PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE NEW MEDIA CULTURE

“Just as the Eskimo has been de-tribalized via print, going in the course of a few years from primitive nomad to literate technician, so we, in an equally brief period, are becoming tribalized via electronic channels.”

-Edmund Carpenter / Marshall McLuhan - Explorations In Communications

Most who do photography today are very aware making images has been revolutionized in process from an analogue to a digital media. To a large extent that change has masked the even greater change photography plays in the culture of our times. Most of what organizes our images is a different media that has not changed picture content, but how we use photography as a communication within the cultural environment.

Photography has over a century old place in our history, but only recently have photos been shared and communicated through the internet as part of every aspect of our daily exchanges between people. In the analogue days of photography what camera users did was a specialty isolated as a hobby or profession in the culture. That distinction and isolation no longer exists with FaceBook, Flickr, Instagram and hundreds of similar media hosts connecting all of us to a world of pictures and much more. News and advertising accessing us through ours and others images - we live in a global museum of pictures of ourselves and the world. Google anything and you find what it looks like in a digital photo on a computer display screen.

The tribalization McLuhan and Carpenter referred to in 1960 has largely occurred in my adult lifetime from the mid’50’s to the present. Photographs as cultural material content

has remained largely the same although improved significantly in image quality over time. What has changed is the role images play in our culture, the global village is now a space well known through photographs. The great varieties of ethnic distinctions in people has diminished in two generations. Everyone today looks like another human being to our younger generations. But of course some old-timers are anxious and fearful their presence has disappeared with their past.

We have known the phrase Global Village for half a century and have realized the technologies of today make the world a smaller place through travel, shipping and communications. But are we aware of the cultural changes. Hardly, as they are evolving in and around is unseen but still apparent and powerful. Some college teachers have noted their students are now different than before, and we call them millennials. But do we of the older generations know them? I could say what does the word ‘gangnam’ mean. You can look it up on Google and you will find: you get ten different breakdowns of the term mostly referring to style. "Gangnam Style" is a Korean neologism mainly associated with upscale fashion and a lavish lifestyle associated with trendsetters in Seoul’s Gangnam district, which is considered the most affluent part of the metropolitan area. In colloquial usage, it is comparable to the English slang terms “swag” or “yolo”. Although half way around the world in a country with a spoken and written language very alien to our own english & european counterparts, its culture has spread into the western world in many ways beyond their Samsung and LG electronic products and Kia and Hyundai automobiles. There are no leaders in Korea intentionally exporting their cultural idioms. It’s just mutual human interest through music and fashions that propel differences around the world.

How we are being tribalized can in part be blamed on new technologies like cell phones and and the internet; but hardware does not explain behavior and culture. The the physical means ideas and concepts are communicated and how that has changed our view of reality influencing how people act and react, is something more. Now we exist as if we really are living in a small village that now encompasses the entire planet, or most of it. The term viral expresses all this occurs instantly, but how it comes about is inexplicable. Something that has universal meaning happens significantly in one place, and its affects spread around the world. The most immediate example was the gang rape on a bus in Delhi, India. The news spread instantaneously well beyond India, and one affect was fear among women. Since that awful rape and death of the victim, women in India and elsewhere are beginning to come out into the open to criticize their society, a typically paternalistic authoritarian but supposedly democratic regime, of its failing half of their population. That story resonates in much of the world and the result is a lessening of the establishment’s power in this “man’s” world, and extending a common populism to another including everyone.

As photographers, is there anything we need to do? No, pictures are like words they are neutral. We just have to be vigilant they are not used intentionally to do harm to others. Culture evolves of its own without much governance. Making laws that inhibit culture has never worked. We just have to live with it and keep it connected to reality as much as possible, supporting that which has a positive meaning to human life. 

Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Really, how can any force silence thousands and thousands of cell-phone users living in every corner of the global village, all talking to each other? There is no security against the talk that fills every village and changes feelings and ideas. Centralized force is becoming absurd, but not defeated. The powers of politics will stir the pot, so let’s be vigilant, so that it does not spoil the stew.

SPIRITS OF SIGHT, SOUND AND MOTION

Our senses afford us the experience of life. The arts that derive from our senses are the rewards of care, value, as well as the gifts of many others that make up our world. Although we are flooded today with the arts of the senses we are yet to become immune to their heritage and influence.

