Today I have a post supplied by Bob. Looking outside at a cool, gray and blustery day Bob recalled a brief article he had written on Photo Fatigue. He passed it on to me and with his permission I'm sharing it with you:

ARE YOU IN A SLUMP?

When reaching for the camera seems like too much bother and capturing great shots no longer interests you, you know that "photo fatigue" has set in. Maybe it is related to the weather or season. But whatever the cause, here are five tips to help you snap out of the slump and get back to enjoying photography again.

#1 REVIEW YOUR WORK
You've probably accumulated quite a collection of photos. If you're not up-to-date on filing your photos and getting your collection organized, now is a good time to do it. While you're at it, review your photos with a critical eye. See what you like and dislike about them and what you would do differently if you could. Don't be modest - give yourself some praise for some of your great photos. Print, mat and frame some of your favorites.

#2 SELF-ASSIGNMENT
This will take some willpower, but assign some photo projects to yourself. There is no limit to what the assignments might be. Perhaps take one (and only one) picture a day for a month. Or shoot a series using just one lens, ideally one you seldom use. How about shooting some black & white-only if you ordinarily use strictly color? Assignments might be subject-specific, such as pictures of water in all its forms, a particular color, close-ups, abstracts or available light shots at night.

#3 VIEW THE WORKS OF OTHERS
Spend some time in an art museum, library or book store viewing the works of artists and photographers whose works interest you. Study how they handle lighting, composition, subjects, expression and other creative elements. You may want to acquire some books on favorite artists to give you ideas and stimulate your creativity in the future.

#4 TRAVEL
There is nothing like visiting a new location to give you a fresh selection of photo subjects. Whether it is a city or park just an hour away from home or a destination on the other side of the world, new sites and experiences are a great way to break out of the doldrums.

#5 TRY OTHER CREATIVE ARTS AND CRAFTS
Exercise your creativity in other ways by writing, sketching, painting, sculpting or working in a craft that you enjoy. Exercising your creativity in a new or different medium will help you the next time you pick up your camera.

It’s kind of funny, when the world went digital the language of photography changed too. We started talking about megapixels, image files, memory cards, LCD screens and more. But do you know what we stopped talking about? Pictures!

Taking pictures is the whole reason to own a camera, sharing pictures is the reason to take pictures in the first place.

Digital photography has given us many new ways to share images. We can look at them on the LCD screen on the back of our cameras. We can send an email with images to friends far and wide. We can use digital frames to show our images off in our living rooms. Or we can use something like Promaster’s Media Tube to turn our HDTV’s into huge digital frames.

Do you know what all of these methods have in common? LCD screens, computer monitors, digital frames and even huge HDTV’s have less than 1.75 megapixels of resolution. Doesn’t your camera have 7 megapixels or more resolution?

The lowly 4X6 print has more resolution than any electronic screen. A 4X6 print from a digital lab can last up to 120 years. 4X6 prints are fast, easy and inexpensive to produce.

With digital cameras we tend to take hundreds more pictures than we ever did with film cameras. There is no way to affordably print every image we capture. But we should get in the habit of printing our good or important images. It’s much easier to see and enjoy all of the details of our lives in a print!

In our business we like selling cameras because they are a lot of fun to use and talk about. Cameras, lenses, flashes, memory cards – all are simply the tools we use as photographers to achieve our goal of capturing a moment, a memory or a vision.

It’s all about the pictures.

Our goal as photographers should be to develop the habit of printing digital images. Making electronic files into pictures that can be shared. Pictures are something you can hold in your hand; they are both more personal and more portable.

Which of these options is more appealing?


Or maybe


Or...


Not every image we capture deserves to be printed. However some of our images require it.

For the last several days I’ve been reading “The Cult of the Amateur” by Andrew Keen. Mr. Keen is a one-time Silicon Valley insider having founded Audiocafe.com, a defunct online music source. He now stands as a critic of everything Web 2.0. His basic premise as taken from the book’s cover: “How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture and our values…”

There are many opinions put forth throughout the book, the two most prominent opinions tend to run from cover to cover.

First, Keen is a fan of T. H. Huxley who was the author of the “infinite monkey theorem”. We’ve all heard this theorem or a derivative of it: if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece.

Keen uses this example often to describe the works that are appearing on YouTube, Wikipedia and other user generated content sites. His point is that while we now have our infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters (read: infinite contributors to infinite YouTube posts), real talent is far from infinite and must be cultivated and talent is actually in very short supply.

The second point of Keen’s is that the brave new world of self published blogs and wikis has created a new concept: multiple truths. With every person now capable of posting their own thoughts and opinions in a world forum, reliable and credible reporting of events has become a thing of the past.

An example of multiple truths can be found in the Wikipedia entries of July 5th, 2006. The day Ken Lay of Enron fame died. Within 45 minutes of the first report of his death the Wikipedia entry on Ken Lay was changed over 2 dozen times as amateur contributors fought back and forth over the question of whether the death was from suicide, murder or heart attack.

