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Is The Professional Travel Photographer An Endangered Species?
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21 November 2007
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Endangered Professional Travel Photographer
Is The Professional Travel Photographer An Endangered Species?
(Yes, but now there's more chance for everyone else)
Anyone noticed how there are fewer "real" pro travel photogs on the road in recent years? Not surprising really, because travellers who take photographs have been getting ever more numerous, and the number of images they take growing exponentially with the advent of 'free' digital film. And that growth has been accompanied by a huge improvement in picture quality, born of technological advances bringing increased resolution, better exposure calculation and truer colour reproduction.
Mind you, it was never easy to earn a living as a "pure" travel photographer. When film was king and stock houses were in their pre-computerized infancy, some professionals made a lot of money from travel stock, even though newspapers and magazines used less of it in those days. One reason for this was the fact that until Tony Stone came up with a really good duping system, original transparencies were usually sent off for selection. And for a long time, even up to the present day, some publications and agencies wouldn't accept anything but originals.
The Three Frame Solution
The way I got round this limitation was to shoot three frames at a time. One always stayed in the filing cabinet, and the others could be sent off as required. But this need to have the transparencies physically available meant that as a rule photographers or stock houses had to be on the spot for picture editors to come in to go through the files or at least have easy courier communication available.
In practice, this meant that although Pete Turner might have had a brilliant shot of the Chrysler Building in his New York studio, I could still sell my humbler photo of the same subject to a publisher in Hong Kong where I lived because I had the actual slide right there ready to go. Unfortunately, this also worked the other way round, and as many more images were published in the USA and Europe, to my chagrin I found many second-rate (in my opinion) travel shots selling more often and for more money in American and European publications than I could hope to get in my region.
Now this is no longer true. Any image can be sent round the world instantly. And it's getting easier all the time as compression algorithms improve and bandwidth increases. Storage is now largely a minor cost in business terms and getting rapidly less expensive. Cataloguing and accessing images effectively is currently where the bottlenecks are, as with other types of information.
The trouble is, images are getting cheaper
The drawback for the pro travel photographer is that images are getting cheaper. Although copyright laws have so far survived the attacks on them, largely thanks to the big bucks support of the giants of the software, movie, stock and music industries, their foundations have already been shaken by the advent of Open Source, online downloads and royalty-free images. As technology improves and viewing and exchanging information becomes ever easier, more and more previously private images will become publicly available. This is already happening with Flickr and Kodak's KodakGallery initiative, to name but two online image repositories. And although most images will not be of professional quality, many will be – and there will be a lot of them!
As mentioned earlier, the images will be there, but finding them is the bugbear. Google and Yahoo image searches are still in their infancy, but you can bet your life that some of the smartest guys in the business are working on ways to improve their accuracy. Pattern recognition, positional probability subject identification – many technologies already used in other fields like semiconductor assembly may have cross-over application in this area. Flickr already uses an innovative cataloguing system (their latest effort is called 'clustering') and this is just the start of images becoming ever more accessible.
What does this mean for photographers?
Well, for the pros, I believe it's bad news. I'm talking about travel photography here, but to no small extent the situation applies across the board. With so many images instantly available and many photographers quite willing to allow their work to be used for free or for a small fee, I believe we're going to see an increasing use of stock photos from non-professional sources in the media. It's just a matter of time before secondary businesses are established to trawl through the masses of these freely accessible photos and provide a service to publishers, art directors etc. After all, it's happened before: many people now make their living buying and selling on eBay, or providing instruction on how to do it. Already, micropayment stock agencies like Fotolia, ShutterStock and iStockPhoto.com, which began in 2000 as a place for photographers and designers to swap images and has now grown into the most visited stock photography web site (yes, more than Corbis or Getty), are selling royalty-free stock images at one US dollar a pop or similar.
But for the mass of photographers who don't earn their living taking snaps, this means a whole new opportunity to have their work seen and appreciated, with perhaps the occasional chance of some money on the side. Once the systems for marketing these "mass market" images are in place and become known, all of us can be paparazzi. All the more so now that mobile phone cameras are getting better.
Online storage and the magic of Photoshop
If storage continues to fall in price (highly likely with the prospect of holographic storage in 2006) we may even be warehousing all our high res originals online, with lower res versions for viewing; Flickr already offers unlimited storage with a 2GB monthly upload limit for USD25 a month. In the near future, everyone's family album will be online, with perhaps printed highlights kept at home.
The magic of Photoshop means that beautiful picture of baby Jack gurgling with glee as he eats his ice cream can be perfect for integration into a Heinz baby food ad, not to mention all the packaging and merchandising to go with it.
And that amazing rainbow over the Venice lagoon photo - when you just happened to be there at the right time - instead of languishing in a drawer at home may be snapped up by a travel mag for a cover at a fraction of the price I want for my Venetian effort.
Just to show how the amateur/professional travel shot distinction is already diminishing, check out these minimally processed shots from Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. In a pretty typical scenario, they were taken on a three hour walk through the national park, with no opportunity to back-track, taking the light as available. These types of subjects tend to show up the limitations of consumer cameras, but I think Helen's Canon Ixus 400 stands up quite well against my D1X. I've spared you the necessary (for a press story) shots with tourists in them!