It was a very different world we lived in when we could not share in worlds of spirits not our own. And what is our own is more now a commonality than an exclusion. Life has become much larger as our world has become smaller. Yet we cannot accept others or get along with them because their spirits are somehow foreign although as human as our own. We become smaller not larger by taking without giving the appreciation of all the many others that share their spirits with us.

I have learned that one spirit teaches another. My spirit was first awakened by music. Then the necessities of life interrupted and I became aware of a visual spirit I found in photography. Although it consumed my interest in and dominated my spirit for some time, I have gradually returned to a life  involving both the audial realm as well as the seeing one.

Little by little the two spirits I follow have come together with a little help. That was a four year long project of working in photography to illustrate many different kinds of music. It opened my ears to music I had not known before and provided new challenges to my being able to see the world as photographs. But most that sight and sound can be related spirits, not antagonistic worlds unto themselves. That is not unusual as many listen and look at the same time. But the extent to which they are related is seldom thought of except by circumstance. An opera, a musical theater, naturally bring all the spirits together. But we do that intentionally and it seldom occurs without trying and deliberate effort.

However there are many instances in life around the world like carnival in Venice and Rio where it is a natural coincidence, others as well I am aware of too that are less obvious to most people.  The spirits of sight, sound and motion live well together when people get together and celebrate this life we all take part in. So why not enjoy it all as one where our spirits flourish together.

This can happen individually too if we want it to. It doesn’t have to be passive, just having music as a background to daily tasks. The spirit of the images I create and work with can be related to the sounds I care about; conjoined together enhancing each other. It only requires an openness to something that is only divided in our minds as to how things should be, but should they? 

Many of the photographers I have known have also been musicians, or is it vice-versa. One I have recently corresponded with works at both music and making photographs, but apparently keeps each realm unto itself. That seems natural, but is it really; or is it the result of a culture we live in that assumes divisions that may not be true but endured none the less. My faith is that the spirits we all live with are one and the same, so dividing them is maybe a false promise, to what I do not know. 

I have learned after a lot of being oblivious that what has made me appreciate the spirit of sound and sight are from the same being just human. What divisions and limitations we apply to ourselves as part of being in a culture are real but not an imprisonment. We are really free to be as fully who we are as we have the courage to be.

A REALLY GREAT SALE OF THE DELL ULTRASHARP U2410 LCD DISPLAY

A couple of years ago or so a friend alerted me to a really good quality LCD display that supports professional-level digital image editing and color management. It is the Dell Ultrasharp U2410 display that when introduced had a list price of $599. Since then many of my readers have purchased this Dell U2410 and not one has faulted its very good performance.

Now a reader brought my attention to the Dell Ultrasharp U24110 being on sale for $200 less than its introductory list price. Now this excellent performing product is available for just $399. So even if you don’t need a new display LCD display today, get one now so when you need it you will have one. Just go to http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=soho&cs=ussoho1&sku=320-8277

IS A PHOTOGRAPHERS VISION TRUE

Recently an article has appeared in severals place on the web that is based on a exhibition and story by Mia Fineman a curator of photography at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. It looks at the pat, mostly the Pictorialist dominated history of photography that began just before the beginning of the 20^th century,but brings into question the use of Photoshop in this current digital era of photography.

FAKING IT: MANIPULATED PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE PHOTOSHOP

“By tracing the history of manipulated photography from the earliest days of the medium to the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, Mia Fineman offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of photography’s development, in which champions of photographic “purity,” such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, get all the glory, while devotees of manipulation, including Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Heartfield, are treated as conspicuous anomalies. Among the techniques discussed on these pages—abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, over-painting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Fineman demonstrates that the old adage “the camera does not lie” is one of photography’s great fictions.” Metropolitan Museum of Art book description on Amazon.com

What Did We Do Before Photoshop?

MIA FINEMAN: Most of the earliest manipulated photographs were attempts to compensate for the new medium's technical limitations -- specifically, its inability to depict the world as it appears to the naked eye.

