"Objects in mirror may be closer..."
"Objects in mirror may be closer..."
It's the ubquity and "ease" of digital that cracks the landscape open wider to to those, male and female, who had an insufficient interest in photography to climb the technical learning curve (as if regarding a contemporary camera as merely a Pocket PC with a big zoom attached actually "flattens" said curve...I guess that's a story unto itself). This is, in fact, a cycle repeating itsself: When roll-film photography hit the scene over a century ago, a sizable part the general public went truly ga-ga for the medium. When exposure automation became reliable and more common, there was another growth spurt. When SLRs became cheaper, smaller, lighter and smarter, "everyone" had to get one...like the pros use, right?
The field of child photography has always been the entreé to paid work for many, many people, and most of the people in this case happen to be female. Hardly new; I've known several women who set up full-time businesses from what started as a hobby that conveniently paid for itself (hell, how did it happen for a lot of us?), and became at least reasonably successful. And, ironically, they're the ones whose heels are being bipped at by those who just bought a dSLR kit and, freshly-printed business cards in hand, are ready to conquer the neighborhood, if not the world. (Park Slope, Brooklyn, sometimes known as Stroller Central, is a very lucrative nabe for this, although most of the people I have as tech-support clients, and who happen to have kids – that is, most of them – are quite adept at taking their own pretty-good d-snaps, thank you).
Sometimes I think of the guy at the photo studio at Sears as the modern analogue (sorry...) of the Maytag repairman. He's gone digital, too, but it hardly seems to matter, since "everybody else has."
- Barrett