Tony Page
From my article in Better Photography magazine, 2006.
(Yes, but now there's more chance for everyone else)
Anyone noticed how there are fewer "real" pro travel photogs on the road in recent years? Not surprising really, because travellers who take photographs have been getting ever more numerous, and the number of images they take growing exponentially with the advent of 'free' digital film. And that growth has been accompanied by a huge improvement in picture quality, born of technological advances bringing increased resolution, better exposure calculation and truer colour reproduction.
Mind you, it was never easy to earn a living as a "pure" travel photographer. When film was king and stock houses were in their pre-computerized infancy, some professionals made a lot of money from travel stock, even though newspapers and magazines used less of it in those days. One reason for this was the fact that until Tony Stone came up with a really good duping system, original transparencies were usually sent off for selection. And for a long time, even up to the present day, some publications and agencies wouldn't accept anything but originals.
The Three Frame Solution
The way I got round this limitation was to shoot three frames at a time. One always stayed in the filing cabinet, and the others could be sent off as required. But this need to have the transparencies physically available meant that as a rule photographers or stock houses had to be on the spot for picture editors to come in to go through the files or at least have easy courier communication available.
In practice, this meant that although Pete Turner might have had a brilliant shot of the Chrysler Building in his New York studio, I could still sell my humbler photo of the same subject to a publisher in Hong Kong where I lived because I had the actual slide right there ready to go. Unfortunately, this also worked the other way round, and as many more images were published in the USA and Europe, to my chagrin I found many second-rate (in my opinion) travel shots selling more often and for more money in American and European publications than I could hope to get in my region.
Now this is no longer true. Any image can be sent round the world instantly. And it's getting easier all the time as compression algorithms improve and bandwidth increases. Storage is now largely a minor cost in business terms and getting rapidly less expensive. Cataloguing and accessing images effectively is currently where the bottlenecks are, as with other types of information.
The trouble is, images are getting cheaper
The drawback for the pro travel photographer is that images are getting cheaper. Although copyright laws have so far survived the attacks on them, largely thanks to the big bucks support of the giants of the software, movie, stock and music industries, their foundations have already been shaken by the advent of Open Source, online downloads and royalty-free images. As technology improves and viewing and exchanging information becomes ever easier, more and more previously private images will become publicly available. This is already happening with Flickr and Kodak's KodakGallery initiative, to name but two online image repositories. And although most images will not be of professional quality, many will be – and there will be a lot of them!
As mentioned earlier, the images will be there, but finding them is the bugbear. Google and Yahoo image searches are still in their infancy, but you can bet your life that some of the smartest guys in the business are working on ways to improve their accuracy. Pattern recognition, positional probability subject identification – many technologies already used in other fields like semiconductor assembly may have cross-over application in this area. Flickr already uses an innovative cataloguing system (their latest effort is called 'clustering') and this is just the start of images becoming ever more accessible.
What does this mean for photographers?
Well, for the pros, I believe it's bad news. I'm talking about travel photography here, but to no small extent the situation applies across the board. With so many images instantly available and many photographers quite willing to allow their work to be used for free or for a small fee, I believe we're going to see an increasing use of stock photos from non-professional sources in the media. It's just a matter of time before secondary businesses are established to trawl through the masses of these freely accessible photos and provide a service to publishers, art directors etc. After all, it's happened before: many people now make their living buying and selling on eBay, or providing instruction on how to do it. Already, micropayment stock agencies like Fotolia, ShutterStock and iStockPhoto.com, which began in 2000 as a place for photographers and designers to swap images and has now grown into the most visited stock photography web site (yes, more than Corbis or Getty), are selling royalty-free stock images at one US dollar a pop or similar.
But for the mass of photographers who don't earn their living taking snaps, this means a whole new opportunity to have their work seen and appreciated, with perhaps the occasional chance of some money on the side. Once the systems for marketing these "mass market" images are in place and become known, all of us can be paparazzi. All the more so now that mobile phone cameras are getting better.
Online storage and the magic of Photoshop
If storage continues to fall in price (highly likely with the prospect of holographic storage in 2006) we may even be warehousing all our high res originals online, with lower res versions for viewing; Flickr already offers unlimited storage with a 2GB monthly upload limit for USD25 a month. In the near future, everyone's family album will be online, with perhaps printed highlights kept at home.
The magic of Photoshop means that beautiful picture of baby Jack gurgling with glee as he eats his ice cream can be perfect for integration into a Heinz baby food ad, not to mention all the packaging and merchandising to go with it.
And that amazing rainbow over the Venice lagoon photo - when you just happened to be there at the right time - instead of languishing in a drawer at home may be snapped up by a travel mag for a cover at a fraction of the price I want for my Venetian effort.
Just to show how the amateur/professional travel shot distinction is already diminishing, check out these minimally processed shots from Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. In a pretty typical scenario, they were taken on a three hour walk through the national park, with no opportunity to back-track, taking the light as available. These types of subjects tend to show up the limitations of consumer cameras, but I think Helen's Canon Ixus 400 stands up quite well against my D1X. I've spared you the necessary (for a press story) shots with tourists in them!
Tony Page
From my article in Better Photography magazine, 2006.
