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Author Topic: Are my photos going to be obsolete?  (Read 12658 times)

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« on: August 05, 2015, 13:03 »
0
I am wondering, if I'm shooting with a camera that has 28 mp, and in 3 years new cameras are probably going to have 40mp, are my photos today will be obsolete in 3 years?

How are you handling the technological advances in terms of old photos?


« Reply #1 on: August 05, 2015, 13:39 »
+20
I'm still selling images today that I shot 10 years ago. The images are smaller, but still useful for lots of applications.

If you shoot things with lots of cutting edge technology or fashion in the subject matter - stuff that gets dated quickly - that's much more likely to kill your future earnings than the size of the image.

People don't need larger images just because camera manufacturers sell equipment to produce them :)

« Reply #2 on: August 05, 2015, 13:41 »
+3
I am wondering, if I'm shooting with a camera that has 28 mp, and in 3 years new cameras are probably going to have 40mp, are my photos today will be obsolete in 3 years?

The difference between 28mp and 40mp isn't really that big. Nowdays most of the image uses are online and in low resolution, I don't see the megapixel count as a problem. I have some old files downsized to 4mp, and they still sell.

A much bigger problem is the subject getting outdated. Old photographic style, old looking props, old looking fashion, makeup etc. will make the images look old, not the megapixel count.

Hongover

« Reply #3 on: August 05, 2015, 14:03 »
+1
Megapixel is just a marketing ploy by camera companies to entice you buying new cameras. There are some point and shoot cameras that are over 20mp, but the image quality is terrible. Bigger sensors and better lenses is a bigger factor then MP.

The focus on digital and print advertising is on the decline. LED ad displays use mostly 72 DPI images. The only constant is packaging, but they're not exactly large format. Many images bought on stock websites goes to web and mobile advertising/design. Retina and 4K displays upped the requirements a bit, but as long as your image is above 10mp, it should be fine.
« Last Edit: August 05, 2015, 14:09 by Hongover »

« Reply #4 on: August 05, 2015, 14:37 »
+1
is your old corvette or your old les paul PAF guitar obsolete  ??? are masters of guitar music
and people who know about hot rods and sportscar throwing away those old cars???
the same thing will happen to digital media. are those ppl throwing their vinyls for cds dvds ???
only the ppl who believe in latest is best with the most bells and whistles are going to
keep trading in their cameras for the next years' model.

maybe just maybe the ones with 40mb with the stock zoom lenses that came with the camera
will downsize to 50% while the same old ppl with xx mb using prime lens or zoom of superior glass
will just submit their work as is.

i think the argument is like someone telling me her mobile is twice as good as my camera because
it shoot videos and photos at twice my camera MP.
i don't know about all those technicalities. it was the same thing in the 60s when they told us all
those things about hi-fi and all those numbers, while the honest salesman told me
it's just to get you to spend your money.

you decide. but naturally, with the latest, biggest, best-est... you look more professional  :D :D :D

« Reply #5 on: August 05, 2015, 15:04 »
0
Bad post !
Can't format
« Last Edit: August 05, 2015, 15:07 by Difydave »

« Reply #6 on: August 05, 2015, 15:45 »
+2
One of my sales today on Shutterstock was a photo I shot ten years ago.  It's 6 megapixels, which I guess was enough for the customer who bought it.  Not everybody needs more pixels.  My camera generates 36 MP; I reduce it to 19 before I submit.  Makes processing and file upload easier, and I doubt it's costing me much in the way of sales.

« Reply #7 on: August 05, 2015, 16:03 »
+3
I am wondering, if I'm shooting with a camera that has 28 mp, and in 3 years new cameras are probably going to have 40mp, are my photos today will be obsolete in 3 years?

How are you handling the technological advances in terms of old photos?

The fun part is that sensor megapixels are increasing, while less pixels are needed then ever before, since almost everything only ends up on a webpage nowadays.

« Reply #8 on: August 05, 2015, 16:28 »
+5
  If you want to attract the big ad agencies, the higher the resolution, the better. They spend big bucks on campaigns that involve Marketing Collateral, Circulars, Brochures, and Packaging. Low res photos won't make it in that Market. That said, I think 28 mp would qualify as hi res, for the foreseeable future.

« Reply #9 on: August 06, 2015, 02:47 »
+1
4K screen resolution will probably be big enough to be selling for many years.  Will be interesting to see how virtual reality takes off.  Will there be stock sites selling 360x180 panoramas?

