This outburst came from my retired, conservative father-in-law, in response to my suggestion that professional photographers need to catch up to technology and make high resolution digital images of their photos available on CD to their customers. What prompted this conversation was my recent experience with the wedding photographer. Getting married this summer brought me into contact with a professional photographer for the first time in many, many years. I was curious how the digital revolution affects her profession.
In many ways the profession is unchanged. Our photographer showed up at the wedding with an "analog" camera, one of much higher quality than any of the guests could afford, and shot onto special film that would provide a high quality image even on large prints of 8"x10" and above in size. After the wedding she provided us with a book of proof sheets, from which we selected the final shots to go into the wedding album. The album comes leather-bound, with high resolution pictures on high quality photo paper. Not a hint of the digital anywhere in the process, and so far no digital camera can match the quality of her "analog" camera, at least not for anything like the same price.
But look beneath the surface here, and you see that the digital revolution is crowding in her profession, and threatening her sense of ownership over her own intellectual property.
First, consider the abundance of digital cameras present at any wedding these days. This came up afterwards in idle conversation with our photographer, and she said, "I know I can't do anything about it, but it's frustrating to work so hard to set up my shot only to have everyone else take advantage by snapping the same shot."
This was a perspective I hadn't thought of before. From her point of view, a significant part of her artistry was not just that she had a better camera than anyone else, but that she had the skill to work with a subject, get the lighting right, set up the pose, and produce an ideal moment for a photograph. She felt that she owned that moment, because it was something she created. This is a problem that isn't entirely new to the digital era, but -- and this is one of the most significant points -- the digital camera has dramatically narrowed the gap between what a total amature photographer and a professional can produce. Our photographer noted that she just wasn't getting as many reprint orders because people were often satisfied with the digital photos taken that piggy-backed off of her pose.
Second, consider the proof book we reviewed before ordering our album. My wife complained that the proof pictures were just run off from a color printer onto regular paper, and on occaision weren't clear enough for us to really see what the actual high res picture might reveal. I noted the same thing, and asked the photographer about this.
She said, "I'm sorry, but I have to do it that way. Too many customers will take a high quality picture, run it through their scanner, and then not order the reprint if their scanned image is good enough." This struck me as an unscrupulous practice on the part of customers, a violation of our "terms of service" with the photographer, but no doubt an inevitable practice. Her preemptive response seemed to me appropriate and reasonable. But it got me to thinking.
And that led to the final point. What about getting images on CD from the photographer? She obviously had them, since she had some digital image she had used to print out the proofs on her color printer. The professional photo lab she worked with certainly could and did provide her with a high quality digital image from her negatives. I asked if this was something we could get a copy of.
A very unhappy expression came over our photographer's face. She pursed her lips, frowned, but said that she would provide a CD, but with several constraints. First, she named a price, one that was higher than we were paying for all the rest of her services and prints put together. Second, she said she would not provide a CD with the highest quality images, because, again, that inevitably led to copies being made of the CD for friends and relatives, who would then not order reprints. This is where my Open Source hackles began to rise.
The parallel between an artist's photograph and a programmer's code is remarkable. The negative, in the case of analog photography, or the high resolution image, in the case of digital photography, is in effect the source code. The viewable image, whether on screen or on paper, is in effect the object code. What I had just been told was that the source code to her work was not available in a freely redistributable and free modifiable form, indeed that the source code was not going to be made available at all.
I declined to pay her price, not because I thought it was too high, but because she was not offering me source code access. I've never been one to adhere to the Open Source approach on moral grounds; I've always thought it was a matter of pragmatism and good business sense. That was the case here. I feel she was ignoring the needs of her customer in a fundamental way, and that ultimately, for her and her profession, that would prove to be a mistake.
The problem is this: she is still living in a world of 20 years ago where the primary means for viewing and distributing photographs was as a print on paper. That isn't the world today. The elegant, leather bound album she has provided us is very nice, but the truth is it isn't the medium by which I or my friends or my relatives will most often view pictures of the wedding. Most of my viewing is done via the computer screen. If I cannot get a decent digital image of something, then, as far as I'm concerned, I'm settling for second best. Furthermore, most of my friends and relatives live hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. By far the easiest way to share pictures with them is over the Web. My parents live 3000 miles away, and thanks to the miracle (and to them it is a miracle) of digital photography, I can put up a daily photo of their grandson, enabling them to feel connected to his day to day life in a way that distance would otherwise impede. I live, communicate, and share in a digital world. It is simply not the same world that our photographer was acknowledging. To her the printed album is the finest realization of her artistic work; to me it's second choice.