The idea for the exhibition grew out of a question that was posed at nearly every presentation on photography that I've given or attended in recent years: How has digital technology, especially image-processing software like Photoshop, changed photography's relationship to truth?

I discovered a connection between trick photography and stage magic, which was the most popular form of mass entertainment in the late 19th century. Stage magicians often performed illusions featuring decapitation and "talking heads," and this motif was quickly picked up by photographers, both professional and amateur.

Photographers have always used whatever technical means were available to them to create the pictures they wanted to create -- Photoshop is the latest tool. That said, I do think there's a tendency among some contemporary image-makers to overuse digital tools and effects -- but it's mostly a matter of taste. In the commercial world, especially in magazines and advertisements, digital retouchers sometimes get sloppy, but the general public has gotten very good at spotting telltale blunders like missing limbs or misaligned body parts, models with weirdly poreless skin, and errant shadows cast by absent objects.

WHAT MIA FINEMAN DOES NOT ESTABLISH: CAN ANY PHOTOGRAPH BE TRUE?

Most experienced photographers realize from working with the process that every photograph is a distortion of reality, it is never true to objective reality or for that matter to what we see with our eyes. And for that matter neither is human vision anything but another kind of manipulation of objective reality. We are all fooled by our own minds to believe what we have learned to be “true”.

Fortunately many photographers in the last 150 years of its history have also written about their ideas  of what making a photograph is and should be. From soon after the beginning of the use of the process in England and France there  has been a movement of enthusiasts to have photography accepted as one of the established arts. Fortunately many of these statements have been published in a single book: A PHOTOGRAPHIC VISION - Pictorial Photography, 1889 - 1923, edited by Peter C. Bunnell.

Although much of what was written by many, some of whom have images referenced by Mia Fineman, smacks of political ideology of one primary purpose, that photography becomes an accepted medium among the arts establishment. In that regard various techniques were promoted as being more or less art-like, while a few argued for using a technique that rendered images truer to the nature of the photographic process, Sadakichi Hartmann in particular. One statement in 1896 by Gertrude Kasebier however was more autobiographically candid, indicating that what is true to a photographers vision should not be subject to the styles of what is commercially successful. “The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourselves. Imitation leads to certain disaster...... New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive.” 

The concluding 1923 section is edited by John Wallace Gillies after receiving letters from Clarence H. White, Dr. A D Chaffee, Edward Weston, Alexander P Milne and W H Porterfield as Statements by Pictorialists. Gilles comments leading into the series of letters. “In the Pictorial section of photography one can make almost any kind of statement he pleases, and some will nod sagely, ‘Yes‘ and others will disagree with great heat. It is right or wrong as it happens to strike the other fellow. There is nothing absolute, nothing settled. It is an art, or not an art as we please to have it. Stieglitz at present makes his pictures sharp and is ready to tell everybody that a fuzzy picture is not the thing. Clarence White likes his pictures softer, and has  held to that view, which speaks well for his opinion. Steichen made them fuzzy years ago, and now cannot get them sharp enough. So what are we to think? Each one has something to say and each statement is different. One might think from this that Pictorial Photography must be an art, for we find the same conditions among painters, all wrangling about what is best. True it is, therefor, that photographers have all the indispositions of artists and, if that makes art we surely have it in photography.

By Edward Weston

Dear Gillies:-

“You ask me to write a short ms. on “Pictorial Photography,” in other words “illustrative photography,” for such is my understanding of the word pictorial. Well I cannot, for it has been years since I left the genre field, and anyhow there are so many painters well fitted to carry on this little by-product of literature. Forgive me, Gillies, for playing with words, but really, is not just “Photography” good or bad, significant without “Pictorial” or “Artistic” tacked on?  .............

Gillies Note:

Mr. Weston, my very good friend and a man of impeccable honesty, has fallen in with words, written by gentlemen who use them to hide behind. With the exception of Sherwood Anderson and John Tenant, these gentlemen who talk glibly about logic of things, using photography as a blind, are all more or less lost in delusion and smoke a sort of mental pipe together when they produce their manuscripts.