« Reply #10 on: August 06, 2015, 05:58 »
+3
What I was trying to say last night when the font diminished to -300, :-) was that I've always reckoned that once a certain size is / was reached Megapixels were more of a manufacturer thing, than a real world thing.
More megapixels is easier to sell to the average consumer than better quality images.



ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #11 on: August 06, 2015, 06:07 »
+2
The content of many images, particularly 'contemporary lifestyle', will become obsolete long before people worry about megapixels, as many before me have said.
Note:
Although all sizes are currently the same price on iStock, not all buyers buy the maximum size available. I haven't counted it out properly, but random sampling suggests it's a much higher percentage than I'd have imagined.
When I started on Alamy, files had to be 48Mb uncompressed, then it went down to 24Mb, and now it's 17Mb. Although Alamy is somewhat of an outlier, presumably these changes were due to market forces.

« Reply #12 on: August 06, 2015, 06:08 »
+3
I recently saw an image of mine, about nine years old, on billboards and the sides of buses. The image had been cropped a little. It was originally 6mp.

« Reply #13 on: August 06, 2015, 08:28 »
+1
A lot of my sales still come from shots taken with my old 350D. What was that 8Mp?
I wish new uploads still sold in the same quantities that they used to when those were first uploaded!


ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #14 on: August 06, 2015, 08:31 »
+2
A lot of my sales still come from shots taken with my old 350D. What was that 8Mp?
I wish new uploads still sold in the same quantities that they used to when those were first uploaded!
Exactly! I had a 350D also, and like even older scans from 35mm slides, they sell better than my newer work from 5D Mk2.
If only we'd have the benefit of hindsight we could have saved a lot of money.

« Reply #15 on: August 06, 2015, 09:52 »
+1
20 MP is a huge file and not likely to be too small for any applications. So much of what is licensed by stock agencies, even macro/midstock is for use on the web - for example, I just had an old 6 MP file taken with my starter D70 camera licensed for $400 last month - and I license photos all the time to books and magazines - directly and via agencies - and shoot assignments with my 12 MP D700 as well as with two other 16 MP cameras and those files are big enough for nearly any application except perhaps a billboard though I suppose they could be uprezzed. I license pix from my 10 MP iPhone too.

As others have noted,the subject and execution of your photos is far more important to their staying power than the megapixels of your camera. I shoot assignments professionally in the NY metro area for magazines, newspapers, architects, contractors, and other commercial clients and my D700 is my go-to camera - your eye and skill are your most important assets.

My first big commercial client back in 2009 hired me because he'd gone out and spent $1000s on a fancy DSLR to shoot the new homes he was building/renovating and realized that it was not the equipment, but the person behind the lens who made the difference, so then he spent the $$$ again to hire me.

« Reply #16 on: August 06, 2015, 11:29 »
+1
Still sell images taken with 4 mp camera. Location, event can be still valuable. Time is going, but people need to return sometimes.

« Reply #17 on: August 06, 2015, 12:11 »
+1
It is the actual subject as well. A lot of my shots are random stuff picked up at car boots over the years, and the like. So it's got that sort of retro / vintage / grunge  look. (A bit like me really! :))
And old fashioned hand woodwork, which basically hasn't changed for many years, and probably won't change that much going into the future.

« Reply #18 on: August 07, 2015, 11:05 »
0
Perhaps photography as we know it will become obsolete.  Why go the trouble of dealing with photographers when you can generate the precise image you need in CGI?  Instead of putting out a brief on ImageBrief, just feed that description into the next generation image creator and out comes the perfect shot assembled from configurable components with some lighting algorithms applied. No ill-tempered models, shadows to annoy Shutterstock, fees, releases or cranky photographers.

The really scary time will be when news photographs are generated that way too!

« Reply #19 on: August 07, 2015, 16:45 »
+1
...Why go the trouble of dealing with photographers when you can generate the precise image you need in CGI?...

Because CGI doesn't look anything like (a) the world as seen through our eyes or (b) a photograph. Nothing wrong with CGI, but it's no more the same as a photograph as a vector illustration is.

And getting a street scene from Boston or New York would be a lot of work to do - we're a long way for a Star Trek replicator for images (or food for that matter).

Hongover

« Reply #20 on: August 07, 2015, 16:55 »
0
Perhaps photography as we know it will become obsolete.  Why go the trouble of dealing with photographers when you can generate the precise image you need in CGI?  Instead of putting out a brief on ImageBrief, just feed that description into the next generation image creator and out comes the perfect shot assembled from configurable components with some lighting algorithms applied. No ill-tempered models, shadows to annoy Shutterstock, fees, releases or cranky photographers.

