News: Taken with an iPhone 6 and printed on a wall.

Apple is presently running an advertisement campaign in Germany, presenting billboard size pictures, taken with an iPhone 6. Here is a sample from a local public transport station:


At this particular place, one can walk up to the billboard and look at the picture up close. From a short distance, they show the typical artefacts that one expects from a small sized sensor, which can be described as "watercolor effect", but from further away it is quite convincing.

Still, the message is literally on the wall (sorry for the pun): Apple is using all their marketing power to convince the general public that an iPhone is all what is needed for billboard sized pictures.

I wonder how the photographic market will look like in about 5 years. Small point and shoot cameras are already a disappearing breed. The word is that DSLR camera makers are very worried about the future.

Nice post Jerome. I have been amazed at the quality of photos from the latest iPhone. Of course no one is ever going to print that size, but knowing that you can will entice many buyers I'm sure. We really have no idea what instuments wil be used to make photos in 5 years or even if photography as we know it will be viable. The way that every person is taking and storing 10's of thousands of photographs every year - the photo overload that already exists where people are only storing and never viewing or revisiting a pic for more than a day or two before moving on - has to eventually have a profound effect on the usefulness of a picture. That view of the general population, will definitely affect the camera manufacturers abilities to sell product or even stay in business.

Jerome Marot said:

Apple is presently running an advertisement campaign in Germany, presenting billboard size pictures, taken with an iPhone 6. Here is a sample from a local public transport station:

​

At this particular place, one can walk up to the billboard and look at the picture up close. From a short distance, they show the typical artefacts that one expects from a small sized sensor, which can be described as "watercolor effect", but from further away it is quite convincing.

Still, the message is literally on the wall (sorry for the pun): Apple is using all their marketing power to convince the general public that an iPhone is all what is needed for billboard sized pictures.

I wonder how the photographic market will look like in about 5 years. Small point and shoot cameras are already a disappearing breed. The word is that DSLR camera makers are very worried about the future.

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Robert Watcher said:

The way that every person is taking and storing 10's of thousands of photographs every year - the photo overload that already exists where people are only storing and never viewing or revisiting a pic for more than a day or two before moving on - has to eventually have a profound effect on the usefulness of a picture.

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You are probably thinking about facebook and the habit that some people have and post their life on it. But 20 years ago, the same people took loads of pictures during their holidays or family events, to have them printed, passed along to their friends and stored for the rest of their life in a drawer, never to watch them again. If they wanted to show their latest vacations to their friends, it had to be the latest vacations, meaning that the pictures could only live a season.

Jerome Marot said:

You are probably thinking about facebook and the habit that some people have and post their life on it. But 20 years ago, the same people took loads of pictures during their holidays or family events, to have them printed, passed along to their friends and stored for the rest of their life in a drawer, never to watch them again. If they wanted to show their latest vacations to their friends, it had to be the latest vacations, meaning that the pictures could only live a season.

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I see it as more than that. People simply don't care about photography in the same waythey once did 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. Facebook aside, they have hundreds or digital files every day of everything they see, everything they encounter, as well as dozen of pictures of themselves and their friends alone or standing in front of the background of everthing they see or experience - every moment of every day. That is not simply a few enthusiasts who could afford to pay for film and processing if they were fortunate enough to have a camera in the film days. It is absoluetly every person in the world from poor kids in Nicaragua to presidents and ones who were professional photographers. They millions and billions of photographic images are stored away on multi-terabyte hard drives on devices, computers and for the most part online servers in data centers all over the world. That is really what I am referring to.

Currently there is virtually no market with companies, newspapers or magazines for paying a photographer for an image because he has a style or quality. There is an easily accessable photo somewhere, of absolutely everything. The only thing people haven't got sick of yet, is another picture of themselves. A few serious photographers may be finding small gallery outlets for their photography art ambitions, but even that has been drying up.

