With over 1 billion pictures made per annum and counting, and an estimated 2.7 trillion+ bits of data floating around those clouds, it’s a wonder that anybody can find anything anymore. Yet, with ever-more sophisticated “search” capabilities on the Internet, and acres of server farms at work, it’s becoming more common for folks to be able to retrieve their images when they want on whatever device they happen to have on them, anywhere.
The concerns this raises for the photo industry are many—chief among them being how we can get our customers to come through our doors to first make a quality image, and then be able to retrieve it and do something with it that will fuel the photo industry’s growth.
There’s no point in considering the oft-told tale of the halcyon days of film photography, when film makers made it by the mile and sold it by the foot and D&P meant having customers pay for every piece of paper, even those that were out of focus or overexposed. The countdown to the demise of film started in 1985, and it’s now three minutes to midnight. Increasingly, more and more images are being made with other than conventional (digital) cameras and are being saved and sent to other than industry repositories. Indeed, I would guess that if 5% of captures did more than sit on memory cards or in some distant server and never again see the light of an LCD it would be a lot, somewhat like the old ratio of 4x6s to enlargements in the old days.
And just as we all tried to get that snapshot-to-enlargement ratio raised, getting customers to work with us to do something special with any of their images presents a new challenge. And increasingly, there will be a challenge to get customers to make those images on a “camera,” or at least what we consider a camera for now. And that’s part of the problem.
Sitting with a camera company exec at the recent CES show, I asked why we’re seeing so many “retro” models, cameras with digital innards that resemble designs from the fifties. He confirmed that makers were very hesitant to change that mold, and that in fact there seemed to be a conscious attempt to hearken back to a certain comfort level as to what a “real” camera looks like. This seems to be an attempt to keep the old guard in the game, tying the design to recreating the “photographic experience” of the past.
But the photographic experience, at least for those growing into their camera buying years, has undergone a major change. Similarly, the image itself and its intertwinement with the social fabric is shifting from something made to hand down to future generations as a visual legacy and record to being something intended for immediate use. That immediacy implies immediate access, immediate transmission and a documentation of the present that is posted, shared and commented upon by a “circle,” a community of associates and friends.
Changing your hairstyle? Having lunch? Taking a drive? All seem fair game for making images, yet these images go nowhere except on a server and a sharing site, and their mundane quality and import is good enough for their intended purpose—to make sure that the “I” of the taker is acknowledged and responded to in kind. The fabric that images once represented, one that bound family and recorded treasured moments, has been replaced by a blizzard of bits and bytes whose relevancy lasts as long as a late spring snow that soon melts into the ground.
Yes, of course there are still true believers, practitioners of the craft who will take the time to make visuals intended for the next generation, or who still see photography as a way to make a statement about how they see the world. However, the vast majority of images today are made for purely social purposes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and we should be open enough to changes in the world to see that photography’s tent can be large enough to accommodate those uses.
Indeed, camera and now camcorder makers have responded this year by making sure that Wi-Fi at the least is a highlight of their new products. In many cases they have also established their own “cloud” or service portal to ensure that any images sent their way will pass through their gates onto whatever final Facebook or YouTube or whatever social media site is desired, hoping I suppose to snag some residual value out of the transaction. We’re also seeing a proliferation of apps that allow users to massage images prior to sending for even more sophisticated editing en route.
That’s all well and good, but again I raise the question about how the photo dealer can come away with much from this scenario. Is it through branded plug-in infrastructure sites that in essence piggyback on the majors’ servers? Is it through offering albuming and retrieval sites that help the end user access and organize their images? Is it through print and bookmaking services that can grab images from whatever cloud the customer has their images on and help them create legacy products?
Yes, as long as there are cameras other than smartphones folks will need lenses, memory cards, bags, tripods, etc. But where does that leave the rest of the business, one that relies on customer content (read images) rather than hardware inventories for a good part of their cash flow? Properly oriented social media exploitation requires marketing muscle, website sophistication, search capabilities and more that are generally beyond a retailer’s capabilities, or ken.
So, for 2012 and beyond, we need to know more and more where our customer’s pictures are and how we can adapt to the transitions the image and its uses are undergoing. It’s not as simple as making cameras with retro designs, having Wi-Fi image capture devices or even touting Full HD video capabilities, or even making cameras look and act more and more like smartphones. It will take some introspection as to what the photo industry can offer and how we might adapt to the social image—or perhaps we need to revisit just what we are selling and who we best serve.
Note: George Schaub is the editorial director of Shutterbug and Petersen’s Photographic magazines and shutterbug.com. He has reported on the photo industry for the last 30 years and served as photo group editorial director at PTN Publishing and Cygnus Publishing and as executive editor at Popular Photography magazine. He has authored over 20 books on photography and is an assistant professor at the New School University in New York.
