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.
Excellent advice Chase! Pro quality equipment is just going to become more accessible to the masses. That’s not going to change so we just need to stop worrying about it and move on. We have to sell our selves and our vision. I’m trying to be very conscious of what people are asking for now and figure out how to give it to them instead of feeling angst about it. It’s not worth the fight.
newer doesn’t always mean better.
I love digital photography and it enhanced my work
tremendously. Now I am also doing a lot of Film Photography.
While moving forward I think we are just ADDING tools, it doesn’t mean we have to eliminate the old ones.