There have been threads running on several other forums about clients becoming disillusioned about digital file quality. Whether this is a growing trend, as some suggest, I don't know. I do have a gut feeling that many photographers, who held off from buying digital cameras because their theoretical knowledge was lacking, have now taken the plunge without increasing their ability to handle digital files.
Many of us have seen this coming for a long while. I haven't seen these other forums but I have seen the problem a lot.
Agencies that have used digital for years (we've been supplying digital photographs to ad agencies since 1995) suddenly go quiet. We talk to them and they say "we're treading carefully with digital at the moment - we've had a lot of problems". Since they've never had problems with our pictures we suggest that they use old fashioned criteria like 'maybe if this was happening with film, you'd just realise that the guy doesn't know what he's doing' rather than concluding the technology itself was flawed.
Pro-File, of which I was a one time protagonist was an attempt to stave this off, but unfortunately it foundered. We tried too address too much in an industry that was developing too quickly - in short the goalposts kept moving. If we'd just kept to our initial idea which was to offer a printer validation service, allied to a bit of basic training that guaranteed photographers would supply reproducible files we might have succeeded.
I'm not a member of any industry body, and I never found any real need for one until now. But now it appears that the majority of photographers are adopting digital capture rather than, as until now bad mouthing it, the time must be right for AoP at least to address the issue.
In the olden days (Bob Croxford being one of our gurus in this area) the technology was sufficiently mature that assistant could learn from photographer, adapt a bit to a new E4 film process maybe, and with a bit of experience become a sound and reliable photographer. Now it seems increasingly its the other way round. I constantly meet freelance assistants who are being hired by my peers to sort out the mess they're in.
I'm sure someone on the council of AoP must subscribe this list (although suddenly I tremble and realise there's a possibility nobody does ;-) Could they perhaps summarise here how the association representing some of the world's leading photographers views the situation?
Mike Russell Mouse in the House London A Carbon Neutral � Company practicing Ethical Banking
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