I have no idea of the future. All I am commenting on, is that with the state or perception of photography as it is today, will their be any value or will there even be photography as we know it in 5 or 10 years. Cuurently of course, photographers have even moved away from the passion and craft of photography and processing, to having far more passion and desire for cameras and technology. That attitude may keep camera manufacturers in business for awhile.

Robert Watcher said:

I see it as more than that. People simply don't care about photography in the same way they once did 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.

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I don't think that many people cared more about photography 30 years ago. I have good memories of the time and, for most people, pictures were little more than small prints that they passed along to impress their relatives with what great places they travelled to. 30 years ago, they used a tripod to take a self portrait of themselves with their wife in front of the Eiffel tower, nowadays they use a selfie stick and an iPhone and it is still the same picture of themselves in front of the Eiffel tower. It may be more pictures, but the purpose did not change. And the technical level was not important: who cared whether the picture was scratched and the colours off, as long as it was possible to recognise faces... and the Eiffel tower, of course.

Facebook aside, they have hundreds or digital files every day of everything they see, everything they encounter, as well as dozen of pictures of themselves and their friends alone or standing in front of the background of everthing they see or experience - every moment of every day.

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Some people do that, but it is a relatively small number of people, at least in Europe. On the contrary and in my experience many facebook users are very concerned about their privacy and do not post a lot of pictures.

Currently there is virtually no market with companies, newspapers or magazines for paying a photographer for an image because he has a style or quality. There is an easily accessable photo somewhere, of absolutely everything.

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Yes, but that is a completely different matter. News photographers used to live from the fact that when something happened, people who were present did not have a camera. That market indeed disappeared.

A few serious photographers may be finding small gallery outlets for their photography art ambitions, but even that has been drying up.

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"Art photography" always was a small market. It is part of the marketing of art. Then, you seem to believe that all markets for professional photographers are in crisis. That is simply not true. Some markets indeed are in crisis:
-news photography (as discussed above)
-stock photography (used to be a secondary market for the news photographers)
-wedding photography, but only in countries were wedding are not a family affair any more (you would be surprised by the number of wedding photographers in some Asian countries).

But other markets are doing quite well: basically all photography that is done on order (packshot, catalogues, everything which has to do with presenting a product for sale).

The market for photography has increased but the demands are higher. The fashion, demand and prices of large impressive prints have increased dramatically, but one needs to have a style and a following to be successful. Printing a photograph "good enough" at 11x14 to wall size, just advertises mediocrity. In California, there's a luxury housing lust and that means a lot more large walls to cover. 65% of art is now sold in international exhibitions.

Also, I see an ever increasing enrollment in school s for photography and film. Teaching itself is a profit center! Alain Briot is so successful marketing his brand and vision for "Mastering Photography", "Mastering Printing" and more, that one of his worse problems could be now is "How to keep my loot of ravishingly beautiful and fast bespoke cars all in gleaming condition! Frankly, he's a bloody genius!

Yes, everyone with a camera thinks that is their qualification for doing weddings, but rich people know to hire a wedding photographer with a caché of clients and prices in the $25,000 to 35,000 bracket. Flowers, lone, BTW, could cost $10-100,000!

Meanwhile, some folk struggle to make a living as a Wedding Photographer with everyone wanting just the files to print themselves at Walmart or wherever!

One needs to have burning ambition, a good idea and a milieux where it has a chance of working well and the stamina to survive and pull it off. You can go to New York city with a Crown Graphic from eBay and some 4x5 film holders and earn a good living shooting fine paintings and sculptures for the myriad of galleries. But you had better deliver the best work. It's tough!

But what I say applies to particular places. Each location has very different opportunities and definite limitations. Be prepared to move to the place which has a deep enough port for your boat to set sail!

Asher

I guess that the thing is, is that camera companies make virtually all of their money (have most of their sales) from photo enthusiasts. Once their is less of need to take pictures because every image can be easily acquired - what need will there be for cameras. Once everyone has taken countless thousands of selfies of themselves, what need will there be to take another that no one is interested in looking at. Actually Facebook is already old school, being taken over by Instagram - which will as well soon be long in the tooth.

