I have been a follower of Austin photographer Kirk Tuck's blog for some time. He always has an interesting twist on things, and I was struck by this recent post about the decreasing need for oodles of pixels for a lot of commercial assignments. Undoubtedly, his observation that we are seeing a decline in the number of high quality printed publications is correct. It seems every week another publications throws in the towel and announces they are either closing or going web only.

So this article led me to wonder: Is the future market for high pixel count MF digital backs going to be more oriented toward the fine-art user who needs the pixel density to make large prints, while the commercial advertising world will satisfied with web suitable lower pixel count images? I think it is certainly an interesting question, and something that the marketing teams at Phase One and Hasselblad need to consider.

Well, there are always the outdoor billboards, posters,subway/airport LED screens etc. The demands for MFD in commercial photography maybe decrease, but I don't think they would vanish.
Dustblue

This trend is the photographic manifestation of a very sad trend in the world at the moment, which is the loss of choice and quality in almost all things. Think back ten years. We had the best cameras ever made, from a grand variety of manufacturers. Today, a handful of mega-corps produce mostly plastic crap. Leica, the last true craft company, is in perilous shape. The same holds true in imaging itself. The ubiquity of imaging has, perversely caused a decline in quality, and accepted quality. Rather than becoming connoisseurs, we all allow our eyes to eat McCellphone photos and pretend we're satiated. This is one respect in which globalism and the smaller world has completely let us down.

There is also website photography where clients want to take details out of images. Having enough resolution ensures they can without shooting additionaly frames, etc... It drastically reduces the number of images you have to take (the time needed to get the images thus money).

On a broad scale I agree with Nick but am not sure how we can turn the tide, instead we probably have to wait and see where the flow will take us.

"On a broad scale I agree with Nick but am not sure how we can turn the tide, instead we probably have to wait and see where the flow will take us."

Unfortunately, I think commercial photography does not lead so much as service market trends that are determined by factors other than our desire to produce quality work. Shooting 10 images a day on 4x5 film for architecture clients was not going to survive as a business model when 98% of their needs were websites, proposals and digital slide shows. Their needs led our change to digital.



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Perhaps we can count on the fact that all forces and movements seem to inevitably give rise to counter-forces. At some point, high image quality and reproduction quality in certain forums will take on a cachet and a market will emerge for it as a counter-force to to mass, crap imaging. Sadly, this may be more as a niche or luxury market. Who knows?

This is one of the main drawback of the age of digital-everything. When reduced to 1s and 0s, instantly transmittable, duplicable, transformable, etc, creations (be they sound, word or image) lose their specialness as 'things' and become mere information. This cheapens them in our imagination ('why?' is an interesting question for another day). None of use would break into a stranger's house and steal his record collection, but we think nothing of downloading and copying songs. This is because information does not conform to our notion of a tangible thing of value.

By consequence it is also disposable. Think of how special a photograph was an an object fifty or a hundred years ago. Now consider how many times you have displayed and then erased photos on your computer in the last ten minutes? Tearing up or throwing out a photo is a significant physical act. Forming, deleting and re-forming and then re-deleting photos from our screens and/or HDs feels like nothing. The iteration of the image is separated from the 'thingness' of the photograph. It thus loses uniqueness, scarcity and value. In, this, I suspect, leads us to ascribe less value to images and their quality.

The 'digitalization' has implications we never seem to consider, many of them great, but a lot of them not so great.

Sadly, I agree with most of these posts. Quality, or more specifically the willingness to pay for quality is taking a big hit in this economy. Maybe there will always be an ebb and flow of things but the internet and it's pixel limitations make it very difficult for a company to convinced that image by MFB X will be more valuable to them than image B from FF 35mm camera b. But, I for one don't care. The substance of what I do is more important than the low bar someone else may want me to do.

Hi-res now starts at 50 or 60 Mpx, and I thought that "publications" never needed that res... but it is nice to have the option to crop.

I think this has already happened... but there are markets like A1 posters for hairdressers where hi-res makes a difference.

What about wedding photography - how long will they be happy to pay thousands for DSLR pictures that are not worth printing A2 and framing?

I've shot those posters, the big ones, for cosmetics. I used, variously, an Aptus 22 or a a 1ds2. You don't need high pixel count for big prints, you need sharpness. I shot this kind of work with "crappy" Mamiya AFd lenses, before the "D" series were released. If its sharp and lit well, even a Leica M8 file enlarges nicely.

