Making Archetypes, Imagining Workshops

Every now and then I resolve to go shoot a pile of those awful archetypes that clutter up Flickr and 500px. Generally street/urban, so I don't have to drive all over tarnation and wait for the damned golden hour. My idea varies. A portfolio cranked out one afternoon to prove how easy this shit out to grind out. Sometimes I'm going to open a Flickr account and work my way up to thousands of followers which I will then monetize or whatever.

It always ends the same way. I go shoot for an hour. I load up 150 shots on the computer and sift it down to an A list of 3 or 4 or 8 or whatever, and a slightly larger B reel.

Then I can't bear to look at them any more. Usually I've got a small handful of photos that would serve. 'Process' them a bit, edit the EXIF so they look like they were taken with an expensive camera, and I'm good to go. I dunno if I can grind out terrible landscapes, but I can produce urban observational quasi-street at a rate of probably 3 or 4 an hour. Counting 'processing' and so on' I'm confident that I could pump out 2 an hour more or less forever. Except that I'd kill myself.

I just can't do it. It's not that I'm an honest guy and can't bear to go through with a scam. I'd love to scam a bunch of people on 500px. I can't bear to look at these photos. I can't bear to spend my time polishing these pigs up in the approved fashion. They're pointless stupid photos, by design.

So the whole project goes in the dumpster and I go back to something that's just going to cost money, with no chance of making any.

What makes this thing something of interest to me is that I have no problem at all doing precisely this at the piano.

Grinding out a decent rendition of Bach's Prelude in C (a very beautiful, very easy to play, piece of music) gives me great pleasure. I'm not trying to express anything, I'm just trying to bang the right keys in the right order, with a respectable approximation of the force indicated on the sheet music. Grinding this thing out respectably is, surely, pretty close to the same achievement as crapping out some terrible Urban Contemporary photograph.

There are a few differences.

Nobody listens to me noodling at the piano and suggests that I ought to take it up as a profession. People looking at photographs are notoriously wont to make just that suggestion, based apparently on the observation that your pictures are "clear" whatever that even means.

I do not kid myself that I might someday become a professional piano player. That simply isn't going to happen. I don't know much about piano playing, but I do know enough to visualize the vast gulf that exists between me and the lowest paid piano player.

I do not kid myself that I can teach the piano to anyone else. Sure, I have a few simple suggestions for the genuinely ignorant, based on memories of my own lessons, but it turns out that teaching piano is a profession in its own right. Again, I am aware of the vast gulf, etc.

Photographers are weirdly unaware of the same vast gulfs. They'll cheerfully start offering up workshops, and even more weirdly other photographers will sign up for them. Most workshops appear to be travel to a beautiful location and take an metric fuckton of snapshots while there, and every night get together with a bunch of like-minded twats to drink and "critique" one another's work. In other words, it's not really about learning anything. It's about hanging out with other gearheads on vacation.

There are no workshops offered in Bellingham, WA, although there are 100s of workshops being offered to photographers every single day of the year. They're all in Venice, or Hawaii, or Antarctica.

I try to envision the same thing for piano players. Go to Vienna, and hang out at the Bösendorfer factory, noodling away on pianos with other people who also cannot play very well, while receiving lessons from some dope who has no idea either how to play the piano, or how to teach people how to play? Then go get drunk?

Doesn't that sound awesome?

Punditry Gone Mad II

As I have noted in the past, guys like Michael Reichmann (LuLa), Thom Hogan (a phalanx of blogs), Ming Thein (mingthein.com), and probably many others are fond of writing little essays about how dumb camera makers are, and how smart they are.

Michael, in particular, is fond of talking about how he has meetings with the camera makers, drinks sake with them. He knows stuff. And yet they mysteriously continue to not implement his dumb feature ideas. Michael has drunk sake with the engineers (almost certainly not -- probably engineering managers) and he can tell us that the reason Nikon doesn't do X, Y, or Z is pure hubris. Why drinking sake with the engineers is supposed to give insight into high level corporate strategy is left, apparently, as an exercise to the reader.

Despite all these people's claims of business acumen (and they do universally claim substantial experience and ability) they seem to not know a basic fact:

We call people like these influencers. They do not, in general, influence the company. The influence goes the other way, they influence the market. Customers listen to these guys.

These meetings meetings have a very specific purpose, they are to give Michael and his ilk a carefully curated message to take to the market. As a courtesy they'll listen to his feature ideas, and will nod pleasantly. Hai! Hai! Kampai! But the purpose is not so that the influencer can help us develop strategy, thanks. We have other people we talk to for that (see below).

The influencers job is to carry water for the company. Period. In return, they get to feel important, they get access, they get content to write about. They most certainly do not get to drive product development.

Either these pundits are ignorant of how business works, or they don't care. They're all in the click farming business, after all, and articles about how dumb camera makers are are rich soil for growing a crop of clicks.

If these bozos really want to influence camera maker strategy, they need to use their position to launch a market research firm. This has a couple of problems. Actual market research would almost certainly not support their pet features (oops, how embarassing), and it would be actual labor. Drinking sake, flying around the world taking crummy pictures, and bloviating on the internet are not much work. I can personally attest to how easy it is to bloviate on the internet.