I as well, have a memory of the path of photography from 30 years ago, having started my professional career in 1979 and being a filmmaker and creative snap shooters years before that. I have been a progressive photographer all through those years and love technology and advances that have come. I am still passionate about photography. But that has no more to do with reality, than did my famous Canadian uncle who demands 10's of thousands of dollars for his are in the 60's and 70's and who had large exhibits and later retrospectives in art galleries around the world including Paris and Tokyo during those years. No one is interested in buying painting from him or any painter any more. There is no market. My wife's family who have a very large water well drilling business, once presumed that everyone needs water, so their abilities will always be needed. It still is, but is being eroded away by corporate pipelines bringing water in from the lakes, forcing farmers who were their mainstream income, to pay and tap into those.

Once photography has no more value, or has little value when it comes to it's ability to be used as a means to make money, what more value is there in it other than having a record of places to look at. Currently there is not a place or object in the world that has not been photographed and that you can't get a print from even if that was desired (which it isn't often). There seems to be a current agenda, where everyone is traveling the world and taking pics of everything they see. There there is Google Streets. Want to see what a place looks like, go to Google streets - it's there. Want to travel inside building to see what they look like - believe it or not I've visited a few on Google Streets, travelling through hallways and boardrooms. And you can even take a ride with Good up famous rivers and look all around or cross a hanging bridge over a jungle. It's crazy, it's amazing, but those are the facts.

EVER CHECKED THIS OUT: https://www.google.com/maps/views/streetview?gl=us


Multiply what we see now, exponentially over the next 5 years - - - we may all be sick of photographic images and only use the cameras in our iPhones for what many do already - taking a picture of internet passwords at friends homes, or snaps of documents so you can access them for filling out in the future. Who knows.

I'm not being pessimistic any more than when I had my professional photography forum back in 2005 and 2006 and saw the potential for the professional photography industry as I knew it changing quickly - - - and it did starting in 2008 right across the board. I have no idea any more than you or anyone else, but I love looking at things realistically and accept that change happens and move along with the tide so I don't drown.

As can be presumed - these are simply my views - nothing more nothing less.

Robert Watcher said:

I guess that the thing is, is that camera companies make virtually all of their money (have most of their sales) from photo enthusiasts. Once their is less of need to take pictures because every image can be easily acquired - what need will there be for cameras. Once everyone has taken countless thousands of selfies of themselves, what need will there be to take another that no one is interested in looking at. Actually Facebook is already old school, being taken over by Instagram - which will as well soon be long in the tooth.

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For sure, Robert!

From now on smartphone photographs will be mined for extra data such as fashion trends, color preferences, and more. Ordering an item, automatically identified in a photograph, will be routine as will finding others who wear the same shoes or skirt!

So the cell phone will evolve as an extension of the brain, until it's actually a small dot added to one's eye glasses and with which we have integrated access through brainwaves monitored from a baseball cap, a scarf or a headband!

Still, professional photography will develop to new heights as we need to produce art for our ever-expanding experience and access to more esthetic experience and a logarithmic growth in interpretive personal data storage. Demands will evolve and photographers will reach above the level of the iPhone users, give us new creative paradigms and some will be very rich!

Asher

The market for photography has increased but the demands are higher. The pieces of large impressive prints have increased dramatically, but one needs to have a style and a following to be successful. In California, there's a housing lust and that means a lot more large walls to cover. 65% of art is now sold in international exhibitions.

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You really think so? I think that any photographer who is able to, is trying to eek out whatever purchases or money they can. However the ones successfully doing that are far and few in between. It is easy to use the wedding market as having failed when in fact during the late 2008-2012 bust, tons of commercial photographers from every part of the industry, were moving into the only viable market left to make any money at - wedding photography. That includes fashion, magazine, newspaper, fine art, product and corporate photographers - who looked at wedding photography as the bain of the industry and something they would never engage in.