THE HISTORY OF PICTORIALISM CONTINUED WELL AFTER 1923

In America, and where else, did an unusual talent from Hollywood become the modern popular leader of Pictorialism in William Mortensen. But after being Cecil B. DeMille’s still photographer his individuality and self-driven vision soon drove him out of the studio dictatorships to Laguna Beach where he set up a small studio and taught students, created his own photographic visions while writing books and articles in popular enthusiast magazines. 

When I was still a photography student in Santa Barbara I drove down to Laguna Beach and visited with Mortensen. Some twenty years later, after his death, I was an editor at Petersen’s PhotoGraphic magazine and obtained an assignment to publish a retrospective of William Mortensen’s work in PhotoGraphic. I was helped by his widow and supported in this effort by the Photographic Society of America, as well as by several of his students from his years in Laguna Beach. 

Since then in 1998 The Center for Creative Photography Arizona Board of Regents published William Mortensen, A REVIVAL. His vision was democratic and reflected in his own words, “the man whose interest is in the picture itself. He may seek his picture in many different fields: in landscapes, in character studies, in portraits, in still life, in the ‘pure’ representations of textures. He may pursue his pictures with a box camera, with a luxury model miniature, or with an eight-by-ten view camera.He may prefer straight contact prints, paper negatives, fresson, or bromoil transfers. But, when all is said and done, his basic interest is the picture itself. Not how it was secured, or what process was used in making it, or what it may accomplish; but simply and solely the picture.”

CONCLUSION

Although many professional photographers in their hire to others accept the vision of who has hired them, so manipulation if there is any is for the purposes of the vision a photographer is hired to produce; it is just a job to solve someone else’s problem in a way that satisfies their vision. Many of us who have made a living by being a hired photographer realize they are not creating their own vision, but one for someone else. Even if you are making portraits for someone sitting for your camera, the vision created by the camera is the subject’s vision, or you may find few who will recommend you to make a portrait of them. The images a professional photographer makes for himself these days, are referred to by them as ‘personal work’; and from the better known of them you will find expensive coffee-table books of this kind of visualization.

If you want to create photographs from your own personal vision, you must be a photographer who is working only for one’s self, no one else. I think this is reflected in what photographers say about themselves. The manipulation and retouching now, in many cases is not done by the photographer before release to the client, but usually afterwards by pre-press technicians and retouching specialists.  Photographers are not ‘manipulating’ images to fool anyone else, unless of course they are part of a circus side-show or represented in YouTube, FaceBook or the like, seeking to go viral on the web. Manipulation of images to result in the best image you can imagine is not a dishonesty by most photographers, it is just a refinement of one’s own vision. 

In my collection of books and magazines, mostly about photography, there is one, ‘VERUSCHKA’, Trans-figurations, by Vera Lehndorff and Holger Trulzsch 1986, done before Photoshop, involving every imaginable manipulation of the subject envisioned by both the model-artist Vera Lehndorff (Veruschka) and her partner Holger Trulzsch. Whose visions are they; are they both, or either Veruschka or the photographer Trulzsch. Not one or the other surely, but only they really know. If it is anything it is a truth that vision is as consistent as the subject and image are and can be from any human perspective.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&rlz=&q=veruschka+transfigurations&oq=Veruschka&gs_l=igoogle.1.2.0l10.360.5635.0.14416.9.6.0.2.2.0.280.521.3j0j1.4.0...0.0...1ac.1.Y1-xcy8o7Ow

UPGRADE: MAYBE NOT, BUT THEN WHAT?

Is the number of cynics increasing? Do more and more people think an upgrade is just a ploy to make money without providing much or anything?

That conclusion could be why upgrades like the new Microsoft Windows 8 is not getting very much enthusiasm. But it could be a lot of other ideas, concerns and people do get tired of old habits. I remember during my youth each fall the big thing was to visit all the car dealers to kick the tires on all the new auto models. It was an expected unofficial holiday and almost every auto brand complied with new models every year and always in the fall. But these days trading in a year old car for a new one when the leaves turned color is a forgotten habit half the current population never knew. Now it is the realm of high-tech products. Currently the more fashionable thing to show off is your new laptop computer, it just lacks the excitement of everything chrome with finned rear fenders. And sadly the office crowd is blase about almost everything, thanks to IT managers who like nothing better than saying no, or was it the politicians that took over that world.

