I'll be covering emerging and future technologies in later chapters, but the view from 50,000 feet looks bright. The "average" resolution of a mid-priced (say, $500) digital camera has been increasing dramatically. As I write this, just about anyone who is serious about photography can afford a 7- to 8-megapixel camera, and megapixel monsters from Nikon and Canon with (what seems to me) an astounding 12-to 16-megapixel scope can cost less than a week at Disney World for a family of four.
Storage will get cheaper and more capacious, too. The last 1GB memory card I bought cost about $50, and I've seen 6GB minidrive hard disks for digital cameras available for less than $200. These prices and capacities should seem laughable by the time the next edition of this book is published. (This comes from someone who paid $300 to upgrade to 32,768 bytes of memory in 1978, and paid $1,000 for a 200- megabyte hard drive roughly a decade later.)
Look for better zoom lenses, smaller cameras, more efficient viewing systems, faster transfer speeds, and dozens of features, including time-lapse photography, image stabilization that cancels hand and camera shake, and ever faster "sequence" photography bursts. These are all becoming available in more expensive digital cameras; before long you'll find features that you didn't even know you needed standard on digital cameras costing $200-$300. Image stabilization has already become a common feature on sub-$300 cameras.
The most interesting thing about looking to the future is knowing that much of what is headed our way are things that we didn't imagine could exist, used in ways we couldn't have predicted. Crystal balls make predicting technology simple, but the consequences are more difficult to foresee. After all, futurists of the 19th century and earlier had no trouble predicting the advent of the horseless carriage. But not one of them foresaw smog, traffic jams, or road rage.
In one sense, the chief value of predicting the future lies in the amusement it might provide our ancestors. Edward Bellamy, in his 1888 book Looking Backward: 2000-1887, insisted that in the 20th century it would no longer be necessary to go to concert halls to enjoy music. Average citizens would be able to listen to musical selections of their choice from the comfort of their own homes. Of course, Bellamy wasn't predicting radio, phonograph records, or even audio CDs. Nor did he have a clue about how MP3s and peer-to-peer file sharing would affect music distribution. His idea was that we would use telephones (a relatively new invention in 1888) to call various symphony halls and listen to the live music in progress!
Predicting the future of digital photography is fraught with similar pitfalls. One part is easy. I can safely say that digital cameras in the very near future will have higher resolutions, greater sensitivity, and much lower cost than the cameras on the market today. In my first book on digital photography, written in 1995, I described "cameras with 3000 x 2000 pixel sensors that equal the resolution of ISO 100 film, yet contain enough fast static RAM to let you shoot 50 to 100 images at four to six frames per second." Today, I own a $1000 digital camera that shoots 3008 x 2000 pixel images, and, with a fast memory card, can grab 20-30 images at 3 frames per second with no problem. In ten years, the future I predicted has come true.
Other predictions are not so easy. Will digital cameras replace film in all applications? It's now looking as if that will happen. Will new applications for digital photography be developed once sophisticated equipment becomes affordable? Will it still make sense to distribute digital images in the same old ways? What are the key issues we'll be facing as digital photography takes over completely from conventional photography?
Making Your Images Your Own
Copyright—extended in 1978 to the artist's lifetime, plus 75 years—has through recent court rulings been made almost perpetual if the copyright holder chooses to exercise all the options. But what good is a copyright in an age when perfect copies of digital images can be made, and pretty good duplicates can be made of analog versions by anyone with access to a scanner or color copier?
Photographers who want to protect their work must now face this problem. Every image you create in every format can be illegally copied and reused without payment. The process might be simple or difficult, depending on the format and expertise of the person doing the copying. Transparencies can't be easily duplicated without using a photolab, a slide-compatible scanner, or some other technology. Prints, on the other hand, can be copied using any flatbed scanner, giving you a fairly good digital file, or taken to a photo kiosk at a department store and duplicated quickly and easily.
The most annoying possibility of all is that someone will gain access to your original digital image—essentially the same as a camera negative or transparency—and then be able to make exact duplicates at will.
Of course, the copyright law might let you collect from those who use images without permission after the fact, if you're lucky enough to discover the usage and can prove it's your image. Proof might not be as easy as you think. Pursuing copyright defense through the legal system is, in any case, very expensive, and the results are uncertain. Worse, the law is not clearly defined in many areas. Just because someone flagrantly uses your image does not automatically mean you have an enforceable claim.
