I’m sitting in the green room right now about to take the stage with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch down here in LA. By the time you’re reading this, I’ve just announced a new tablet form of Photoshop called Photoshop Touch (coming to iOS!!).
As I sit here running through the script for the show that’s live in 5 minutes, I stumbled upon a thought that is both sweet and bizarre. It’s this: The psd image I’m using for the demo was something I shot a few years ago. I shot it with a $40,000 camera. With a $6,000 dollar lens, and a $25,000 lighting package. And the first time we worked up this shot in post production, it took an entire day on a $10,000 computer using software priced at $1500 bucks. (Collectively that’s a lot of zeros.)
And yet, here I am today–just a few years later–I don’t own any cameras that cost that much. An image of the same quality can readily be captured with $2,000 worth of gear. I’m able to work up this multi-layered PSD image LIVE in under 5 minutes on a touch-enabled tablet that’ll cost a couple hundred bucks and is running software that (although pricing isn’t out yet) will probably be cheaper than my lunch.
Talk about a dramatic shift. I think it’s cool. Maybe you’ll hate me for that. But regardless of what I think, here are three ideas I request you take away:
1. Our industry needs to stop bemoaning the rapid changes it’s seeing. We’re not alone. Think of the shifts in 100 other industries that happening concurrently. We’re not alone.
2. No one is trying to push you out. There is no enemy, no one to hate. There is only art, technology, information, and market dynamics.
3. You can do this. You can decide what part of the story you’ll be in — and there is no right answer, you just need to decide and move forward so that you’re not caught in never-neverland. You can be fully in the old story, fully in the new story, or have a foot in both camps (people still shoot film and digital…). I just recommend that you get your head straight as to what camp you want to be in and get comfortable with it.
It’s a lot more healthy — and effective — than becoming a cork in the tide.
Been hearing of this for quite a while now. I can’t wait to try Photoshop Touch for myself. For someone who worked for Adobe before.. this really is an exciting news
A copy writer told me that it’s a pretty good time to be a writer these days. Everyone wants to be a designer, an Art Director, a photographer. Surprisingly it’s pretty cheap to write. I don’t get the whole equipment debate at all. I rather go with Sir Mixalot where he stated that it’s cool that a lot of people own cameras and are able to see the difference in your vision and style and that’s what you get hired for. Although that’s pretty hard to understand at the beginning as it is to articulate what your style is and take advantage of it.
“An image of the same quality can readily be captured with $2,000 worth of gear.”
what about the $25,000 lighting? you might be able to shoot today with a 5Dmk2 what you shot a few years ago on a P25 but the cost of high speed flash lighting is still massive.
PCB Einstein with pocket wizards MC2 radio system and you can get amazingly fast shutter speeds for not much money.