eric schmiedl photography

Digital photography turned the entire world of photography upside down. “Uncle Joe and his Nikon will do it for free” became the bane of many wedding photographers. iStockPhoto and its ilk damaged the revenue of Getty, Corbis, and others so much so that Getty bought iStock with the reasoning that, “if something’s going to cannibalize one of our businesses, it might as well be one of our other businesses.” And throughout, the armchair Internet-forum businessmen opined that the high-end advertising shooters would be the only ones unaffected. The following was written as an exploration of the effect that digital photography had on the professional-minded amateurs and the professionals alike.

For easier reading, there’s a PDF version here.

The introduction of digital technology to photography was the greatest change the medium saw since the transition from wet plates to film. Initially, it was seen as an evolutionary shift that would fit in with the existing repertoire of tricks. The airbrushing that was originally done on large transparencies could now be done by drum-scanning the originals and editing them on dedicated retouching workstations. Then the first digital cameras enabled studio photographers to skip the film-processing step and shoot directly to the computer, but at phenomenal expense and firmly tethered by an umbilical cable. Kodak changed all that with the introduction of a digital camera that worked like a film camera in 1994. “I’ve been around the world many times traveling with a portable darkroom and developing pictures in bathrooms from Saudi Arabia to Washington, D.C. So when the NC2000 came along, and the laptop computer, I thought, ‘Holy Christ, this is brilliant. I don’t have to take all this crap with me on the road’.” (Hickey) But at $18,000 apiece for “atrocious” image quality, it was limited to low-fidelity newspaper work and had little chance with the eager amateur or the high-gloss advertising shooter. The kinds of cameras that would appeal to those buyers took another ten years of development to arrive on the market. The result was a renaissance in photography: the instant feedback and zero cost per frame meant that amateurs could experiment to their heart’s content while networks allowed photo sharing to an audience thousands of times that normally sitting around a slide projector. The learning curve for photography flattened almost overnight and the average person’s exposure to better-than-snapshot quality work exploded. High-end photographers could do retouching and photomontage in a way that was absolutely impossible with film. But the ease of making and editing images had its own far-reaching consequences. The explosion of quality photography by consumers meant that low- and mid-level professional photographers were now competing with their customers as well as their peers. Between the increased ease of taking pictures, the new possibilities in retouching, and the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, computer technology completely transformed advertising photography by cutting out the low end of the professional spectrum and pushing the high end beyond pretty pictures and towards the creation of work that captured the attention of viewers by telling a story.

It was the influx of tens of thousands of new photographers to its ranks that exerted the greatest force on the photography profession. An industry that traditionally taught its members by apprenticeships was flooded with green ‘pros’ whose only claim to professional status was a shiny new camera and a good eye for composition. Why did this happen? Photography has always been an attractive profession to many. The same stereotypes of a wild and glamorous lifestyle surrounded by beautiful models, high adventure, and none of the drudgery of a 9-to-5 office job that inspire would-be actresses and rock stars have also been attached to photographers for decades. But the path to becoming a professional photographer was fraught with difficulty—the need for complex technical knowledge and extensive training combined with a good eye, and the extreme uncertainty of a job that might pay extremely well one month and not at all the next kept all but a few very dedicated souls away. But with the introduction of cameras that provided both instant feedback as well as automatic modes, even amateurs shooting strictly for themselves had no reason to hold back in their pursuit of professional quality photographs without the professional quality price-tag.

“The auto function on cameras has really allowed a wide range of photographers to get instant access to taking great photos,” Jon Feinstein from Shutterstock, a stock photography website. “They don’t have to learn light metering or the large technical issues beforehand. They can still produce images that are close to the quality that seasoned professionals would be shooting,” he says. (Hardy)

The automatic capabilities of the cameras reduced to almost nothing the amount of training required to take a useable picture, leaving to the photographer just the duty of composing the shot. The instant preview screens on the back of digital cameras removed the guesswork and meticulous planning that was associated with film. Instead of carefully metering a scene and choosing camera settings and film processing based on years of experience then hoping the results came out as expected when the film was processed by a lab, the what-you-see-is-what-you get nature of digital cameras meant that the photographer could verify on the spot that the picture was as he or she envisioned and make corrections appropriately. The result was a general increase in the quality and volume of amateur photography at the same time as it hit the newly-formed photography sharing websites, which allowed an amateur’s photographs to be found by others around the world when previously they would have been confined to a closet shoebox.

