This may be appalling to some, or realistic to others, but I think if we don't discuss the state of the profession of photography we will eventually regret it. When it is more than a hobby, how has the industry changed? Is it a good change? Has technology helped or hurt the professional?
The Reality
As with everything in life, the only constant is change. We would be foolish to accept that photography as a profession is indeed changing. It's subjective as to if the evolution of the industry is good or bad for the professional.
The Industry
In the past I've known several professional portrait photographers that easily made a great living by photographing families, seniors, and children. Two studios in my hometown had both existed for over 30 years and made a living by selling good quality work at industry standard pricing. Today, both of those studios are out of business, I suspect for slightly different reasons. Trying to investigate the reason for the failure would be somewhat challenging because in my opinion, it's not just one thing to blame.
Back to the way the industry has changed, I know that one of the studios continued to do things exactly the same way they always had and that is almost never a recipe for success, if you don't adapt with changing technology and times, it's likely you will fall behind and eventually become irrelevant. But that alone didn't do it. Combine some bad customer service, aggressive sales tactics, and a lack of marketing, all the while with tremendous increases in number of competitors, and it shouldn't be too difficult to start to see why the business would begin having some problems.
Blame the WACs
Everyone wants to quickly blame the WACs (With A Camera, referred to as MWAC, GWAC, etc.) for flooding all the local markets with subpar work and cheap or free pricing.
This has been a huge hot-seat topic locally in my area as there are well over 600 photographers in a town with about a 10 mile radius. It's seen as a double-edge sword to some, since many of us want to help like-minded folks, and let's face it, photography is a fun and rewarding thing to do. Teaching and watching someone grow is also a fun and rewarding thing to do. But I think we'd also be foolish to think that the newbies aren't affecting at least some of the professionals' client base. Many professionals (including one of the long-term studios I mentioned earlier) took the stance of "our work is better, and our customers will see that." That held true for some time, and you can't just always blame someone else when your business begins to have issues.
But have the newbies hurt the industry? Some will argue they have, citing the flood of work across social media and word of mouth tremendously overpowering any other source of marketing.
Technology advances have made it appealing for many new photographers to jump into the industry, and after awhile many newbies begin to charge (often too little) for the work, which in turn over the past few years has conditioned many customers' expectations to that of $50 sessions with all images provided on a disc. Whether you agree or disagree with this practice, I think we can all agree it does have some form of effect on the industry as a whole.
Help the Newbies?
This has been an interesting chapter in my career from when I started to where I am now. Full disclosure: I used to work as a retoucher for one of those long time established studios. Spending 50-plus hours a week with an older established photographer sort of molded me to have the same views on the newbies, amateurs, and the like. It wasn't a positive experience. For years I had the same attitude they did. I hated the newbies and I wanted to really make sure people saw my work quality and I thought I would be fine on that path. I was pretty dense looking back at the situation, and had I continued on that path acting the very same way I'd fail just the very same way. It was obvious a change was needed so I sort of did a reboot and looked at everything with fresh eyes.
I now have a different view on the industry, and it has helped tremendously for the things that are in my power to change (me, basically). Being negative hadn't helped anything grow. I currently teach, and it has not affected my business in either way.
Established Versus Starting Out
Many of the successful studios have been established and solid in the community they've been in for years. Some will say that in today's market, becoming established or getting off the ground is much more difficult than it once was. Not necessarily impossible as there are new success stories, but I think we can all agree that the level of difficulty has certainly increased. I know many very talented photographers who are often more skilled than these established ones and they just can't seem to gain any traction.
Having a reputation and established customer base can most definitely help keep a business going. Return customers and referrals are often the lifeblood of a studio. But where does that leave the new crop of talented professionals? Is it possible to still get established as a new studio, or has the industry crossed a threshold where there's no going back?
It's not just photography. I was speaking to an established taxidermist who said the crop of new taxidermists flooding the market would make it impossible for him to get going if he were only starting his business now even with his same skills. He is very busy and successful, riding on his business of over 20 years. He cited another local taxidermist with excellent skills who could not make it due to the sea of competition and now works a regular job. Sound familiar? It's not just photography, but the way I see it we have two choices: we can stay doing what we have been doing or we can adapt and do what we must to keep the industry going. But my research has indicated that the photography industry is growing faster than almost any other industry. So that only perpetuates that same situation.
Part-Time Professionals
I have observed and learned that a great many of the professionals in the industry that I have always looked up to now have a main job, or secondary source of income. In an industry that was once booming with full-time professionals, I think it's an interesting shift to see highly-talented folks working regular jobs and doing photography "on the side." Has that in itself hurt the perceived legitimacy of the professional?
Technology
Technology has certainly given us some awesome new tools to work with: cameras with incredible low noise, low-light capabilities, lights that pretty much remove the sync speed with flash, lenses that are razor sharp wide open, beautiful touchscreen LCDs for zoom and checking on photos that were just taken. All those things are wonderful tools but they also make it that much easier for more and more people to jump into the industry. Again, just an observation. I am not stating this is necessarily a bad thing, just assessing how it may be affecting us all and our business bottom line.