Until they actually start gathering market data in an organized way, you should ignore any implications and suggestions that they have influence with the camera makers.

They don't.

Writing About Gear

Another winning essay from Kirk Tuck right here.

He's making the well known point that writing about camera gear is way more widely read than writing about pictures or about Art. This is a depressing reality, especially for those of us who find gear talk boring, and who decline to write about gear.

Many self-styled photographers are in fact camera enthusiasts, as I have noted ad nauseum and, in the way that audiophiles listen to their gear with your music, the pictures they make are mainly about showing off the capabilities of their gear, and their mastery of it. Macro photographs of bugs, endless pictures of ospreys, and so on. As a dabbler in the piano, I am loathe to condemn these folks too loudly.

But there is more. Gear can be quantified. Experiences with gear can be discussed without getting abstract. "My big hands have trouble with the tiny buttons" and so on. These are easily relatable statements. You can argue about specifications. You can discuss future features, and so on. There's simply a lot to be said here, most of which is accessible, most of which doesn't require firmly held ideas about abstractions to absorb and enjoy, or to disagree with.

Art, and pictures in general apart from the quantifiable, the measurable, that's a lot harder to talk about. It's all abstract and kind of vague. It's pretty hard to talk about without first clearing away some intellectual underbrush. One cannot, for example, talk meaningfully about the artistic merit of a photo without having some idea about what Art is, and what Artistic Merit might be. You needn't necessarily settle on some universally agreed upon definitions, but you've got to sort them out to a useful degree for the purposes of a single discussion.

Your choices are to either spend time and words clearing away this sort of underbrush, which is pretty dry stuff, or you can assume that everyone's already on the same page regarding the underbrush and launch into the discussion you want to have. In the latter case, you're essentially launching the layperson onto an sea of words without a chart. It's meaningless blather. Worse, it appears to have meaning, but since the layperson probably means something different than you do when they say "Art" the apparent meaning seems all wrong, incoherent, disconnected.

At book length, you can do the underbrush work, and then have some space to talk. On a blog, all is pretty much lost. Short form, low-context blather, the stuff the web thrives on, flatly cannot support any meaningful discussion of Art and related ideas.

Finally, most intellectual discussion of any depth whatsoever requires that you state some definitions up front, to set the context of the discussion. "For our purposes, let's consider Art to mean blah blah blah". The vast majority of people seem unable to permit this basic first step. You will bog down inevitably in arguments about definitions, which will mostly be idiots posturing to try to look clever. Of course, people will tend to do the same thing for lens resolution and so on, but in those areas there are well-defined, universally agreed-upon definitions and ideas. The posturing is a lot easier to put a stop to in technical domains.

Pretty quickly, people learn that discussions about things other than gear, picture sharpness, white balance, rule of thirds, where the lights are put, and a few other easily measurable things are off-limits and snowball into flamewars and furious ranting. So, efforts to start such things up die away pretty fast, and we're back to gear.

With the notable exception, obviously, of this blog. Where I moderate the comments, and have essentially no readers!

(That's tongue in cheek, I know a couple blogs that get a bit more traffic than this one that talk about Art and stuff, see my Other Blogs and Things page)

Ownership

Michael Reichmann of LuLa went on some silly rant about how every camera maker should support DNG for its RAW format, casting it as a no-brainer. Obviously, it's just clickbait.

In later discussion he attempted to make it a moral issue, claiming that the image data belongs to him, and that it is therefore immoral for the camera maker to force him to convert their RAW formats to DNG offboard, and that they should do it onboard the camera. Huh? If it's about access to your image data, well, you have that with a one-step offboard conversion. If it's about accessing it immediately, you should be demanding a sensor access port. In fact, Michael just wants clicks, and perhaps to a degree wants DNG output for convenience. If there is a moral issue here, DNG output is not a relevant part of the discussion.

But he did raise an interesting idea. These are his 1s and 0s, it's his image data.

Really?

That is certainly the law in most of the world. But is it right? Is it in fact the moral and proper position?

I don't see that it's immoral as such. And, given that camera makers are making cameras in the current social and legal milieux, there's certainly an assumption of fitness-for-purpose where the purpose includes "image data that is mine."

But is that the way it ought to be? Or the only possible way it ought to be?

What if, for instance, a camera maker decided to claim certain rights to every picture you shot. Would that be immoral? Obviously it would be if they didn't make it quite clear, given the current legal and social situation. There are certain assumptions in play, and not being clear that these default assumptions are wrong would constitute a lie of omission. But if they made it clear? Perhaps if they offered substantial discount on the camera, provided you gave up certain rights, or gave the camera maker certain licenses.

I am confident that there are photographers who would go insane with fury if Canon started offering such a deal, and lots of others who would deride them for such a terrible idea.

That would be pretty fun to watch.

Pundits

Once again I feel compelled to make a short industry post, despite my disdain for such things.

The camera industry is experiencing a dip. I discussed this here, the reasons are not complex or difficult to understand.