As to commercial photography, well, I love photography so much that I quit shooting commercially, for the most part. I mainly shoot commercials and music videos now. I just wasn't comfortable with where things were/are going.

I have talked with many of my friends that are doctors, lawyers, architects, business owners and their wives. They do not see the difference between a 50 mpxl image and a 10 mpxl image unless it is blown up huge - 20 x 30+. Just don't see it. To them it is all about content and I understand that. But I do see a difference so for me it is about both content and quality.

For the most part, good pictures do not live or die by their resolution. Impact is impact, and if you've got a great shot, the message will get through. If you've got a mediocre one, rendering it in excruciating detail will not lift it out of its mediocrity.
Sure, you need a certain level of capability to keep certain repro options on the table for a client, but you rapidly approach a point of diminishing returns for the amount of money being spent on higher resolution systems and their associated operating logistics.
There are very few needs out there that will tax the limits of the current crop of MF backs.

Well the fact that there's so much crap out there also makes it possible for people to become more discerning and savvy visually?
Perhaps in view of the overwhelming amount of crap out there, a backlash will occur where people will pay more for and use only 1 extremely good image to represent their brand image, whereas they will hire less trained hands for less important photographs.

wishful thinking but just maybe?

There are some more things happening here.
Besides the shere amount of data, there is also the quality- the amount of information included in the file.
There are also a lot of new developments like pixel binning for High Iso photography, addition of color to noise improvements,
need of larger chips for extension of image quality because of physical limitations of 35mm lenses.

An economical point of view is who is really needing these improvements and which media (Print, Web, Presentation, Science or Industry)
will use it despite the higher costs.

I believe there is a well defined market for these Highend tools, even with growth in a medium and long term perspective. But the average
"Photographer" doing the so called "normal" ads, people, sports and wedding stuff will probably opt out of MF and scale down to whatever needed smaller systems.

And then you all still did not use the main evil word for the next 10 years to kill a lot of "Photography" jobs : CGI (computer generated imaging)

Nonetheless - I see a quite safe and important role for MF in the future. Not for so many as in the past, but those who survive the next 2 years
will stay for a long time.

Greetings from Munich
Stefan

Very well said. Mass consumption has brainwashed people to demand more and more quantity. ( Storage units are a relatively recent invention ). In order to have more quantity, quality must be constantly reduced. This has pervaded virtually all of North American society, and has spilled over into the arts, etc, resulting in a precipitous decline in literacy, both cultural and traditional. It is quite difficult now to buy quality, whereas quality was the norm in the recent past.

Hopefully there will be a backlash to all this mediocrity and the pendulum will swing back. I believe there will always be a market for quality, although a smaller market at at least for the near future.

Yeah, those pre-industrial times with all that disease and pervasive mass poverty must have been truly awesome! The modern world really sucks.

LOL, excellent...

Yeah those super high quality medium format prints with those super precise manual cameras... The past always looks rosy when looking through modern tinted sunglasses.

In a way we live in the future where cameras can produce processed images in microseconds, everyone is safe and secure knowing that the planned image is captured and everyone goes home happy about the day.

In other ways, we've fallen into more group think, because everyone can see every frame in micro detail and as a photographer it takes a strong personality to keep the vision intact.

When I started you worked with one AD, maybe the CD and formed this creative bond working in a singular direction, usually without a lot of client interference. Now every step is previewed and ok'd by everyone, sometimes all the way up to the CEO so staying with a clear clean singular vision is difficult.

The last year has seen a drastic cut in advertising production, both in available projects and pricing, though out the door pricing is hard to pin down because regardless of the deals you see floating around our industry, it's still an expensive world.

Cameras, computers, lights, rentals, hotels, airfare, per diems and catering haven't dropped that much, in fact airfare has increased, the newest professional cameras and lighting have increased and the advent of adding motion has increased the size of crews so costs and scope of production has gone up, not down.

We hear it all the time that quality has suffered but a lot of that is just romantic notions of the past. Commercial production is much more professional than ever, though if anything has changed it's the fact that a lot of the unexpected surprises have disappeared with digital, because everybody sees every frame just a few seconds from capture.

It funny we all complain that medium format cameras have less than detailed lcd's but sometimes it's a blessing because if you unplug from those two magliners and 30" screens you can show a client an image but it's just rough enough to be more like polaroid, less like real world micro check detail.

Maybe instead of asking for 4", 5", 6" lcd's it's better just to say this is it, don't worry, trust me.

