Internet Tough on Professional Photographers
Posted on June 16, 2007
The Internet is changing many things and many careers. One of the careers at risk is professional photography careers. Andrew Brown explains how professional photographers face increasing competition on the Internet.
News photographs don't have to be technically accomplished. They sell on their captions. But many professionals make their money from photographs that are no longer news - the stock images sold by picture libraries. This is the market that the web will devastate. It is already damaging it: when I went round to see my friend, he was looking at a pile of 4,500 stock transparencies returned to him by a well-respected agency that had just gone bankrupt.Photo sharing resources like Flickr make available a wealth of photos that was once unimaginable. Resources like these make it tough for professional photographers to compete and pushes the old stock photo companies out of business.A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. A British photographers' site, EPUK, has calculated that if only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here - by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.
Perhaps none of these people could make a living as a photographer, but few want to. Any money they make is gravy for them - and bread taken from the mouths of professionals.