Lacking the business skills of a traditional photographer and failing to anticipate the elements and expenses of professional work that lie beyond clicking the shutter, the new population of professional amateurs offered their images at a fraction of the cost—if they charged anything at all.

Tens of thousands of talented amateurs [each] capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere [could individually never] make a living as a photographer, but few want to. Any money they make is gravy for them – and bread taken from the mouths of professionals. (Brown)

As amateurs started offering their work for pennies on the dollar, consumers of lower-end photography began to look skeptically at the comparatively high rates charged by traditional photographers and started to use the new breed of professional amateurs instead. The photography industry began to stratify, with amateurs willing to do low- to mid-level work at discount prices and professionals able to charge profitable rates mainly in situations where the logistic or creative requirements precluded an amateur from doing the job.

I couldn’t imagine being anything but in the top 1-2%. When you’re working with that kind of budget and crew, it doesn’t matter whether you’re shooting digital or film. The lowest end stuff, though — like when a creative director decides they can shoot it themselves… that really affects the photographers working at that level. But there will always be clients who demand high quality work. (Grecco)

A creative director shooting their own advertising images would have been unheard-of before the introduction of digital photography. No creative director would have known about all the different possible film-stocks to use and what combination of filter-packs would correct for the unique color casts of a film, or what processing instructions to give a lab for the unique situation and intended look of a shoot, or even how to interpret a Polaroid so as to understand how the final transparency would look. But with digital, the creative directors would know the minute that they pressed the shutter whether or not they had the shot. No longer did they have to call in a professional for simple jobs, and the professionals were no longer able to sell the simple fact that they could produce a picture.

To understand why amateurs were able to establish such a foothold in the market so quickly, it is necessary to understand the market many amateurs sold to was very different from the market paid high rates for professionals—a market that wanted to escape the look of increasingly sophisticated amateur photography. As amateur photographers gained in technical ability and the demand for cheap works rose to put some spare change in the pockets of the hobbyists, computers themselves were experiencing a similar explosion in popularity as a means of media consumption. Since computer screens were small in size and low in resolution compared to the world of print advertising, and the ads on web pages often occupied only a small fraction of the already-small screens, the kind of photography that proved effective on the web was understandably different from the kind of photography that was effective elsewhere.

CNET Networks’ research demonstrates that the strongest [web] ads get attention with powerful images, color, and contrast. Their guidelines: Use powerful images. Big expansive photography gets ads noticed. […] Bright, eye-catching colors such as red, blue, golden yellow, and green generate impact. And models who look straight at the viewer resulted in higher Noted scores… (Plummer)

The often lower-budget world of web advertising had realized a critical need for just the kind of singular, ultra-vivid work that the low-priced and generally simpler in concept ‘microstock’ and related imagery did best. Web ads needed no deep storytelling impact or subtle handling of nuance; in fact, overly sophisticated imagery was bad for viewer comprehension. It was all about punch and impact. As the Web gained popularity, the market for simple imagery of the kind that skilled amateurs could and did produce took off. The amateurs were familiar enough with Photoshop and the newly-affordable tools of professional retouching that they could take unremarkable images and re-mold them to be bright, saturated works that jumped out at the viewer from the web pages on which they were placed. It did not matter whether the images were retouched with the kind of skill needed to make them look good magazine page when they would run on the Web in a size small enough that it might be hard to tell whether or not the camera was even precisely in focus.
As they were making inroads into low-end photography and web advertising, the amateurs opened up the market to buyers who could previously not afford photography and thereby increased sheer volume of decent quality work that was produced and the amount of decent quality photography to which the average consumer was exposed. They did this by making their work available at low prices.

Stock photography – the pictures used by companies on packaging, leaflets, and websites – used to sell for thousands of dollars. Changing technology has meant you can now pick up these images very cheaply. […] The market place for cheap images is growing fast and quality is no longer a priority. […] Because almost anyone can produce sophisticated leaflets, newsletters, blogs and websites the customer base for microstock has ballooned. […] Microstock has also put pressure on professional photographers like Shannon Fagan. He now has to produce 60 saleable shots in one session rather than the 10 he used to aim for and the budget cuts affect his entire operation. […] “My fees are dropping. I presented that to the agencies that sell the photos, said this is a problem. There is nothing they can do about it. It is not their problem. It gets transferred to me, the crew, the models, the locations,” he says. (Hardy)