For example, consider the image in Figure 1.10, a view of Toledo, Spain from a hilltop outside of town. The vantage point from this hill is perfect, and El Greco used it several times to create paintings that now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Museo del Greco in Toledo. This view is so popular, that I own no less than five books that use similar photographs on their covers. All the photographs are by different photographers, but are virtually identical except under very close examination. I discovered why this is so some years back when I drove up the hill myself and discovered a well-trod scenic overlook that must have been used by thousands of photographers, and perhaps the Greek painter himself, over the years.
Some types of images, particularly news photographs, scenics, and other pictures that don't contain unique subject matter, are difficult to prove as your own. However, even the most unusual image must be solidly established as belonging to you if you expect to recover damages. This is true if the image is reused in its entirety, and more difficult if parts of the image were "sampled." I won't get into the differences between new works and derivative works, or things like "fair use." There are plenty of law-and-the-photographer books available that address these issues.
Instead, I'll tell you some of the ways digital photographers can "mark" their works much as they use an ink stamp, embossing, or some other device on conventional photographs.
One way to protect work is to include information in file headers within the digital file itself. A little expertise and the right disk-editing tools can let a photographer insert a code or text signature in the file in a place where it won't affect image quality. Of course, anyone with the same expertise and tools can take it right out.
Another method involves overprinting the digital image with a faint watermark, which (supposedly) doesn't interfere with evaluating the image, but makes it impossible to duplicate or use the file without reproducing the watermark as well. Of course, you still have to supply the unaltered digital file for reproduction, so this form of protection is far from complete.
A third method is to use encryption, and works particularly well with images distributed on Photo CD, an older format that's been largely supplanted by the Picture CD, but which is still used by professional photographers. Every Photo CD using the original format contains several copies of the image at five to six different resolutions. The low-res versions can be left unencrypted so they can be viewed on-screen. Some distributors even give permission to reproduce these images, with proper credit, since they are suitable only for basic desktop publishing applications anyway. Then, when a buyer wants to gain rights to a high-resolution version of an image, a decryption code can be purchased by paying the necessary fee.
Encryption is a good solution, but distributing images on Photo CDs is inefficient in some cases. You might have to send along a hundred different Photo CDs containing the ones the client wants to look at, whereas it might make more sense to burn a special CD-ROM with only the 100 images that fit the requirements. Moreover, even if you encrypted a bunch of TIFF files, you'd have to create a special low-res version of each so the client could view the images on a screen.
A company named Digimarc Corporation has developed a scheme that might solve most of the problems inherent in other image identification methods. It involves embedding a random code pattern right in the digital file as a form of noise that is present at such a low level that it can't be detected with the eye. Yet, the code can be detected reliably even after the image has been subjected to the photomechanical reproduction process. That is, you can scan in a suspect image that has been printed in a book, magazine, newspaper, poster, or whatever, and find the embedded digital signature using the right software. The encoded information is holographic; the entire code can be read from any smaller portion of the reproduced image. Cropping your work drastically won't disguise the code one bit.
A lot of work remains to make this technology viable. It has been incorporated into a Photoshop plug-in to add the codes to any images you want. It could even be included in a chip in copy print stations or photocopiers that would alert the machine that a copyrighted image was present. The code can include information on how to obtain permission, so if you tried to copy a certain image, a dialog box would pop up saying, call 800-xxx-xxxx, obtain a code, then key it in to proceed.
For photographers to recover damages, the reliability would have to be established in a court, much as radar gun manufacturers routinely send experts to testify about the accuracy of their devices the first time they are used in a given jurisdiction.
There are advantages to this method. The code can be supplied to an image when it is finished, or actually applied by the digital camera when the picture is first made. It automatically will be reproduced along with the file, and can't be removed without destroying the image, unless you have the original creator's code. As with common encryption schemes today, both public and private codes can be incorporated—one code that allows verifying an image and can be freely distributed, and a second, private code known only to the photographer. That prevents others from falsely stamping other images with anyone else's code. Photographers who sell all rights to an image could remove their own code, and allow the new owner to embed one of his own.
The Digimarc system also bypasses having to encrypt the images themselves, so they can be freely distributed, viewed, and used. It doesn't stop unscrupulous people from stealing pictures, but does make it easier to prove their theft if you catch them. Since Digimarc works with any digital file, including video, audio, or text, its broad commercial applications are an incentive to work out the last few kinks in the system.