Anyway, upgrades maybe don’t deserve cynicism. The computer operating systems are just trying to keep up with the kids and their newest gizmos. Smart phones and tablets also have operating systems, so it has made practical business sense to incorporate the new device systems with what runs a personal computer. The short side of that is these new operating system upgrades do not run all the older software or have support for older hardware accessories like film scanners. Oh yes, there are workarounds, but a lot of computer users are just sitting tight and running their old system like Windows XP; and that includes many corporations. In fact Apple OS10.6.8 is becoming much like Windows XP in the hearts of users. But then you can’t buy new hardware like the latest Apple Mac or PC laptop and have it delivered with an older operating system, in many cases the new machinery will not run except with the latest software. More work-arounds, maybe and maybe not.

So has high technology created its own Catch 22 for itself? Yes if the companies like Apple, Adobe and Microsoft ignore the data indicating fewer and fewer people are choosing to upgrade. Of course some of the drag is just a kind of satisfaction in getting along with what one has, and a good part of that is that comfort comes with familiarity and there is an innate fear of having to learn new ways to do things - unless there is a very good reason to change. But as more and more computers have improved reliability, product failure is less of an incentive to invest in the newest system or to upgrade the operating software.

All this would be helped a lot if forced obsolescence was avoided in the process of upgrading. So why don’t companies that upgrade make a priority list of what helps not just them and their business, but what helps people. One solution is to make newer systems backwards compatible. This is built into CD/DVD disc design - my oldest music CD’s play well using almost any kind of disc drive in the newest devices. But of course Apple believes disc drives are no longer necessary, so it leaves them out of their newest computers - but fortunately you can add a disc drive externally connected to an Apple Mac. So as long as there is a readily accessible alternative you can hang onto the old, familiar and often essential ways to get things done.

I just wish this was taken all the way so all of your established tools and techniques can be preserved. For instance if you have an old Mac that is worn out you can get a new one and easily transfer all of the data on the old Mac onto the new one quite easily. Unfortunately if some of those goodies don’t work with the new one you are left hanging in an empty world. So why not also allow copying the old system too, and provide a way to run it virtually in the new one????? In a way this has been done by software companies like Parallels systems, which allows Microsoft Windows operating systems to run in virtual mode on an Apple Mac. But sadly neither Apple’s Boot Camp or Parallels allows running Apple’s 10.6 operating system virtually on a newer Mac that runs OS 10.7 or 10.8. 

This makes me reluctant and not inclined to buy a new Mac, because I have one relatively recent Mac mini with OS 10.7 and it won’t run all of my older scanners or the software I prefer to do my work. So this almost new Mac mini  gets used very little, and that pisses me off with Apple enough to not even think about buying a new toy. And that Apple has provided the joy in my life. I am not just into having things, but I get irritated when anyone gets in the way of my doing the work I most enjoy. So, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft et al when are you going to begin thinking more about the consequences of upgrades and that to some of us they are really downgrades!

IS PHOTOGRAPHY AN ART OR A SCIENCE?

Since photography began popularly at the end of the 19^th century an argument has gone on whether making a photograph is an art or is it a science. It is a continuing question that has never been resolved for much of the 20^th century, and still remains a question. Of course some photographer’s work is now accepted by the establishment and publicly as art. But the fact that the photographic process is scientifically based, even more so in the digital age, leaves much doubt and misunderstanding in the minds of many who adopt using a camera.

Much of that doubt and confusion is the result of a photographic business community that keeps the process as secretive and so little understood deliberately. Mystery is to their benefit in the marketplace - would you buy a sausage if you really knew what’s in  it? So the public is at the mercy of what companies are willing to share, and it does not amount to much understanding of the hardware and software they are using However, one thing you can be sure of is that the science behind photography demands that the photographer must think scientifically rather than artfully to make photographs.

Fortunately people are not so easily led to abide to the dictates of the establishment, and think and do more as their spirit demands. So a side business has developed that supports every creative image manipulation method imaginable to satisfy the quirks of individuality and self-expression. Sadly that has not added much to photographers understanding of how the medium, a camera, a computer and software function. Mystery still prevails and the “magic” remains in the hands of the establishment’s secretive possession. This is further complicated and made ever more obscure as today’s computers and software are inept at providing much control over the photographic process.