We also complain that the medium format backs don't go to high iso, low light smooth, grain free images where we can see every stich, every eyelash, but with film we never had that and nobody lost their minds. If you shot film on a night time Paris street it was grainy, soft and actually beautiful and maybe that's what we keep missing that high iso imagery should be grainy, soft and beautiful.

Sometimes I think we have what we need and if I was a speciality camera maker, I'd sell the virtues of the "film" look of my cameras vs. the smooth, clean ultra micro, 3d detailed look that seems to dominate every "sales" conversation.

But as far as saying there is less quality, less experimentation, less beautiful imagery, that's far from the truth. There is more beautiful imagery today than anytime in the past.

A lot more.

BC

P.S. Just to add a lot of people, have preached the death of still photography, or even the need for beautiful imagery, but that is just a reflection of a very down and confused economy.

Things will return, products and services will be sold and nothing on a world wide scale sells like inspiring imagery.

Print or Web, Broadcast or PDA, crappy cheap imagery makes for a crappy cheap presentation and that has never sold anything worthwhile.

When I wrote the blog I was addressing what I see as the great middle ground of professional photography, the second tier markets, the event photographers, the PR photographers, people supplying images to corporations for websites and internal publication. Like it or not this represents the large percentage of non retail (by retail I mean wedding and portrait photographers) photographers. I think there will always be a place for the high end /advertising photographer and didn't mean to imply that everyone would succumb to the rigors of the general market. Just thought I'd throw that in.

If you are in this for the money, there are great opportunities now with all the masses of businesses who need pictures for the web. It's usually bulk and low paid and the best of it tends to go to large studios specialising in conveyor belt photography.

There is still a need for quality, even for the web, which will pay more money, but will extract every drop of your blood in turn.

The ideal is to be able to churn out decent bread and butter stuff which will subsidise the nicer projects from which you don't make so much money (relative to the time invested) but which are nevertheless good for the soul.

Being a realist, I'm in this for the money (because I have to eat), but I occasionally get the odd creative shoot which reminds me of why I chose to be a photographer.


Edward

This really isn't any different than any other profession out there. The reason you get into is not always what you get out of it. Good and bad in everything I guess.

You might think the quality has gone down until you pick up a magazine from 10 or 15 years ago. Have you done that recently? Quality looks like it's gone up to me. (much of the older stuff looks grainy, flat, and not so good, IMO.) Almost everything printed today looks at least as good in terms of color, smoothness, sharpness, etc. I'm serious, go dig through your bookshelf and report back.

And as to the statement that you 'need' 50mp or 60mp or else you are compromising in quality is just plain silly to me. How many publications have ever used the equivalent of 4x5 film (as in a 50mp digital back) for their layouts?

Just saying, if people could get the technology worries out of their heads and just look at the images...

(just my 2 cents, of course.)

I think that comments regarding quality address crappy content. There is a glut of technically good imagery out there that is emotionally flat, and a glut of clients that want safe and boring.

As per pixel quantity, I shot 4x5 exclusively for almost 30 years. Nearing the digital transition I realized that 4x5 was overkill as most architect and magazine clients rarely need anything over an 8x10 so I switched to shooting 120 roll film in my view camera and scanning it in house. To emphasize the point of my late format realization, primarily shooting a 5DII now........more than one of my top tier national clients have asked why I supply files so large.........

But I would hardly, but very, very hardly call "posters for hairdresser", high end photography.

When I started reading this thread and saw some of the "rants", I was thinking where is this people living, what are they looking at, who are they working for, to be so "imaging depressed".

I totally agree with you, they should just flip through the pages of magazines and books from 10 years ago and see how the "old film days" were better.
Imagery on the last few years got just much better. there are so many good photographers compare to the past, that is not even funny anymore.
And yes! Good digital images are way way better in texture, feel and colors than the older "film" images.
The old film days.... or the Polaroid days..... Once they all were using Polaroid, they were all complaining about it: it was blurry that you could not check detail even with a loupe, the colors were not right, it did never developed properly on cold temperatures, it stank, it leaked and was yucky.... Now that Polaroid it is not there anymore many of those are crying.
The only ones that should be crying at the extinction of Polaroid, are the guys working with large format polaroid. I can feel for them....: a little of blur and tilt shift here and there, and most mediocre pictures could look as "master pieces" and "artistic".....

I just do not agree about the grainy images of the past being bad. grain on the right image, IMO is good and it has its charm. yet it can be reproduced on digital images and can still look very good and charming.

I think this has already happened... but there are markets like A1 posters for hairdressers where hi-res makes a difference.