Is Film Dead?
Back in the 1970s, when newsfilm cameras began to be replaced in a few markets by electronic news gathering (ENG) equipment—portable videotape cameras and recorders—a trade paper rocked the industry by publishing an article with the headline, "Is Film Dead?" It was predicted that videotape would replace film in television news (which it eventually did, although film hung on quite a few years as the favored medium for local television documentaries), and, eventually, in the production of theatrical motion pictures. A decade later, pundits were saying the same things about film in all still photographic applications. Today, it's beginning to look like they were right.
But don't expect film to vanish totally overnight. Many motion pictures today are still shot on color negative film, and many still photographs are still produced using negatives or transparencies exposed in a camera. Certainly, digital photography has already taken over some fields, such as catalog photography, completely and utterly. But not all worlds have been conquered. There are artistic reasons for retaining film capabilities, too, as anyone who shoots a lot of black-and-white film will testify. The film "look" may someday have a cachet of its own in an age of digital imaging. If you want the lowest cost media, the broadest range of film speeds, spectrum sensitivity, and grain characteristics, film today provides options that you needn't expect from electronic gear anytime soon. In the future, though, it may become a high-priced option as processing becomes harder to find.
Pricing
If you sell your photographs (or hope to!), digital photography is likely to cause some changes to how pictures are sold. Should they be adjusted because no processing is required? Can a photographer who works with an assistant or stylist hire a computer nerd instead, and bill higher rates because the nerd gets paid more?
Or, how about the cost of supplying images? Instead of circulating dupe slides and sending camera originals or prints only when absolutely necessary, can you use DVDs with full resolution TIFF files? Will clients expect you to pass along the savings—if any—to them?
The problem is that photography has always been a difficult business to quantify. A shooting day you can bill for probably requires two days of preparation. That image shown earlier of Toledo, Spain might be worth quite a bit to someone who needs it taken at a certain day or time and doesn't want to fly to Spain to get it. But, if all you need is any old picture from that hillside, a stock house can provide it for a reasonable fee. My average-looking shot might be good enough, even when compared to one by, say, Ansel Adams, although Adams' will have a neat moon positioned in just the right spot and have a lot longer tonal scale.
Digital stock photography may revolutionize the industry in several ways, some good, some bad. Photographers will have many more outlets for distributing their photographs, and the availability to end-users will become much broader, but overall prices should come down significantly. I can remember when digital fonts used for desktop publishing cost $100 per typeface. Now you can buy a CD-ROM with 2,000 decent typefaces for $5.00, and even pro-quality fonts are selling for a tiny fraction of their original price. When buyers can purchase traditional stock fodder for a few dollars, your own seaside sunsets, Yellowstone Park scenics, cute kid and kitten photos, and other efforts must either be cheaper (not likely) or better than the alternatives. Unless you're a "name" photographer, or happen to grab a one-time shot of a news event, the days of collecting thousands of dollars for a single picture, year after year, might be over. Now that Adobe has included a stock photo library with Photoshop, prices for individual shots may drop even further.
Look for new ways to bill for photography to emerge as digital photography becomes more mature.
Ethics
Anytime I interview a news organization about digital photography, one of the first things they emphasize—even if I never bring up the topic myself—is how they have measures in place to ensure that images are never, ever altered in a misleading way. Even something as innocuous as moving the pyramids around for a National Geographic cover, or placing Martha Stewart's head on a model's body for Newsweek sends shivers of terror down the spines of most journalists and their critics alike.
For thousands of years, "seeing is believing" was more or less true. Viewers of an early motion picture that showed a train heading straight at the audience fled the theater in terror, because they couldn't comprehend that this fuzzy, black-and-white image wasn't the real thing. Today, we're confronted with realistic photos of the President shaking hands with space aliens, or Elvis attending the (most recent) wedding ceremony of his daughter. It's hard to know what to believe. Some images are obvious fakes, such as the one shown in Figure 1.11, but others are not. How do you know which photos are real?
As much fun as digital manipulation is, there are several areas in which it must be used with caution. The most obvious is in news photography. Picture editors have long worked with restrictions on what they could do and not do. Publishing a picture which shows a male politician hugging a lovely woman, but cropping out his smiling wife standing right behind him would be misleading, to say the least. News publications keep such situations in mind.