Is There a Future for Full-Time Professionals?
So in summary, is there a future for full-time professionals in the industry?
Personally, I think there is a future but we need to adapt and change to be able to sustain. Running things the way they always have been will almost certainly guarantee failure. This is a difficult pill to swallow because most humans like to keep things as they are. We are resistant to change, but learning to adapt is likely to be crucial to survival in an ever-increasingly saturated market.
This certainly isn't meant to sound like a negative article, but rather observing and learning and making sure we are aware of the changes around us. It's often so easy to get lost when you are too close to the forest to see the trees. It's an elephant in the room that many photographers don't wish to discuss, but I feel that being aware is a vital element to continued success.
What do you think? Is there a future for a full-time professional?
Image via Little Visuals.
It's business as usual in the sense that there are still magazines, stock, etc available. Yes, the market is seems saturated because the ability to deliver images is no longer determined by USPS and Prints, but by email, Dropbox, etc, but there is still a market.
The competition is now not between 3 photographers in NY fighting for a few mag slots, but between 5000 photographers vying for 100 mag slots. It's still the same industry, you just have to work harder to get noticed.
This has been the ongoing question/argument since digital came on the scene. I started off in film back in 77 and I still use film. I shoot with my DSLR, but prefer film. But here is what I saw happen when Digital did come around.
The studios that were in existence did a couple of things. They stayed strong and continued to produce the same great work they were doing using film, digital or a combination. Our customer base always appreciated the work and they could see the difference in quality that was being produced over Uncle Bob who just got a digital camera for his birthday (my apologies to anyone who has an Uncle Bob who got a DSLR.....) We didn't change our prices, etc... However, when Uncle Bob and mom, etc... started to come in and charge next to nothing; there were the studios that started to panic. They were still producing the same quality but they felt they needed to drop their prices to compete with the WAC folks. Well; they had overhead, and a lot of it. Just because they dropped their prices didn't mean they got more customers. It just meant they were going to go out of business sooner.
When I first started my studio full time, there were I believe about 75 studios listed in the yellow pages. About 4 years into Digital; there were easily over 150. That didn't mean they were quality, and most of the were working out of their homes. That was not a bad thing. That didn't even count the number of people who were out there not advertising just word of mouth. The thing to remember here is that with Digital; just because you had/have a camera didn't mean you knew anything about photography. It meant you could charge a battery, turn on a camera and take a picture.
We would charge upwards of $75-$150 for a sitting fee. That covered our time, film or even with digital; anything that was not associated with prints. If you were involved in a one hour or two hour session, there was your hourly rate. Your mark up on your prints covered the work you put into them. If a print at our cost was say $4.00, we didn't price it at $10.00. Which is exactly what started to happen with the WAC. They figured they could go to Walmart and get an 8x10 made for $1.50, so they would charge $5.00 for an 8x10. Doesn't matter that their image sucked to begin with, but now they were putting out a printed image that sucked as well.
Eventually, there were so many WAC's out there; no sitting fee, an 8x10 no longer cost the customer $75, it only cost them $5-$10... The general public decided that the guy/gal who had been shooting for 15-30 years and had quality in their images could be looked over because the WAC did an "ok" job and was much cheaper.
Now, there are still the hold outs. We still price our work accordingly. It was a tough situation to keep working through. But some of the best photographers I knew got so worried they kept dropping their prices in order to try to survive. It didn't help their business. It sunk them.
DSLR's maybe aren't that much of the problem. I do believe that the general public just doesn't have any expectation anymore. Have you seen the number of add-ons for Photoshop lately? Want to make something disappear from your image? Want to automatically correct your color? Anything you want to do to a photo you can pretty much do. From the beginning, the amount of crap going on in Photoshop was so ridiculous no one trusted what was happening in the photography world. Now it is just assumed that every photograph is touched up to the point is isn't what it originally was.
I talk to people all of the time who will say that if Digital wouldn't have come along and they would have to shoot film, they would have never gone into photography. That tells you how much Digital played a part in photography. There is nothing different between the two other than you really do need to understand photography and what it is about when you shoot film. If you can be a photographer with Digital, you can be a photographer with film.
So with that alone, Digital played a huge part in the "downfall" of the photography business. DSLR's are already getting shoved to the back of the closet just like film cameras did. People are shooting portraits with iPhones. It is becoming the new Digital age where film was supposed to die. We don't know what will come next, but 100 years ago, no one saw film ever being put on the back burner. Something else will come along, we just don't know what; and Digital photographers will see a new group of photographers doing the same thing, and this conversation will be going on, but with different words.
As professionals you are selling what you always sold -- your creative vision. It has nothing to do with your equipment. I remember spending 2/3rds of my time calling on art directors and creative directors doing the selling part. The photography part was the trailing third. There was a time when prominent photographers were represented by agents who did the selling part. I don't think that happens much any more. People will not beat a path to your door simply because you are good at your craft -- you have to sell and close the deal. If you can't do those two things stay an amateur and enjoy your art. At nearly 77 years old I am enjoying being an amateur much more than I ever did as a professional.