None of the Wikipedia contributors were actually on the ground at the scene, none knew anything other than what they had heard from another blogger – CNN hadn’t even reported the facts yet. Today the Wikipedia entry states coronary heart disease caused a heart attack. But imagine you are researching a term paper or looking up something for your own betterment and you “caught” the Ken Lay page while it claimed the death was suicide. How would you know the truth? Afterward, when it all settled out would you still trust Wikipedia?

Keen weaves examples, argument and opinion into a book worth reading. The reader gets the sense Keen revels in his new status as the “Antichrist of Silicon Valley”; it’s even printed on his business card. However between the hyperbole and a little bit of grandstanding there is a large amount of material that does bear discussion and thought.

I have both a Wiki and a Blog so I guess I’m one of the infinite monkeys in Keens assessment. But I think the cultural and economic values that we hold true are being challenged by this new interactive world of amateurs. I am inclined to think there is a lowering of expectations in everything from truth to talent.

The judgment on whether this challenge of the amateurs is good or bad may take years before it can be sorted out. Read “The Cult of the Amateur” for yourself and see which side you are likely to come down on.

Once upon a time the photo industry threw a party and everybody had to come. The party had a theme – “One Hour Develop and Print”. It was a great party, it lasted from 1981 until about 2002 (some of the partiers who always hang around until the host flashes the lights swear the party lasted until August 20th 2003*).

Everybody had to be there because there really was no choice. Turning captured memories into something that could be seen, touched and remembered wasn’t a DIY option for 99% of the camera users. The time and chemistry were beyond them; besides, why do on your own what somebody else can do faster and cheaper?

The photo industry both anticipated and dreaded the advent of digital cameras as a mainstream consumer product. They anticipated the enormous sales potential of customers wanting to switch from old outdated film cameras to new digital cameras. The dread hit them every time they walked past their film labs and took a moment to stare at the quarter of a million dollar investment of their own money that digital was about to make obsolete.

Or so they thought.

Looking back over the last 6 to 8 years of consumer digital imaging I can assure you that the days of “Name and phone number, please. Matte or Glossy, one or two of each?” are long gone. Our own store still processes a significant amount of film, but the cameras that shoot film are falling like flies. We can go three or four days and only take in one or two rolls each day. Then we get walloped with 50 or 60 rolls just in the first three hours of business of the fifth day.

Rolls of film were tangible, labor intensive to process and easily counted, weighed and measured. Digital prints on the other hand are stealth prints. Labor is reduced to a few button pushes to process the pictures (plus the constant and on going machine maintenance and color balancing). There is no trashcan full of spent film cartridges, no 20 minute delay in waiting for the negative to develop. There is only the relatively quiet sound of paper advancing through the printer and the cutter on the other end of the machine dicing up 4X6 prints.

On the whole, does a photo lab produce as many 4X6 prints today as it did in 2001? Unless they are the last game left in town, probably not. But a few things happened in the business as digital took root.

To begin with, a few photo labs went out of business and that left the survivors a larger share of a shrinking pie. This isn’t something to really get happy about if you are a survivor. This type of strategy means you’re playing musical chairs with everyone else in your market until there is only one chair left and hopefully you are the one sitting in it. And even then it’s just you in a shrinking market.

Another “happening” has been the backlash from the initial DIY attitude of printing images at home on an inkjet. After a while, most home printers found out what a drag it is to sit at their computer for an hour or two in order to print 100 pictures. Then they figured out it was 30% more expensive to print at home. The pendulum swung from DIY to DIFM – Do It For Me. Photo stores don’t have a lock on the process anymore, but they do have this marvelous economy of scale that produces good prints at cheap prices with little to no time investment from the consumer.

Lastly, one of the larger influences just taking hold of the industry can be characterized as consumer empowerment. Today making a 4X6 print from a digital file is swell, but it isn’t the limit of the file’s potential. In today’s market we have photo books, greeting cards, t-shirts and mugs. There are place mats, bibs, drinking glasses, thermos mugs, bowls and plates if you are house wares minded. How about a life sized acrylic mounted cutout of your next family picture? It can be done!

Owning a photo business isn’t easy, and it’s a pretty darn competitive market too. However it also isn’t dying alongside film. The photo business is evolving and changing. The cameras and media had to change first and become widely adapted before the infrastructure of the photo stores could catch up. The stores that embrace this change and seek out ways to make customers successful in digital will be around for a long time to come.

This kind of brings me to the end of my current thoughts on the photo industry. From the two earlier posts on amateurs, weekend warriors and business plans up to photo stores and changing industry thinking, I believe that from my point of view the photo business is thriving.

*August 20th 2003 - the release date for the Canon Digital Rebel. Considered the first affordable digital SLR.

It's the first of October! Cool evenings and trees starting to lose their leaves. Download all of your cards to the computer, burn your CD or DVD back ups and then format your cards.

Always practice safe photography!

And while you're at it... print the good shots. It's easier to share a 4X6 or 8X10 print than it is to get everyone gathered around your computer in the spare bedroom. Photographic prints cost less, have higher resolution and last longer than inkjet prints. If you choose the inkjet route store them in a high quality album that limits exposure to light.

A picture says a thousand words, but a memory card is mute!