There are many ways to juxtapose images, crop, or otherwise present a photograph in a way that misrepresents the truth, even without digital manipulation, and newspapers are used to dealing with this. Even the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) concedes that color correction, dodging, burning, contrast enhancement, and other techniques that have long been used to improve an image without altering the meaning of its content are acceptable in the digital realm.
Strict rules govern images collected for evidence or forensic purposes in legal applications. Pictures must portray a scene accurately, to the extent that crime scene photographers often provide many different views and wide-angle perspectives to show the overall picture before zeroing in on a specific piece of evidence. An unbroken chain of possession must be established, proving that these are, indeed, the photos taken at that time and place, rather than some others that might have been substituted intentionally or by accident.
In this regard, digital photography has some advantages over conventional processes. Digital images don't have to change possession as many times, since a separate processing step isn't required. In addition, images stored in a vendor's proprietary, raw camera format have been accepted by courts as proof enough that they haven't been previously altered.
A third area in which photographers must be extremely careful is in advertising. Digital photography lends itself to the kind of manipulation that courts have frowned on as being misleading. You can do what you like to make a product look good, but it must still accurately represent the product to the consumer.
Many years ago, there was a case in which a soup vendor put marbles in the bottom of a bowl of soup, to make all the vegetables rise to the top and make a photograph of the soup appear richer than it really was. Today, we'd probably just clone extra food chunks using Photoshop. However, any such manipulation could be done only to the extent that it didn't misrepresent the product, as the soup manufacturer found out. You can brighten a sweater, add drops of dew to a bowl of fruit, drizzle some digital juice down the front of a sandwich, but the final image must be representative.
The vagaries of the reproduction process can be compensated for, but not overcompensated. One camera manufacturer was allowed to include photos in an advertisement that were actually sharper than those typically produced by the camera in question. (They were shot with a 120 SLR rather than the 35mm camera being touted.) It proved that by the time the ad was printed, the sharpness of the photos was still less than similarly sized prints from the advertised camera. Lighting and other aspects of the images were all similar to what the camera could produce, even though a larger format was used.
Like journalistic and legal photography, advertising illustration is a field in which the pitfalls are well known, and most photographers, art directors, picture editors, and others know what to look out for. There are several other areas, such as medical photography, industrial documentation, and so forth, in which deceptive manipulation is also a potential problem, but there is little incentive to falsify information in these arenas, so digital photography presents few problems at present.
Storage will get cheaper and more capacious, too. The last 1GB memory card I bought cost about $50, and I've seen 6GB minidrive hard disks for digital cameras available for less than $200. These prices and capacities should seem laughable by the time the next edition of this book is published. (This comes from someone who paid $300 to upgrade to 32,768 bytes of memory in 1978, and paid $1,000 for a 200- megabyte hard drive roughly a decade later.)
Look for better zoom lenses, smaller cameras, more efficient viewing systems, faster transfer speeds, and dozens of features, including time-lapse photography, image stabilization that cancels hand and camera shake, and ever faster "sequence" photography bursts. These are all becoming available in more expensive digital cameras; before long you'll find features that you didn't even know you needed standard on digital cameras costing $200-$300. Image stabilization has already become a common feature on sub-$300 cameras.
The most interesting thing about looking to the future is knowing that much of what is headed our way are things that we didn't imagine could exist, used in ways we couldn't have predicted. Crystal balls make predicting technology simple, but the consequences are more difficult to foresee. After all, futurists of the 19th century and earlier had no trouble predicting the advent of the horseless carriage. But not one of them foresaw smog, traffic jams, or road rage.
In one sense, the chief value of predicting the future lies in the amusement it might provide our ancestors. Edward Bellamy, in his 1888 book Looking Backward: 2000-1887, insisted that in the 20th century it would no longer be necessary to go to concert halls to enjoy music. Average citizens would be able to listen to musical selections of their choice from the comfort of their own homes. Of course, Bellamy wasn't predicting radio, phonograph records, or even audio CDs. Nor did he have a clue about how MP3s and peer-to-peer file sharing would affect music distribution. His idea was that we would use telephones (a relatively new invention in 1888) to call various symphony halls and listen to the live music in progress!