Businesses and professions that do not adapt to their customers changing needs do not survive. That is why there is no airline called "Cannard" today. Cannard thought it was in the business of providing passenger service by ship. In fact it was in the people-moving business, and when that business changed from ships to airplanes Cannard failed to adapt. Our photographer thinks she is in the business of providing high quality printed photographs. In fact she is in the image-capturing business, and as the business shifts from printed to digital format, she will either adapt or fail.
And this is where my father-in-law and I disagree. He sees unfettered access to photography source code as the end of professional photography. I see rigid adherence to antiquated technology and distribution mechanisms as the end of professional photography.
We are seldom as euridite on the spur of the moment as we want to be. In response to my father-in-law's outburst I mumbled something about agreeing to disagree. Now I know, in addition to everything I've said here so far, what I should have said. So Jerry, this is for you:
The fate of professional photographers is not unlike the fate of an earlier generation of artistic professionals: portrait painters. In many ways the invention of the camera decimated what had been a thriving profession. Up until the late 19th century it was quite common for any family that was at least middle class to hire a painter from time to time to do portraits of members of the family.
Through the dim lens of time we think of these people as artists; after all, they were painters. In fact they were tradesmen, with only a few rising to the worth of artists. What their customers wanted was a generally realistic representation of family members that could be preserved over time. They turned to painters, because painters offered the best available medium -- oil and canvas -- offered in that era.
The demise of portrait painting was neither instantaneous nor complete. Early photographs were not in color, and were not as permanent a medium as oil and canvas. In fact today's printed photographs are still less durable than an oil and canvas painting. But as the quality and durability of photography improved, and its cost dropped, it became the medium of choice for capturing representative images of friends and loved ones. The portrait painter faded as a fixture of local business, unable to compete on either quality or cost.
Which is not to say that these tradesmen have entirely disappeared. I live in a town of about 5000, and even here you'd have to look no further than the yellow pages to find a professional painter who does portraits. In my town you'll find one, maybe two. By contrast there are over a dozen professional photographers.
What is happening now to photographers is similar to what happened to portrait painters a century ago. Photography continues to get cheaper and easier, closing the gap between what is available to the amateur and what requires a professional. This trend began long before digital photography. Professional photographers have been in a gradual retreat for decades. Today we turn to the services of a professional only on special occaisions: school portraits, graduation, weddings, and the like.
Digital photography is taking this trend to another level.
I always found "analog" cameras too much trouble to deal with: you had to buy film, you had to put film in, remove it, get it developed, and then you either had to buy an expensive camera that was hard to operate, or settle for pictures that were frequently grainy or out of focus. To cap it off, you had to pay to get film developed before you had any idea which pictures you might actually want to keep.
With a digital camera, all of those issues go away. The process of "developing" and selecting pictures is much easier, getting prints doesn't require me to leave the house (thanks to ofoto.com or similar sites), and, most importantly, I get much better quality pictures despite the fact that I don't know any more about photography than I used to.
So once again technology has dropped the cost of image creation, while increasing the quality of image creation available to the non-profesional. Finally, the cost of image duplication and distribution has become virtually zero, as people like me migrate to think of the image on screen, not the image on paper, as the primary medium for image viewing.
Professional photographers can forestall the impact of these trends by handling their photgraphs in an extremely proprietary way. They cannot change these trends, however; ultimately the forces of the free market will overcome them.
The result is that professional photographers will have to charge a lot more for their basic service, building in an assumed price for the digital copies that customers will freely make, At the same time, the only people willing to pay that higher price will be those who really value the professional difference in photography. Those who are simply looking for a reasonable quality image that captures a moment will use ever cheaper and ever better digital cameras themselves.
The consequence: there will be fewer professional photographers. Fifty years from now someone looking through the yellow pages here in Sonora will still find one or two professional portrait painters, but they will also find only one or two professional photographers, instead of the dozen or so the town now supports.
Should we mourn the passing of these tradesmen? No more so than we mourn the passing of the portrait painter. The key is to remember that new professions will arise. In the heyday of portrait painting there were no photographers, no videographers, no sound recordings. The technological changes that led to the demise of one profession opened up many other professions demanding equal or greater creativity. So it will be this time as well.
When my son is old enough to have children of his own, and they are old enough to think about such matters, they will look at my stacks of photo CDs, or an old archive of my website, and think of these as quaint artifacts of a bygone era. They will feel much as I did when first I looked at the musty old oil paintings hanging in my grandmother's farmhouse.
Then they will compare these with their own full motion, full audio, 3D, holographic images, and behold a future that we cannot now even imagine.
We have a choice. We can treat the professional photographer's artistic work as proprietary intellectual property not to be meddled with. Or we can treat such work in an Open Source manner, allowing and expecting the "source" to change and be redistributed. This choice won't be made on moral or personal grounds. It will be made for pragmatic, business reasons. One approach will hinder change and new technologies; another choice will accelerate change and new technologies. It isn't that Open Source is right; it's that Open Source is inevitable.