editorial principles that have long served the progress of the people’s interests and are historically associated with names like Pulitzer and H.L. Mencken.

Individuals who only know me casually assume I am a rather radical liberal, but in contemporary connotation that would be misleading, because what I hope for in 2009 is also a conservation of some long established principled values of human society that got lost in the rush to riches during the recent past. For instance digital technology has propelled photography into a progressive new future, but the value of a photograph as a record of the history of human life has not changed. Surely the cell phone camera captures that show up on FaceBook and YouTube are often superficial and adolescent uses of a photograph, but that does not detract from the other extreme of iconic images like Capra’s shot of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, or the Raising Of The Flag On Iwo Jima, or the little Vietnamese girl fleeing the Napalm bombing of her village; have been photographs that have educated people to a more modern sense that war is a problem, not a solution for humanity. Would there be the help so many have given to Aids victims and the starving children of Africa if it were not for their being photographed and one wrenching picture after another in the media has moved people to give or volunteer.

Between the ridiculous and profane to the inspired, photographs document life and the world we live in. Sometimes I am struck when looking through my archives I find pictures of places that no longer exist as I captured them on film, or people I knew who are no longer with us. I have a personal philosophy that all there is to this life for an individual is the experience of living it. And now getting too old to do many of the things I used to, photographs allow me to remember and re-experience life as it once was, to find an added dimension of living experience that without photographs would not be possible. If anything makes us immortal it is the photographs which have documented and illustrated a life as it has been lived. How cherished are the pictures of loved ones who have too often died young and left us?

The camera’s future is not in the marketplace of tomorrow but in the use we put them to make photographs that become a part of the illustrated story of human life in these times whatever they come to be.