Predicting the future of digital photography is fraught with similar pitfalls. One part is easy. I can safely say that digital cameras in the very near future will have higher resolutions, greater sensitivity, and much lower cost than the cameras on the market today. In my first book on digital photography, written in 1995, I described "cameras with 3000 x 2000 pixel sensors that equal the resolution of ISO 100 film, yet contain enough fast static RAM to let you shoot 50 to 100 images at four to six frames per second." Today, I own a $1000 digital camera that shoots 3008 x 2000 pixel images, and, with a fast memory card, can grab 20-30 images at 3 frames per second with no problem. In ten years, the future I predicted has come true.
Other predictions are not so easy. Will digital cameras replace film in all applications? It's now looking as if that will happen. Will new applications for digital photography be developed once sophisticated equipment becomes affordable? Will it still make sense to distribute digital images in the same old ways? What are the key issues we'll be facing as digital photography takes over completely from conventional photography?
Making Your Images Your Own
Copyright—extended in 1978 to the artist's lifetime, plus 75 years—has through recent court rulings been made almost perpetual if the copyright holder chooses to exercise all the options. But what good is a copyright in an age when perfect copies of digital images can be made, and pretty good duplicates can be made of analog versions by anyone with access to a scanner or color copier?
Photographers who want to protect their work must now face this problem. Every image you create in every format can be illegally copied and reused without payment. The process might be simple or difficult, depending on the format and expertise of the person doing the copying. Transparencies can't be easily duplicated without using a photolab, a slide-compatible scanner, or some other technology. Prints, on the other hand, can be copied using any flatbed scanner, giving you a fairly good digital file, or taken to a photo kiosk at a department store and duplicated quickly and easily.
The most annoying possibility of all is that someone will gain access to your original digital image—essentially the same as a camera negative or transparency—and then be able to make exact duplicates at will.
Of course, the copyright law might let you collect from those who use images without permission after the fact, if you're lucky enough to discover the usage and can prove it's your image. Proof might not be as easy as you think. Pursuing copyright defense through the legal system is, in any case, very expensive, and the results are uncertain. Worse, the law is not clearly defined in many areas. Just because someone flagrantly uses your image does not automatically mean you have an enforceable claim.
For example, consider the image in Figure 1.10, a view of Toledo, Spain from a hilltop outside of town. The vantage point from this hill is perfect, and El Greco used it several times to create paintings that now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Museo del Greco in Toledo. This view is so popular, that I own no less than five books that use similar photographs on their covers. All the photographs are by different photographers, but are virtually identical except under very close examination. I discovered why this is so some years back when I drove up the hill myself and discovered a well-trod scenic overlook that must have been used by thousands of photographers, and perhaps the Greek painter himself, over the years.
Figure 1.10. If someone steals this photo for their own use, how will the photographer know?
Some types of images, particularly news photographs, scenics, and other pictures that don't contain unique subject matter, are difficult to prove as your own. However, even the most unusual image must be solidly established as belonging to you if you expect to recover damages. This is true if the image is reused in its entirety, and more difficult if parts of the image were "sampled." I won't get into the differences between new works and derivative works, or things like "fair use." There are plenty of law-and-the-photographer books available that address these issues.
Instead, I'll tell you some of the ways digital photographers can "mark" their works much as they use an ink stamp, embossing, or some other device on conventional photographs.
One way to protect work is to include information in file headers within the digital file itself. A little expertise and the right disk-editing tools can let a photographer insert a code or text signature in the file in a place where it won't affect image quality. Of course, anyone with the same expertise and tools can take it right out.
Another method involves overprinting the digital image with a faint watermark, which (supposedly) doesn't interfere with evaluating the image, but makes it impossible to duplicate or use the file without reproducing the watermark as well. Of course, you still have to supply the unaltered digital file for reproduction, so this form of protection is far from complete.
A third method is to use encryption, and works particularly well with images distributed on Photo CD, an older format that's been largely supplanted by the Picture CD, but which is still used by professional photographers. Every Photo CD using the original format contains several copies of the image at five to six different resolutions. The low-res versions can be left unencrypted so they can be viewed on-screen. Some distributors even give permission to reproduce these images, with proper credit, since they are suitable only for basic desktop publishing applications anyway. Then, when a buyer wants to gain rights to a high-resolution version of an image, a decryption code can be purchased by paying the necessary fee.
Encryption is a good solution, but distributing images on Photo CDs is inefficient in some cases. You might have to send along a hundred different Photo CDs containing the ones the client wants to look at, whereas it might make more sense to burn a special CD-ROM with only the 100 images that fit the requirements. Moreover, even if you encrypted a bunch of TIFF files, you'd have to create a special low-res version of each so the client could view the images on a screen.