The personal computer business began in ernest in the mid-80’s with a lot more garage factories putting together components than is commonly known. But these were mostly difficult to use requiring the user learn command-line control. So the next development making computers user friendly was what is called a GUI (Graphic User Interface), that led to some off-shoots like computer games and digital image editing and processing. But the typical personal computer was always a mix of often not very compatible pieces designed and constructed to provide independent color reproduction. That situation still dominates and a personal computer has no idea of what image is presented on-screen and cannot identify what the subject of the picture is, even that it might be a photo of something natural.

In the mid 1990’s Color Management was introduced and soon was supported by the two most popular computer operating systems. This allowed for a translation of color values so any RGB number set would reproduce the same objective colors in a color reproduction device like a display or printer. Color management however is a limited value as it does not assure that the RGB color captured in a digital image is true to the subject color photographed. And, Color Management is still far from being universally used by photographers.

This leaves digital photographic imaging being subject the photographers’ perception to be able to adjust, edit and process digital camera or film scanned images to match or not the image that was the subject. So photo images, however they are reproduced are done so by personal, individual visual perception and evaluation. Whatever the image is in relationship to the subject is the photographer’s choice. As a choice made by diverse minds it must be called accurately art of some kind; good or bad.

THE ACCELERATION OF CHANGE

We are on the cusp of changes regardless politically of what next months voting results. Although many would like America to be like it was in the past anyone who is a serious photography enthusiast knows that is a fading interest. The digital photography world has almost completely obliterated the film photography of the last century and more. My Shutterbug readers are nearly all over 50 years of age and they are getting older and of course fewer. I have not received any e-mail from a younger photo enthusiast in recent years, but maybe that’s because I’m an old guy even though someone new to reading Shutterbug does not know what my age might be.

That today is different than yesterday I am reminded of by my colleagues, those who write about digital media because computer editing photo images is my primary subject. For instance one magazine just featured new 27 inch LCD computer displays, and not one is a model I could recommend for a serious digital photographer. All three are LED backlit which demands using the newest display management system to accurately calibrate and profile the display. In addition all three have a color range limited to the sRGB range that is just 2/3^rd the color gamut of any camera that offers Raw files from the sensor capture. Additionally all are very bright with a high white luminance that may not allow adjustment to reproduce the equivalent of paper white to be able to edit for color managed printing.

But displays are a small part of computing changes. Microsoft is about to offer Windows 8 and so far it is not known how many older software applications and hardware devices like scanners will be supported. And today’s commentary is critical,”Where is the Start button?” All brands of desktop personal computers are reporting fewer sales and have concerns the demand will continue to be smaller, as more and more users buy tablets. Even the camera companies are concerned about their future prospects as more smart-phones and tablets offer better and better built-in cameras. Even Google is now offering a Chrome laptop at a very modest cost, further weakening the market for the established brands.

In the 20^th century although serious and professional photography was a small niche specialty it was led by sufficient companies like Kodak, Dupont, Canon and Nikon as well as many smaller brands that were able to maintain long and consistent places in the marketplace. But today, with digital photography so dependent on computer editing and processing, the photo imaging industry is even a smaller, largely ignored step-child of a much newer technology. 

However, the needs of marketing for professional photographic services will continue and high-end photo and graphics computing products will remain. But as there are fewer and fewer professional quality-level enthusiasts left over from the 20^th century film days, the smaller number of camera sales will drive prices for high-end photo and graphics computing performance to pricier levels beyond the reach of most amateurs. That will weaken and narrow the interest now supportive of these products. The aspiring wannabe professional will face an increasing challenge to afford involvement, competing and establishing themselves at a profitable level. And it is easy enough for advertising and marketing illustration to option other ways to produce marketing images of products in what is a volatile and changing segment of the consumer industry.

So, am I painting a bleak scenario for a future of serious photographic enthusiasm? No one knows what tomorrow may bring. There may be new technology options that will make enthusiasm both practical and exciting, I cannot imagine. But being too old and too tired to still participate fully as I did in the 20^th century, and realistically not inclined to look very far ahead is its own bias. Maybe I know too well the 20^th century will not return or be repeated.