Is photography dying?

When I started my career in photography I never would have guessed we’d be making photos without film and making prints without a darkroom and chemicals. A lot of professions have gone away and companies gone out of business because they never anticipated what was coming. When I started process cameras and enlargers were used to make color separations then drum scanners and now no one even makes a professional scanner because there’s no market for them.

How many companies made film cameras and how many now. Is there even a medium format pro level film camera made now and no one makes view camera lenses for film anymore either.

Typesetters, paste up artists, process camera operators, scanner operators, litho strippers, dot etchers and air brush retouched are just a few of the people I’ve seen loose their jobs because technology put them in the unemployment line.

The evolution has occurred because companies can cut overhead, streamline production and get jobs out faster with shorter lead time. And you can bet as soon as it’s economically feasible companies will close their photo departments, stop booking photo shoots and go fully AI.
 
Out to Lunch said:
I could not care less if a picture of a hamburger is made by a computer program or a photographer.
Click to expand...
But perhaps we should...

I was recently asked which program I used to create my last photographic project (see below), not what camera! I mostly take still-life photos, and carefully stage them even outdoors. No Photoshop, let alone AI!

C803AE87-5694-4C57-B515-AE436959B78E.jpeg

98EDC095-6A72-4864-B603-498D071BF36F.jpeg

62D85B2D-59E4-4D95-B75D-4D1BBE371987.jpeg
 
Instead of rejecting AI out of hand as a matter of principle, it would be better to make an effort to try to understand what's going on in the visual arts today. A photographer friend who teaches visual arts (high school), and photography (college) in Nanjing told me today that teachers and students are increasingly involved with generative AI image creation. Teachers are also increasingly making use of ChatGPT to develop teaching materials, including AI. Cheers, OtL
 
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A lot of interest in "AI" is driven by its potential to generate nearly limitless profits by the replacement of costly (and troublesome) human labor from the workplace. Thus, almost all areas of photography will likely be impacted by this technology. I would guess that the costliest applications of photography would be the first to be "automated." These areas include, but are not limited to commercial and vocational work. The various "arts," to the extent they are valued as commercially attractive products, will be impacted as well: look no further than the troubling fascination in the press that happily fill their front pages with stories of how an AI generated text, composition or image has "won" some prize or fooled experts, ..., etc.

But, behind all of this "excitement" is a more problematic reality. The replacement of human beings by algorithms (whose behaviors are "emergent" and "tacit"--but these are other concerns) will be only one of the more problematic results from the inexorable march to a "better world through technology that we don't understand." Human beings, unlike algorithms, are living, sentient creatures that need a sense of purpose and place in the world. Isn't that why many people who participate in this forum make photographs?
 
Blissfully ignorant of almost all things AI, I have to wonder how it is essentially different from manipulated images done with Photoshop. It's a fiction, staged and created with computers. True, the manipulated image starts with a photographic image but otherwise the concept is the same. Now the concept expands the computer's roll to the initial creation. Not a huge step IMO.

From my POV this makes the role of the Photographer of more importance. And by Photographer I mean the human being who takes a photograph with either film or electrical means using a mechanical/electronic device. This role of work being done by a Photographer separates factual from fictitious. The only real problem to confront is how to recognize the fiction and the fact. That is something well above my pay grade.
 
Today people are photographing with Large Format; Medium format Analog and Digital, Analog fullframe, etc, all declared dead long ago.
As long as we remain photographing with whatever camera we like, photography is far from dead.
(My favoriete system (OLympus m4/3) is also declared dead many times, but will suit me fine for years and years to come.)
 
Out to Lunch said:
Instead of rejecting AI out of hand as a matter of principle, it would be better to make an effort to try to understand what's going on in the visual arts today. A photographer friend who teaches visual arts (high school), and photography (college) in Nanjing told me today that teachers and students are increasingly involved with generative AI image creation. Teachers are also increasingly making use of ChatGPT to develop teaching materials, including AI. Cheers, OtL
Click to expand...
That's ok, but it isn't photography right?
 