High-end photography IMHO normally requires movements... I said that, for "posters for hairdressers", High-res makes a difference. High-res is not necessarily High-end ...would you like to give some examples of what you think is high-end photography?

I think he's talking about beauty shots that are printed large for instore display, from Dior, L'Oreal, Aveda. I've shot these as part of larger campaigns, they ask for it in the usage.

This is truly one of the oddest comments about photography. Seems myopic, outdated or uninformed. Yes, certainly camera movements aid in some high-end photos (whatever your definition is of that) and will exist for the foreseeable future, but not a requirement by any means of high-end shooting. After reading your posts for weeks now, I think you have the idea of high-end photography confused with the requirement of the most expensive cameras/high pixel count, just like there are plenty of great cars, but not all have to be or are Bentleys.

"High-end photography IMHO normally requires movements..."

Nonsense.

High-end photography IMHO normally requires movements


There was a time when high-end professional commercial photographers used professional 10 * 8 cameras with movements - the depth of field of these cameras was such that movements were needed for a high proportion of pictures.

Many picture buyers today are not aware of what is possible with camera movements ... and professional photographers without cameras with movements are happy not to tell them.

Everywhere I see 3rd rate DSLR pictures that would have looked better taken with a view camera.

I think that high-end picture buyers should be able to expect high-end professional photographers to have versatile kit available if required.

Perhaps I am biased (or "traditional") ...there are tens of thousands of professional photographers with DSLRs, and so I chose to specialise in the type of work that you cannot do with DSLRs. If the commercial world is not prepared to pay me real money for my type of quality, I will stick to landscapes etc.

Its never been a great camera system that makes a great commercial photographer. What makes one a great commercial guy IMO is hard work, consistency, strong relations, excellent communication skills, top shelf lighting ability, and above all uber strong composition skills. As for camera? Any old hunk that has enough juice to get that done and out the door without client complaint is plenty good enough period. In fact this ( again IMO ) is nothing new and in my early film days when i worked for a studio we used lots of less than perfect gear, bent and damaged lenses, jiggy bodies, lights that had color temp issues etc etc etc. Then digital came along and we entered a geek boy stage of "I have digital therefore I get big job" and all of a sudden pixel peepers "thought" they were the end all and be all of all answers that ever pertained to photography. Thats when the real upheaval in this business happened the game of digital decimated the photography business as it had been for close to a hundred years. Now? Heck I couldnt agree more with Cooter this is just down times and the market is adjusting. As long as they are eyeballs there will be a need for commercial still photos. Now whether or not that pays worth a damn, or whether or not motion work all but obliterates the demand for stills, or whatever trends become the new norm only time will tell but anyone with brains, talent and financial skill will survive one way or another. It'll be a long time coming before still photographers go the way of typesetters and completely disappear.

To touch on a few comments made above I too agree that overall image quality has risen substantially in the past few years. With anyone and everyone into taking pictures for their favorite social networking sites and whatnot the game of photography has probably been practiced more by more people in the past few years than all the previous years combined if you were to only count actual shots taken as opposed to rating the overall quality etc. The old saying goes practice makes perfect and with so many practitioners out there happily clicking away at work many of us would scoff at, its still practice. This enables them and our customers a better eye to gauge whats actually a really good image or not so demand for quality rose and you either stepped up, or stepped out.

Heck I look back now at work i sold ten years ago and thought was stellar and I'd be damn embarrassed if any of my customers today saw it and knew I did it.

So it is. The demands grow and so must we in one form or another.

right on ...

Movement of the belly or the shoulders?

I guess some of you guys were buying the wrong magazines ten or twenty years ago. I have a collection of great oldies that I am slowly rereading for the last time prior to turning the space to current purposes; my opinion from this experience is that the old school of photographers, the good ones even from the 50s, have nothing to be ashamed about. Where things are different, if you want to chat about fashion magazines, is that now all the models are made of plastic. There is no skin anywhere, no character and certainly no charm.

How fortunate for Jean Shrimpton that she had the grace of a Bardot and got out in time; both now live in memory as being the perfect women, not the perfect shop dummies.

Maybe too many influential people have a pet inflatable girlfriend...

Rob C

Bellies do not need to be moving to require camera movements... I hear that pre-dig all the reclining ladies in PLayboy were shot with 5*4 view cameras, so that they did not have to arrange the ladies so that all parts were in a plane parallel to the film.

I thought they were shot on 8x10"?

I think the centrefolds were on 8x10 but the rest as luck would have them. I think luck had them a lot on 'slow' Kodachrome.

Rob C