The little papers went digital before the big ones did. To them not having to pay a darkroom tech was all the incentive they needed, and mostly they didn't care much about quality in the first place. Many of them just use digital P&S cameras.
The big magazines like digital. Thousands of images to choose from where in the past they only got hundreds. Never mind that they actually get less usable images, the editor has to wade trough all those images, so his job is secure. Guess whose job he worries about?
Many of these digital guys are not photographers in the classic sense of the word they are instead image collectors who use their digital camera as a butterfly collector uses a net.
A personal piece of advice, from lots of personal experience. When you are out of a job is not the time to try and find the most satisfying job, it is the time to find a job that will put groceries on the table. When you are eating regularly is the time to hunt that dream job. Only most of us, and I put myself near the top of the list, are not willing to work at finding a dream job when we have a bread and butter job. I have recently come to the conclusion that if you do not have the energy to hunt that dream on the side, you will not have the energy to make it come true anyway (I sadly have come to realize I never did).
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frank theriault wrote:
First, Paul, congrats on that gig. It could be interesting, or if it isn't, you'll photograph it so that it ~looks~ interesting <g>. A bit of travel, not bad money: so who's to complain, eh?
Along the lines of what you're saying, when I first quit my job a month or so ago, I was thinking, "here's my chance to do what I love - I'll be a photographer!"
Then I realized that without digital I've been left
behind. Even little a**-wipe weekly rags have gone
digital these days. They don't hire staff photogs
(since the editor is also the reporter and
photographer), so the best I could do is freelance. And, they don't want negs or prints, they want
digital.
So about all I can do with film is continue to take whatever silly little photos I take, and maybe they'll end up on the wall of a cafe or restaurant or small insignificant gallery, and people will go "oooooh" and "aaaaaah", and if I'm lucky I'll sell one or two, and I'll end up losing a couple hundred dollars on the show.
Or, I could go to a publisher, who would steer me to their vanity press subsidiary, and for a couple of thousand bucks I could get a run of several hundred books which would likely be very poor quality anyway, which I'd schlepp from store to store who wouldn't want to even take the crap on consignment, so I'd sell maybe 10 volumes to relatives.
That's all film will get ya these days.
Without digital, all ya got is a hobby. A wonderful, fulfilling hobby to be sure, but nothing more than that.
cheers, frank
===== "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst" ******** "Of course it's all luck" -- Henri Cartier-Bresson
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-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