So many aspects to this issue and worth unpacking.

For example:

"I could not care less if a picture of a hamburger is made by a computer program or a photographer."

Absolutely true. Some time ago people used sketches/paintings to advertise on billboards, then it was offset prints of analog photos and then the same with digital photos and now its computational photography. >>>Not AI. It's not intelligent but follows an algorithm!

A long time ago I saw a movie where a politician was framed with a doctored (analog) photograph. Presumably to show how we can not rely on film as being 'true'. That made me limit (wet) developing to exposure and choice of grade of paper and also print the whole image with that nice black line around it.

When full frame M cameras became available I started using LR but limited myself to: adjusting exposure and shifting the histogram. That was the same as choosing a grade of paper. I felt and still feel that the file was the same as a negative - it is just a different medium. I use a 'fake' black lime imitating the edge of a negative.

So my photography is like painting/sketching etc and maybe it is art. I still use LR6 and am scared what I should do when it no longer works. I have looked around for alternatives but EVERY developer uses algorithms to 'fix' this and that, from inserting sky to you-name-it. That way we have been lured into the world of IMAGINED PHOTOGRAPHY. My take is that when we use software that does stuff over which we have no control then it is no longer photography.

We then get something that we imagine what a hamburger is like.
Or on Insta where influencers make us believe what humans should look like.

So:
I think that visual artists will strike back and take control, somehow.
I hope that there will be a basic software that allows us to print/publish a photo as it was taken by the person who pressed the button.
I don't get people who like computational photography of x/b/w-phones where reality is re-imagined.

Surely at some point people will wake up and not want to live in make believe?
 
Then, there's this:
deepai.org

Generative Adversarial Network

A generative adversarial network (GAN) is an unsupervised machine learning architecture that trains two neural networks by forcing them to “outwit” each other.
deepai.org deepai.org

machinelearningmastery.com

A Gentle Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) - MachineLearningMastery.com

Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs for short, are an approach to generative modeling using deep learning methods, such as convolutional neural networks. Generative modeling is an unsupervised learning task in machine learning that involves automatically discovering and learning the...
machinelearningmastery.com machinelearningmastery.com
Perhaps the most compelling reason that GANs are widely studied, developed, and used is because of their success. GANs have been able to generate photos so realistic that humans are unable to tell that they are of objects, scenes, and people that do not exist in real life.

Astonishing is not a sufficient adjective for their capability and success.
Click to expand...
 
If ppl sell they're gear in favour for AI then all the better for die hard photographer for bargain used gear😄.
Though I doubt it'll happen. In 50 yrs time the paradigm shift would totally have moved from mirrorless. To what I don't know...but I hope I'm still around to see it, or maybe not lol.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: dct
^^ And, which makes more cameras available for "camera-tossing": 🙂

A Digital Camera Story to Warm the Old Film Heart

Thought you guys would appreciate this - even encourage it! Best Regards, Bill Mattocks http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19509-1984183,00.html And: http://cameratoss.blogspot.com/ Camera tossing David Rowan Wondering how to use the over complicated new digital camera that...
rangefinderforum.com
 
Next up is the AI bathroom mirror.
Get up in the morning and face the mirror and say the magic words:
"Mirror mirror on the wall, make me the fairest of them all"
Soon we’ll all talk, think and look the same. In the year 2525!

Mike
 
Based on what I’ve read, more pictures than ever are being posted on the internet - due to the genius of the mobile smart phone. Everyone is a photographer these days.
 
Yokosuka_Mike said:
Next up is the AI bathroom mirror.
Get up in the morning and face the mirror and say the magic words:
"Mirror mirror on the wall, make me the fairest of them all"
Soon we’ll all talk, think and look the same. In the year 2525!

Mike
Click to expand...

People won't even be living in the "real" world anymore. That's what the metaverse is for. A "person" will be able to look like whatever they want to in there.

"Mirror mirror on the wall, today I will be a fried egg sandwich on rye toast"

I must be hungry . . . .
 
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