What is interesting about this, to me, at the moment, is this. There are many pundits out there on the webernets who will happily tell you why the dip is there, and what camera companies can do about it. Their answer is always the same:

Camera companies are stupid, and have not been listening to professionals and serious photographers, i.e. to me, and this is the cause of their troubles. If they would only listen to me, or if only they had listened to me back then, they would be fine. The solution, going forward, is for them to listen to me.

This is completely wrong, of course. When you're selling consumer gear, the opinions of professionals and serious amateurs are largely irrelevant. They're not your market. For the last decade, Canon and Nikon have been focused on selling cameras to moms, to people who Just Want Pictures. Sure, they talked to serious photographers and professionals, those people sometimes have ideas and there are products in the lineup aimed at those people. Still, the target was the people who just wanted pictures.

To claim that the camera industry is stupid, and that fill in the pundit is much smarter than the camera company is, is ridiculous and insulting. These companies have been insanely successful, and remain insanely successful, in a tough, competitive market. Of course they didn't execute perfectly, but they executed well enough. They rode the digital wave to something like a five-fold increase in market size in something like 10 years. That's incredible for a market of this size and maturity. That's mind boggling in fact. It's like GM suddenly figuring out how to sell 10 cars to every person on the planet.

The market shift they're seeing now is probably not a shift the major camera companies were capable of following, any more than the buggy whip manufacturers could have started building cars.

In particular, listening to some dolt with a website is not the answer to their problems. The answer is probably figuring out how to capture a larger share of the shrinking market as it adjusts, while downsizing to fit, without destroying the company (or the camera division).

And no, I am not pointing fingers at any one, or any two, pundits. There's a bunch of these people out there, bleating the same silliness.

Pictures and Cameras

I try to avoid industry commentary, but this particular tempest in a teapot struck some chords, and also inspired a little thinking about larger topics. I hope you don't mind.

Some people, most people, just want pictures. Some people want to possess a camera. Some people like to make pictures with a camera, that is, they want to possess pictures (like the first group) but they also want to have made those pictures. Obviously no single person falls cleanly into one camp or another, each of us partakes a little of each. Still, as elements of markets perhaps, people are primarily driven by one or the other. Let us assume, to simplify things for this little essay, that there are people who want to possess a camera for one reason or another, and there are people who want mainly to possess pictures.

In the 19th century, if you wanted a picture, you went to an artist or a photographer, you paid a fee, and a picture was made for you. If you wanted a camera, well, you could buy one of those as well, starting a few decades into the century. Many fewer people bought cameras than bought pictures. Lots and lots and lots of people bought tintypes. Lots. Many people bought cameras, so they could sell tintypes. A few people bought cameras to possess a camera, or to make art, or something.

When George Eastman brought out his Kodak in 1888, all this changed. People who wanted pictures but didn't much care about cameras could, suddenly, just go take some pictures. 10 cents apiece (3-4 dollars in today's US currency, ouch), and you controlled what the picture was of. You could take a picture of.. THAT THING RIGTHT THERE! It was wonderful. The people who just wanted pictures were suddenly empowered.

Right now there are pundits rushing around yowling about the impending death of the photography industry, or large portions of it. In this way the current times differ in no interesting ways whatsoever from any time in the last 150 years. Still, we can take a peek under the covers, a bit.

I regret that I can't find any sales figures for Eastman's camera. However, in the early 1970s we find that Polaroid was selling in the area of 5,000,000 cameras per year, while Japan is selling in the area of 2,500,000 SLR cameras per year. If we consider the average Polaroid customer to be someone who wants to buy pictures, and the average SLR customer someone who wants a camera, this suggests, very very roughly, that in the 1970s the camera-buying public was actually about 2/3 picture buyers.

More modern numbers from say 2005-2010 comparing compact digital cameras to DSLRs, with a similar assumption, suggest that 85 to 95 percent of the camera buying public is actually buying pictures, not cameras.

All this is complicated by the changing prices of things, opening and closing markets. As devices get cheaper (down to "free" with a cell phone) more and more picture buyers will get into the game, skewing the percentages toward that group. Probably. Maybe.

What does this all mean?

Right now, DSLR sales seem to have turned the corner and begun to decline. This has lead to outcries of the end of the world. The DSLR will be dead shortly!

I disagree. I think that the people who want pictures will all be using their phones in 5 years. Virtually all of them are using their phones now, the DSLR they bought 2 years ago just sits on the shelf. People who just want pictures, even good pictures, won't be buying any DSLRs ever again. So it goes. The heyday of that market has passed. The market will shrink, perhaps to as little as 10% of what it was at its peak. Given that the DSLR market is weighted toward camera people, and away from picture people already, I think the 10% number is quite conservative. Sales will drop, substantially, and then will flatten out as the market is reduced to the "enthusiasts," the people who want, mainly, to own a camera. Then the long tail begins with sales declining year to year more or less to infinity.

Same as it ever was. There's almost always a long tail. The only photographic technology I can think of that it legitimately and completely gone is dry plate, and I'm not sure about that. Everything else remains with us, and shows no sign of ever going away any time soon.