A company named Digimarc Corporation has developed a scheme that might solve most of the problems inherent in other image identification methods. It involves embedding a random code pattern right in the digital file as a form of noise that is present at such a low level that it can't be detected with the eye. Yet, the code can be detected reliably even after the image has been subjected to the photomechanical reproduction process. That is, you can scan in a suspect image that has been printed in a book, magazine, newspaper, poster, or whatever, and find the embedded digital signature using the right software. The encoded information is holographic; the entire code can be read from any smaller portion of the reproduced image. Cropping your work drastically won't disguise the code one bit.
A lot of work remains to make this technology viable. It has been incorporated into a Photoshop plug-in to add the codes to any images you want. It could even be included in a chip in copy print stations or photocopiers that would alert the machine that a copyrighted image was present. The code can include information on how to obtain permission, so if you tried to copy a certain image, a dialog box would pop up saying, call 800-xxx-xxxx, obtain a code, then key it in to proceed.
For photographers to recover damages, the reliability would have to be established in a court, much as radar gun manufacturers routinely send experts to testify about the accuracy of their devices the first time they are used in a given jurisdiction.
There are advantages to this method. The code can be supplied to an image when it is finished, or actually applied by the digital camera when the picture is first made. It automatically will be reproduced along with the file, and can't be removed without destroying the image, unless you have the original creator's code. As with common encryption schemes today, both public and private codes can be incorporated—one code that allows verifying an image and can be freely distributed, and a second, private code known only to the photographer. That prevents others from falsely stamping other images with anyone else's code. Photographers who sell all rights to an image could remove their own code, and allow the new owner to embed one of his own.
The Digimarc system also bypasses having to encrypt the images themselves, so they can be freely distributed, viewed, and used. It doesn't stop unscrupulous people from stealing pictures, but does make it easier to prove their theft if you catch them. Since Digimarc works with any digital file, including video, audio, or text, its broad commercial applications are an incentive to work out the last few kinks in the system.
Is Film Dead?
Back in the 1970s, when newsfilm cameras began to be replaced in a few markets by electronic news gathering (ENG) equipment—portable videotape cameras and recorders—a trade paper rocked the industry by publishing an article with the headline, "Is Film Dead?" It was predicted that videotape would replace film in television news (which it eventually did, although film hung on quite a few years as the favored medium for local television documentaries), and, eventually, in the production of theatrical motion pictures. A decade later, pundits were saying the same things about film in all still photographic applications. Today, it's beginning to look like they were right.
But don't expect film to vanish totally overnight. Many motion pictures today are still shot on color negative film, and many still photographs are still produced using negatives or transparencies exposed in a camera. Certainly, digital photography has already taken over some fields, such as catalog photography, completely and utterly. But not all worlds have been conquered. There are artistic reasons for retaining film capabilities, too, as anyone who shoots a lot of black-and-white film will testify. The film "look" may someday have a cachet of its own in an age of digital imaging. If you want the lowest cost media, the broadest range of film speeds, spectrum sensitivity, and grain characteristics, film today provides options that you needn't expect from electronic gear anytime soon. In the future, though, it may become a high-priced option as processing becomes harder to find.
Pricing
If you sell your photographs (or hope to!), digital photography is likely to cause some changes to how pictures are sold. Should they be adjusted because no processing is required? Can a photographer who works with an assistant or stylist hire a computer nerd instead, and bill higher rates because the nerd gets paid more?
Or, how about the cost of supplying images? Instead of circulating dupe slides and sending camera originals or prints only when absolutely necessary, can you use DVDs with full resolution TIFF files? Will clients expect you to pass along the savings—if any—to them?
The problem is that photography has always been a difficult business to quantify. A shooting day you can bill for probably requires two days of preparation. That image shown earlier of Toledo, Spain might be worth quite a bit to someone who needs it taken at a certain day or time and doesn't want to fly to Spain to get it. But, if all you need is any old picture from that hillside, a stock house can provide it for a reasonable fee. My average-looking shot might be good enough, even when compared to one by, say, Ansel Adams, although Adams' will have a neat moon positioned in just the right spot and have a lot longer tonal scale.
