By now you’re seeing a lot of video and motion based photography on SCBP. You’re seeing the word “hybrid” along side the words “photography” and “photographer”. We’re seeing more and more people view photography on their phone and tablets. We’re seeing less and less prints in our homes and pros are selling less prints then years past. My friends, we can only blame so much on the economy and its time to take a good look around us…more then look SEE. See that people are consuming media in larger quantities then ever, see what they are using to consume that media and see how they interact with it.
Now think about how we, as artists and professionals can service peoples desires to consume visual information. We’re selling a service, as we always have but the delivery has changed. Are prints dead? Not yet. Will it happen in our lifetime? Maybe. But still photography will remain. It will work as it always has; to sell an idea, an emotion in a slice of time. Its in our DNA to share what we see and to express what we feel. Since the dawn of man we’ve been scribbling on cave walls, stone tablets, canvas paintings, photography prints and now screens.
Is still photography dead? Hell no! It’s just that the way we consume the still photograph has changed. This does not mean that the photograph has to be static either. Since we’re displaying an image on a medium that can show motion photography we now have a new coloring book and with hybrid cameras like the GH3 a new box of crayons.
Below is a commercial made up of nothing but still photography for the visual elements. There is the added depth of words and sound and a bit of movement that together creates a hybrid photography piece that a company paid many millions to create and distribute. It is beautiful, effective and it is something that we all can emulate on some level.
Are you still wondering where your sales are going? The sales are going to photographers that are embracing change, that see each screen as a golden opportunity to grow their business rather then grow fears. The future of photography belongs to those willing to take that big box of crayons and play and have fun and sell. Take that box of crayons, push the red button, color with stills color with motion, with sound… share it!
What is your cave painting going to be?
And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer. God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the field, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer. God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say,’Maybe next year,’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from an ash tree, shoe a horse with hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. Who, during planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from tractor back, put in another 72 hours.” So God made the farmer. God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-comb pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the leg of a meadowlark.” It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and brake, and disk, and plow, and plant, and tie the fleece and strain the milk, . Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh, and then sigh and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what Dad does. “So God made a farmer.”