For years, professional photographers would make their back catalogs of work available through stock photo agencies to buyers who needed to illustrate the concept of teamwork or security or any number of other concepts, or who simply needed a picture of a house for their brochure. Many photographers made their living with this kind of work full-time, spending tens of thousands of dollars to arrange a photo-shoot on the bet that some buyer in the future would need a photograph of a particular concept or object. Since images were often expected to sell only a handful of times in their usable life—and since the uses often involved extremely high budgets, like ads costing six figures merely for the privilege of running in a single magazine—the price of the stock photographs was correspondingly high. But amateurs armed with digital cameras were used to spending money on their photography hobby and never getting any return at all. When the Internet came along, they were perfectly willing to sell their images for a dollar apiece on ‘microstock’ sites—stock agencies that would charge a dollar or two for the use of an image instead of a few hundred or thousand, and compensate the photographer only a few cents. The thrill of having anyone at all buy their images was enough for the amateurs, and they submitted their work in great numbers to be sold for cheap. The photographs on microstock sites were not as highly polished as the work of a professional stock shooter, of course. Few amateurs knew how to put together a large photo-shoot, and so the images on these websites tended to the simplistic and conventional. But the customers who flocked to these websites had no need for out-of-this-world photography. “[according to a microstock site operator,] we’re targeting a more consumer orientated market—non-profit, religious groups, school teachers—people who would not be paying hundreds of dollars for images” (Hardy). The people who had made do for years with free clip-art or just plain text now could afford to illustrate their work.
When the average small business owner or schoolteacher could license or maybe even take quality images, something interesting happened. The associations and assumptions that consumers had with and about photography started to change.

The ubiquity and affordability of digital photography means many consumers are taking photography less seriously – it is a fun activity. […] Users increasingly opt to retouch their own images, and as a result, are less inclined to trust the images shown to them in the media. (Cheesman)

Now anyone could make a brochure that had a pretty picture of a banana, for example— just like the glossy brochures distributed by the blue-chip corporation next door. Indeed, the fourteen-year-old kid down the street could take that image of a banana and manipulate it on the computer so it was shown as part of a complete breakfast. What did that say about the fancy magazine ad with the banana on the moon? Those photographs started to lose their effect. Once consumers could produce similar effects with the use of their own cameras and computers, simply presenting a breathtaking or apparently impossible photograph stopped being a way to demonstrate to the customer that the advertiser fell into the category of successful companies with whom the consumer wanted to deal. Advertisers had to find ways to make ads that would hold the attention of the consumer in this new environment, and digital imaging—the same force that was pushing the industry away from standard photography—would prove to be the means to achieve that goal.
The computer image manipulation tools that amateurs used to enhance their photographs were the byproduct of a revolution in professional-grade photo retouching that started in the high-end professional world and trickled down to the home computer, along the way enabling professionals to create work that would have been inconceivable before digital manipulation was invented. At the dawn of computer technology, companies brought to market specialized image retouching workstations that could duplicate the effects of an airbrush and retoucher’s pen, but do so more quickly and with greater control. Accessible only to the dedicated retouching studio who could afford the $100,000 and up price tag, these workstations were quickly applied by creative photographers to the creation of an entirely new kind of photographic art.

Availing himself of the latest in digital imaging systems [in 1988], Turner […] is able to achieve “generation of transparent image effects, positioning by separations, cropping, retinting, transparent retouching, generation of color vignettes and lines, image reversal, [and] softening of contours.” […] Turner’s photographs, made for Bell Atlantic, may appear to be futuristic landscapes or science fiction fantasies, but they are created from today’s science fact. They just might be a glimpse of what lies in store for us in terms of photography, showing us, as Bert Stern said, ”something in a way not seen before” and suggesting limitless possibilities to the challenge of creating the perfect advertising photograph. (The Art of Persuasion 169)

Always searching for something that would appear new and novel to consumers, advertising photographers found that they could achieve effects through digital manipulation that would have been previously impossible due to the physical limitations of the darkroom.
As the tools to do professional-grade computer retouching became more sophisticated, photographers discovered more and more ways to apply the remarkable new tools to realize creative visions that would otherwise have been impossible to stage. Automotive photographers, long fond of images showing cars in exotic locations, had long struggled with the challenge of bringing a car to the remotest of places while keeping the paint in perfect condition—until digital came along.

