The Online Photographer

This is interesting, but maybe simply based on inertia, changes nothing in my world. People today have no attention span and are happy to turn over operations to machines so that they need not clog up their brains with learning how to do things. Phones are easy.

My phone's camera will never be anything but a sketch pad, or to remember my parking space in a crowded lot. I never cared to be in the majority of anything, so I'll stay in the sliver of society that still uses proper cameras.

Good (albeit deceptive) historical impression animation.
The “deception”, of course, is that it doesn’t tell a nearly complete story of how cameras merged into the consumer electronics and, most importantly, the communications industries. How photographs are the new notes. Etc. The wider view of world technology and society certainly moderates the story.

But why are you “sad and despondent “? This is inarguably the best age for photography! Just look at the tools and media you have at your fingertips today. Thank goodness that we no longer rely on chemical reactions with coated papers and plastic films to record images!!

It's obvious that the GROWTH of the smartphone dwarfs that of the dedicated camera. Is it also reducing the effective amount of dedicated photographers (in the sense of photgraphers using dedicated cameras, even though not exclusively)? It's not clear from the animation and the answer would add depth to the topic.

What strikes me is how well digital cameras did for a brief run.

I helped someone put on a projected slideshow yesterday, using photos from an old, tiny Nikon Coolpix they took to Cuba. Outside photos looked fantastic. Night photos were a blurry mess, but served their purpose.

I'm surprised how many companies are still going, all milking the same cow, it seems. In 20 years, it's hard to say who will remain, but I will be 76 and probably shooting a 10 year old camera that works really well. There will come a time when used cameras are in short supply, though, and prices for them also go way up. Might be good to put one on ice right now, if you really like it.

Beastie Box sounds like a good name for your camera.

Mike, speaking of the Sigma beastie, would you consider going back through your archives and adding a unifying tag / category to your posts about it? You've created an amazing resource about an important photographic niche, and it's too significant a contribution to let it settle into the general archives. If you don't want to be camera-specific, having a "monochrome" category would be an excellent starting point for many interested people.

And in case nobody has told you this recently, your personal digressions into odd corners are widely helpful and interesting. Keeping with this example, monochrome-converted cameras actually aren't that rare – if you also count the ones converted to only see infrared. I've followed your journey and have been getting better results with my IR cameras as a result, including adopting the Monchrome2DNG software into my process.

Why would we be sad?

A fascinating little graphic, especially since 1. it starts the year I was born and 2. I've owned more than a few of the example cameras. Thanks for the link.

Cyclops?

My wife's a Data Scientist professionally. And I don't need her to tell me that animation and the data it represents it grossly misleading.

It assumes that people with smart phones would have bought a camera, if it wasn't for the existence of smart phones. That a smartphone sale is implicitly a lost dedicated camera sale. Nope. Wrong.

Maybe I just exist in and around a circle of people who like the haptics and ergonomics of a proper camera?

Are camera sale numbers going down. Yes. Of course. But 'in my bones', I think that it's mostly due to the past market saturation from the digital boom. The smart phone didn't kill the proper camera market. Smart phones rise simply coincided with its the digital cameras inevitable decline, once saturation was achieved.

Yesterday, as my wife and I drove up the street to feed Mr Fin (the most beautiful horse we've ever seen), I took a crappy old Olympus SP320 to take some happy snaps. Not my smart phone. The why? Because using the SP320 was fun. And when you have fun, you take capture better images.

Hmm... thank you for being thought provoking as usual, Mike.

I believe the proper phrase should be "Never give up, Never surrender!" from Galaxy Quest's Commander Taggart. :-)

Thanks!

Looking at that, it's clear that it was digital cameras rather than smartphones that killed film cameras, so at that point 'cameras' were still being sold in large numbers. I bought my last new film camera (an EOS 33 - Elan 7 in the US) in 2000 or 2001, so just after the absolute peak of film cameras; and I bought my first digital camera, a Powershot, a couple of years later.

It's interesting to remember that when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in the 'One Device' presentation (2007), he spent about 15 seconds on the camera (the whole presentation lasted a bit more than an hour). Early smartphones were not about the camera; that has happened in the last 10 years or a bit less.

Smartphones may appear to win but they may not have last laughs. When predators have nothing left to hunt and devour, they turn on one another.

One amusing downside of the good quality of smartphones today is that at famous tourist sights, hordes of tourists keep snapping away well into the night. In the old days, those of us with "real" cameras could shoot (even handheld) past dusk, when the smartphone crowd had long packed up and left.

When I took up photography I bought a film SLR. No one I knew did photography as a hobby and no one I knew had an SLR (or TLR or rangefinder), most families I knew had compact cameras and they got used on special occasions to fill the family album. I met some like-minded people at a college class but us people who took photography seriously for its own sake were not common in my experience.

Then digital cameras came along and friends of mine who had shown no previous interest in photography bought DSLRs and upgraded them as new models were introduced. Photography was big and so many people in my circle had a Flickr account.

Later on, phone cameras became common, and decent quality, and those friends now have DSLRs and Flickr accounts gathering dust but they are still taking more pictures than they did back in the days when I first took up photography. I'm back to being on the fringe with my apparently niche hobby as an enthusiastic photographer who often leaves the house just to take photos.

I keep reading that camera sales are declining, it's all doom and gloom, and that everyone just uses phones these days but I do wonder what base is being used to measure this decline? The peak of camera sales in the DSLR and digital compact boom of the early 2000s? Or the market for enthusiast cameras prior to that phase of rapid tech expansion? The data on the animation seems meaningless and is comparing apples and oranges (for reasons many others have pointed out). Clearly a lot more photographs are taken these days and most of them are on phones but I am left pondering whether photography as a hobby has just returned to its previous size - a small niche in a now increased market.

I'm aware that none of the above is data and I don't have any figures to compare Canon/Nikon's film SLR sales to their DSLR/mirrorless sales (I'd be interested to see them). But, with the amazing cameras and lenses available to us now, I'm not yet convinced that the sky is actually falling, it just seems to be back where it used to be and maybe even a bit brighter.