Digital stock photography may revolutionize the industry in several ways, some good, some bad. Photographers will have many more outlets for distributing their photographs, and the availability to end-users will become much broader, but overall prices should come down significantly. I can remember when digital fonts used for desktop publishing cost $100 per typeface. Now you can buy a CD-ROM with 2,000 decent typefaces for $5.00, and even pro-quality fonts are selling for a tiny fraction of their original price. When buyers can purchase traditional stock fodder for a few dollars, your own seaside sunsets, Yellowstone Park scenics, cute kid and kitten photos, and other efforts must either be cheaper (not likely) or better than the alternatives. Unless you're a "name" photographer, or happen to grab a one-time shot of a news event, the days of collecting thousands of dollars for a single picture, year after year, might be over. Now that Adobe has included a stock photo library with Photoshop, prices for individual shots may drop even further.
Look for new ways to bill for photography to emerge as digital photography becomes more mature.
Ethics
Anytime I interview a news organization about digital photography, one of the first things they emphasize—even if I never bring up the topic myself—is how they have measures in place to ensure that images are never, ever altered in a misleading way. Even something as innocuous as moving the pyramids around for a National Geographic cover, or placing Martha Stewart's head on a model's body for Newsweek sends shivers of terror down the spines of most journalists and their critics alike.
For thousands of years, "seeing is believing" was more or less true. Viewers of an early motion picture that showed a train heading straight at the audience fled the theater in terror, because they couldn't comprehend that this fuzzy, black-and-white image wasn't the real thing. Today, we're confronted with realistic photos of the President shaking hands with space aliens, or Elvis attending the (most recent) wedding ceremony of his daughter. It's hard to know what to believe. Some images are obvious fakes, such as the one shown in Figure 1.11, but others are not. How do you know which photos are real?
Figure 1.11. Some digital photos are obvious fakes, but others might be more believable.
As much fun as digital manipulation is, there are several areas in which it must be used with caution. The most obvious is in news photography. Picture editors have long worked with restrictions on what they could do and not do. Publishing a picture which shows a male politician hugging a lovely woman, but cropping out his smiling wife standing right behind him would be misleading, to say the least. News publications keep such situations in mind.
There are many ways to juxtapose images, crop, or otherwise present a photograph in a way that misrepresents the truth, even without digital manipulation, and newspapers are used to dealing with this. Even the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) concedes that color correction, dodging, burning, contrast enhancement, and other techniques that have long been used to improve an image without altering the meaning of its content are acceptable in the digital realm.
Strict rules govern images collected for evidence or forensic purposes in legal applications. Pictures must portray a scene accurately, to the extent that crime scene photographers often provide many different views and wide-angle perspectives to show the overall picture before zeroing in on a specific piece of evidence. An unbroken chain of possession must be established, proving that these are, indeed, the photos taken at that time and place, rather than some others that might have been substituted intentionally or by accident.
In this regard, digital photography has some advantages over conventional processes. Digital images don't have to change possession as many times, since a separate processing step isn't required. In addition, images stored in a vendor's proprietary, raw camera format have been accepted by courts as proof enough that they haven't been previously altered.
A third area in which photographers must be extremely careful is in advertising. Digital photography lends itself to the kind of manipulation that courts have frowned on as being misleading. You can do what you like to make a product look good, but it must still accurately represent the product to the consumer.
Many years ago, there was a case in which a soup vendor put marbles in the bottom of a bowl of soup, to make all the vegetables rise to the top and make a photograph of the soup appear richer than it really was. Today, we'd probably just clone extra food chunks using Photoshop. However, any such manipulation could be done only to the extent that it didn't misrepresent the product, as the soup manufacturer found out. You can brighten a sweater, add drops of dew to a bowl of fruit, drizzle some digital juice down the front of a sandwich, but the final image must be representative.
The vagaries of the reproduction process can be compensated for, but not overcompensated. One camera manufacturer was allowed to include photos in an advertisement that were actually sharper than those typically produced by the camera in question. (They were shot with a 120 SLR rather than the 35mm camera being touted.) It proved that by the time the ad was printed, the sharpness of the photos was still less than similarly sized prints from the advertised camera. Lighting and other aspects of the images were all similar to what the camera could produce, even though a larger format was used.
Like journalistic and legal photography, advertising illustration is a field in which the pitfalls are well known, and most photographers, art directors, picture editors, and others know what to look out for. There are several other areas, such as medical photography, industrial documentation, and so forth, in which deceptive manipulation is also a potential problem, but there is little incentive to falsify information in these arenas, so digital photography presents few problems at present.
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