A new trend is evolving: Car photography without cars. It´s true. On more and more photo production sets for car advertising, the car is missing. The magic word is RBV. Reality Based Visualisation. […] Now all the photographer has to do is take the picture. Without the car. (Car Photography 2.0)

Using 3D rendering technology, an automotive photographer could drop a computer-generated image of a new car into a scenic photograph of an exotic road, beach, or mountaintop. The location might be so remote or precarious that no real car could be brought there, or it might have been photographed weeks or years before the ad was conceived. The art director need no longer spend long hours debating which paint color would go best with the scenery: the paint color could be adjusted after the fact to the client’s taste. Indeed, the car itself might be a design that never rolled off a production line and instead lives only in the computer aided design files of the engineering department. As a result of computer technology, all advertising photography suddenly had a vast gulf of possibility open up.

“’The ease of computers and photographers’ knowledge of them allow things to be done that would never have been possible before. It’s no surprise that in the D&AD Annual, the section for photography is called ‘Photography and Image Manipulation’. […] Belford is of the same mind: ‘The Apple Mac has opened up many interesting post-production techniques to art directors. So much so, that we will probably see an increased blurring of the boundaries between photography and illustration over the next few years. What’s great about computer software is the almost limitless possibilities it gives us to do work that is distinctive.’” (Considine)

As a result of digital image manipulation techniques, the visual vocabulary available to the photographer or creative director went from limited by the realities that could be achieved on-set or with an airbrush to being completely without limit on their creativity. Objects of extreme proportions, otherworldly sets that could be constructed only in the imagination, people of a beauty impossible to humanly achieve: anything that could be imagined could be created on the computer and applied to the illustration of a concept.
At the same time as digital manipulation was opening new possibilities in photography, the advent of the Internet was turning on its head the conventional model of how people consumed media and creating a whole new world of opportunity for advertising imagery. As they were subjected to a barrage of information from millions of micro-outlets across the Web, consumers quickly learned to adapt to the new rate of information flow and filter out all the extraneous or overly time-consuming stimuli. The conventional ads that worked so well in newspapers and magazines and TV back when consumers had the time and inclination to pay attention were no longer effective when translated directly to the Web. The minutes it takes to read through a few paragraphs of advertising copy or the 30 seconds it takes to watch a television commercial were no longer available to advertisers. “Message of all kinds must be quick. Requiring consumers to log through a lot of copy, sit through a long setup, or wait, really, for anything at all, is a tremendous task. [The Internet generation] are consumers weaned on fast information, and advertising must comply or find itself bypassed.” (Fredericks) When email was delivered instantaneously, news headlines updated every thirty seconds, a hundred sources of entertainment merely five seconds away by mouse-click, and the latest hassles from work delivered around-the-clock, taking the time to read an ad just wasn’t worth it. In a world where consumers wanted everything yesterday, advertisers had to find a way to convey their message in the time that it took the viewer to glance at the ad, even before that viewer had a chance to decide whether or not it was worthwhile to read the ad’s text.
The solution to the problem of consumers that ignored the old style of advertising was ads with ‘story appeal,’ or an intriguing concept illustrated by an often-clever photograph or illustration that had been around for decades.

“The subject of your illustration is all important. If you don’t have a remarkable idea for it, not even a great photographer can save you. The kind of photographs that work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiosity. He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on here?’ Then he reads your copy to find out. Harold Rudolph called this magic element ‘Story Appeal’, and demonstrated that the more of it you inject into your photographs, the more people look at your advertisements.” (Ogilvy on Advertising)

Even before computers started affecting the view of consumers towards conventional media advertising—Ogilvy was writing in 1985—ad designers knew that an interesting picture had an easier time of drawing readers to the ad than a merely pretty one. Highly conceptual images appeared to the mind in the same way that a new destination appeared to the traveler: ripe with possibilities for exploration, a welcome escape from the predictable world to which they were accustomed. The novelty of a conceptual image encouraged the viewer to dig deeper and explore something he or she had not seen before. However, by their very nature they involved situations that were difficult to stage—indeed, often difficult to conceive—and so they were not necessarily the first choice of the budget-constrained advertiser. Then digital technology came along, and the advertising industry had to adapt or fail.