At any rate if there are a few photographers capable of making some money and finding a market in photography, I won't dispute that. The fact is that just as in the past, the pro photographers are not the ones who keep the camera manufacturers profitable. My point has more to do with absolutely almost ever person alive today, who equally loves photography and have the capability to take pictures effortlessly and endlessly to their hearts content. Those are the ones and their thinking in 5 to 10 years - that will determine whether there is any value in photography at that time aren't they. They are also the current purchasers of cameras and iPhones and any other device that captures images.

Do I want to see a change to photography? Of course not. I love it. But I've already seen more changes than ever could be imagined and it isn't going to stop right here.

Still, professional photography will develop to new heights as we need to produce art for our ever-expanding experience and access to more esthetic experience and a logarithmic growth in interpretive personal data storage. Demands will evolve and photographers will reach above the level of the iPhone users, give us new creative paradigms and some will be very rich!

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Could be. May be nic and even ideal. But may be wishful thinking as well.

Asher Kelman said:

Yes, everyone with a camera thinks that is their qualification for doing weddings, but rich people know to hire a wedding photographer with a caché of clients and prices in the $25,000 to 35,000 bracket. Flowers, lone, BTW, could cost $10-100,000!

Meanwhile, some folk struggle to make a living as a Wedding Photographer with everyone wanting just the files to print themselves at Walmart or wherever!

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That is not only for photography. Luxury brands are doing well, yet mainstream retail is tanking. It is probably a consequence of more and more money being concentrated in the top 1% of the population, while the middle class is quickly pushed into poverty.

Still, photography will develop as we need to produce art for our ever expanding experience.

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People in general have already lost their need for and sense of value in art. As for expressing it in photography, they may for the moment - and as long as everyone on their social network tells them how great they are and how they should sell the pics - think they are satisfying that even though they are pointing a camera and grabbing what everyone else is - - - like the attitude on everything else, they may soon tire of it and find no time as everyones life continues to get more and more hectic. Do you really think that attitudes are going to revert to some idealistic way art or photography may have been viewed in the past? I think that history over the past hundred years shows that not to be the case. It will be interesting to see, won't it.

Robert Watcher said:

Do I want to see a change to photography? Of course not. I love it. But I've already seen more changes than ever could be imagined and it isn't going to stop right here.

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The main thing is that one needs to be realistic. My heart goes out to all those displaced by the easy access to pretty good pictures from millions of low end but capable automatic DSLRs and now iPhones and the like! At the very least, photography should be enjoyable, even if one is shooting for an insurance company or police department, as one only has one life to live,\ and it should be as interesting as possible.

I am fortunate to have the luxury of being older and photography is just one of my passions and I do not depend on it for being able to afford ice-cream or a art paper for my grandchildren. Still, there's a pressure to sell, both for a personal satisfaction that others like our work so much that they must own it and secondly because it will support this habit!


Asher

Jerome Marot said:

That is not only for photography. Luxury brands are doing well, yet mainstream retail is tanking. It is probably a consequence of more and more money being concentrated in the top 1% of the population, while the middle class is quickly pushed into poverty.

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You are correct I think Jerome. And even for those reasons, I come to the conclusion that I do, when it comes to where the value or usefulness of photography might be in the future - and the result that would have on camera companies.

The reality is too, that rich people are commonly tight with spending, even though the common concept is that they spend without thought - they don't like spending their money unless it really props up their social status or appearance. So putting efforts into that small market can be good for a awhile maybe - and the side of placing all your eggs in a very small basket can be devastating when interest is lost in what you offer. The luxury market is not really a sustainable market to corporations selling product - in the case of most companies, it is none of their market - so irrelevant.

I think that we are losing sight of the main news here. The main news is not that facebook exists, it was founded in 2004, 11 years ago. The main news is that Apple is demonstrating that a cell phone can take pictures good enough for a billboard. I would think that users already new that their phone took pictures good enough for facebook.
Now, you said that camera companies make virtually all of their money from photo enthusiasts and not from pro photographers. This is true. The enthusiasts bought better cameras for posting pictures on facebook (or flickr, 500pix, forums, etc...), because they believed that technically better pictures were necessary than the ones produced by a cell phone. This is what Apple is set to change with their marketing campaign.