The really scary time will be when news photographs are generated that way too!

CGI is more expensive than photography by quite a bit. It's much cheaper to hire a model to hold a baby than to create that same scene in 3D. Not to mention it will never look natural and you can differentiate it really easily. 3D renders have this stiffness/unaturalness about it and the moment you can make something close to realism, uncanny valley will rear it's ugly head.

I don't think 3D renders will ever replace photography.

« Reply #21 on: August 07, 2015, 17:52 »
+1

CGI is more expensive than photography by quite a bit. It's much cheaper to hire a model to hold a baby than to create that same scene in 3D. Not to mention it will never look natural and you can differentiate it really easily. 3D renders have this stiffness/unaturalness about it and the moment you can make something close to realism, uncanny valley will rear it's ugly head.

I don't think 3D renders will ever replace photography.

i agree. it's like in the early 2k when they got the nerdy teens going crazy over computer generated girls over the real thing. i actually had a group of guys tell me they like them better than the girls they find on porn site LMAO. but eventually, they got over that like scarlett johanson guy in  don john movie, the real thing is warmer LMAO. you cannot replace the real thing. photography and movies will still rule with real bodies  ;D

« Reply #22 on: August 07, 2015, 18:27 »
0
Chaps and chapesses, I posted my original comment with my tongue so firmly in my cheek it was almost protruding from my ear as a response to the recent batch of grumbles on this forum about the venture capitalists dictating the future of Shutterstock. I could just see an investor saying, If we could cut out the photographers, who are always grumbling about the reviewers, and, in fact, save money by eliminating the reviewers too, then we have an economic model for success!

However, there is a grain of truth in it.   I have been fortunate enough to see some amazing technology in labs over the last few years as part of my day job, largely starting from the need for image recognition but capable of being flipped to image generation, which will surely find their ways into products before too long. Yes, CGI is far more expensive than photography and somewhat unnatural but it wont always be that way.

Looking at similar technological changes, I bought my first CD Drive in 1989 or 1990: it cost $7500! A few years later, manufacturers were charging money to take them out of new PCs for companies wanting to protect their networks.  In 1992, I ran a demo in London of the first software-only MPEG encoder with rather jittery images, at a time when a still-image JPEG encoder (it wasnt just a selectable filetype back then!) was a piece of hardware which cost around $5000.

Never say never when it comes to technology.   

Hongover

« Reply #23 on: August 07, 2015, 18:40 »
+1

CGI is more expensive than photography by quite a bit. It's much cheaper to hire a model to hold a baby than to create that same scene in 3D. Not to mention it will never look natural and you can differentiate it really easily. 3D renders have this stiffness/unaturalness about it and the moment you can make something close to realism, uncanny valley will rear it's ugly head.

I don't think 3D renders will ever replace photography.

i agree. it's like in the early 2k when they got the nerdy teens going crazy over computer generated girls over the real thing. i actually had a group of guys tell me they like them better than the girls they find on porn site LMAO. but eventually, they got over that like scarlett johanson guy in  don john movie, the real thing is warmer LMAO. you cannot replace the real thing. photography and movies will still rule with real bodies  ;D

There's been a number of films recently that used CGI in the place of real people and it had the opposite of its intended effect, at least on me.

Jolie on Beowulf...realistic, but completely unsexy. Leslie Mann's fake nipples on the Change Up was awkward looking. Humans tend to idealize subjects rather than rendering them in a natural way. And her nipples were just too perfect to invoke any type of arousal. And who can forget Jessica Alba's fake nude scene in Machete...they flattened her stomach and digitally removed her bikini. Again idealized and completely weird. I appreciate the flaws of the human body and I can naturally respond to it emotionally.

As you get further away from uncanny valley and you look at nude anime characters, the emotional response becomes natural again because we accept them as sexy drawings. Not that any of them really interest me. Like you, I prefer the real deal.

« Last Edit: August 07, 2015, 18:42 by Hongover »

« Reply #24 on: August 08, 2015, 16:56 »
0
I am wondering, if I'm shooting with a camera that has 28 mp, and in 3 years new cameras are probably going to have 40mp, are my photos today will be obsolete in 3 years?

How are you handling the technological advances in terms of old photos?

Back to the topic. I'm still using a Nikon D700 (12 MP) and a D300 (12 MP) beside my newer Nikon D750 (24 MP). The Images I shoot with the older Nikons sell well, even the pics I shot 5 or 6 years ago. Very few buyers want to make huge posters, but are looking for images for illustrations on the net and in print media. And for this purpose you don't need more than 8 or 10 MP.


 

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