The buying public is still out there. What’s gone is their willingness to pay attention to drivel. Ads are failing today that would have once produced good results just a few years ago. Other ads are working far better than expected. […] I’m talking about [ads that make] a statement that’s fundamentally more interesting than what had been in your customer’s mind. (Williams, Pushing Past Media Overload)

In the new media environment, where computers brought the impossible photograph within the reach and the high-speed information environment caused eyeballs to glide over the old style of image, the photograph with story appeal became the natural choice. It rewarded the viewer with a humorous situation or an unusual concept. It communicated in a few short seconds what an advertiser would have taken minutes to say. It was simply more engaging than the rest of the shiny objects calling for the consumer’s attention, and so it took off.

‘Copy seems to be making a comeback,’ Justin Tindall, a creative partner at DDB, says. ‘But the big news is, it’s not coming back as words, it’s coming back as pictures.’ And what beautifully written pictures they are; column after column of engaging narrative imagery, made up of persuasive, visual sentences. The press ad is back – using the power of narrative photography to engage the consumer for more than just a few fleeting seconds and, in so doing, reclaiming its unique power. (Considine)

Advertising designers and photographers discovered that they could communicate with the consumer at the speed of modern information by writing the advertiser’s message right into the very fabric of the picture. The intriguing and usually amusing conceptual pictures cooked up by the art directors and designers of the new generation grabbed the viewer with an oft-outlandish situation that made them viewer laugh and encouraged them to look closer, thereby giving them a reason to spend a few seconds longer reading the always-short copy to find out what purpose inspired the creation of the image.
The change that the trend towards images with story appeal brought to the outputs of the visual advertising industry and amateurs alike was dramatic. While there are still plenty of conventional pretty pictures to be seen everywhere, one need only compare a recent advertising annual to one from the mid-90s or earlier to see the dramatic rise in creative photography with a great deal of story appeal. Even ‘straight’ photography saw a great demand for work demands a few more seconds of detailed inspection. At the same time, amateurs pushed their own photography forward by leaps and bounds, devising ways of replicating studio-style lighting with hobby-level equipment and making their first inroads into visual gags and storytelling by photography. In a twist that perhaps demonstrates a divergence from professional values, the humorous images that amateurs prize are crude but real shots taken with a point-and-shoot camera that are then annotated not by the photographer or an art director but by hundreds of other amateurs using basic tools to overlay headline text. The trend in phenomena like ‘LOLCATS’—photographs of cats, kittens, and other animals with intentionally-misspelled captions in large headline text—is on capturing funny moments that actually happened in front of the photographer, not amusing situations that the photographer dreamt up. Perhaps the professionals finally found in the photography of artificial concepts a place where the amateurs could not compete.

Brown, Andrew. “We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers.” The Guardian. May 3, 2007. December 5, 2007. < http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/may/03/media.newmedia>

Cheesman, Chris. “Kodak: Consumers view photography ‘less seriously’.” Amateur Photographer. October 23, 2007. December 4, 2007. < http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Kodak_Consumers_view_photography_less_seriously_Read_Kodaks_report_on_the_state_of_the_photography_market_news_151022.html>

Considine, Pippa. “Photography is the New Copy.” Campaign. July 28. 2006. Academic Universe. Lexis-Nexis. December 3, 2007. <web.lexis-nexis.com>

Fredericks, Steven J. StrADegy: Advertising in the Digital Age. TNS Media Intelligence: 2007.

Grecco, Michael. Comments at Photographic Resource Center/CIPNE lecture at Boston University’s School of Management on 11/26/2007, confirmed via email on 12/1/2007.

Hardy, Ian. “New threat to stock photo sales.” BBC News. November 23, 2007. British Broadcasting Corporation. December 1, 2007. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/click_online/7107866.stm>

Hickey, Eamon. “A look back at the NC2000.” Rob Galbraith DPI. January 13, 2005. Rob Galbraith. December 4, 2007. <http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6463-7191>

Memberg, Florian. “Car Photography 2.0.” MADVERTISING. August 1, 2007. Decemer 3, 2007. < http://madvertisingblog.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/car-photography-20/>

Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. Vintage, 1985.

Plummer, Joseph, et al. The Online Advertising Playbook. New Jersey: Wiley, 2007.

Sobieszek, Robert. The Art of Persuasion. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1988.

Williams, Roy. “Advertising Trends: Pushing Past Media Overload.” Entrepreneur.com. November 15, 2006. Entrepreneur.com, Inc. Decemer 4, 2007. <http://www.entrepreneur.com/advertising/adcolumnistroyhwilliams/article170166.html>

…after all that, I want to send some love over to the awesome Darrel Young and his brand-new watering hole for stock photographers, the Stock Imaging Forum for the discussion of stock photography.