I am fortunate to have the luxury of being older and photography is just one of my passions and I do not depend on it for being able to afford ice-cream or a art paper for my grandchildren. Still, there's a pressure to sell, both for a personal satisfaction that others like our work so much that they must own it and secondly because it will support this habit!

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That is wonderful. And if the camera manufacturers are still around in 5 or 10 years providing us will gear to fulfill that passion - then wonderful. If they aren't though, because there is no market for what they offer because of changing views of photography by the masses (the ones that keep them in business) - - - then it will be much more difficult and even pointless to fulfill our passion in the way that we want.

Just as it is now that a few older hold-outs manage to find obscure processes and gear to practice photography as they have always intended - that may continue or not. As for the value of photography and gear in the future, it may be fairly realistic to say that there may be other things that have replaced it in this fast moving and increasingly complex society. Would you not agree on some level the possibility?

Robert Watcher said:

The luxury market is not really a sustainable market to corporations selling product

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Companies specialised in luxury goods, like LVMH, are doing very well. LVMH profit is about 3.9 billion € per year.

Jerome Marot said:

I think that we are losing sight of the main news here. The main news is not that facebook exists, it was founded in 2004, 11 years ago. The main news is that Apple is demonstrating that a cell phone can take pictures good enough for a billboard. I would think that users already new that their phone took pictures good enough for facebook.
Now, you said that camera companies make virtually all of their money from photo enthusiasts and not from pro photographers. This is true. The enthusiasts bought better cameras for posting pictures on facebook (or flickr, 500pix, forums, etc...), because they believed that technically better pictures were necessary than the ones produced by a cell phone. This is what Apple is set to change with their marketing campaign.

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I'm sorry that you see it that way Jerome. What I have responded to based on your opening post as far as I understood it - - - has nothing to do with Facebook (you brought that into the conversation) - - - addresses the iPhone and printing to large sizes and whether that really has any relevance or not - - - and mostly to this part of your opening post:

I wonder how the photographic market will look like in about 5 years. Small point and shoot cameras are already a disappearing breed. The word is that DSLR camera makers are very worried about the future.

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I wasn't aware that commenting on that would be a deviation. I'm sorry for doing so. I will butt out now.

Robert Watcher said:

I wasn't aware that commenting on that would be a deviation. I'm sorry for doing so. I will butt out now.

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It is in the nature of forums that conversation deviates and you brought interesting arguments into the thread. But Apple's advertisement will not change the way the general public posts personal picture on the Internet. People use their iPhones (and other phones) to post photographs on social sites before that advertisement, they will do exactly the same after that advertisement. Cell phone pictures of newsworthy events were used before that advertisement, they will still be used after that advertisement. The advertisement does not change that part.

What the advertisement may change is that people thought that for a "good" picture (that meant a "technically good enough to be printed large" picture), a "good" camera was needed. Now they know their phone is good enough.

Robert Watcher said:

I'm sorry that you see it that way Jerome. What I have responded to based on your opening post as far as I understood it - - - has nothing to do with Facebook (you brought that into the conversation) - - - addresses the iPhone and printing to large sizes and whether that really has any relevance or not - - - and mostly to this part of your opening post:



I wasn't aware that commenting on that would be a deviation. I'm sorry for doing so. I will butt out now.

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Robert,

These deviations are extra fruit on a tree. You are expected to bring more to hte table than the chef was offering This is an open forum!


Asher

More about the iPhone 6 advertising campaign:

Pranksters Put Up Fake ‘Shot on iPhone 6′ Ads Next to Real Apple Billboards

and also: this tumblr feed.

Jerome Marot said:

More about the iPhone 6 advertising campaign:

Pranksters Put Up Fake ‘Shot on iPhone 6′ Ads Next to Real Apple Billboards

and also: this tumblr feed.

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An excellent prank!