A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
2 May 2016
We're pleased to announce we've compile Volume 5 Number 4 of Photo Corners on the Archive page. This edition includes 16 Features, 27 commented news items, 25 Editor's Notes (which included at least 96 items of interest), three Reviews and three Site Notes. That's a total of 74 stories in April.
Writing about digital photography on that scale is subversive act in 2016.
The digicam market that exploded in the first years of this century had already begun to disappear as the Great Recession reduced disposable incomes. The iPhone, introduced at Macworld Expo in 2007 while CES was blithely oblivious, heralded the end to that era.
And despite the disturbing fixation on the annual if small incremental improvements to cameras and lenses, the high-end market continues to shrink.
You might think everyone is honing their image editing skills. But they aren't.
Everyone at the SFMOMA press event with us was shooting with newer gear.
And yet the industry continues to invest heavily in image editing applications as if they haven't read the memo.
We haven't read the memo either, though.
Look at our SFMOMA images. Everyone at the SFMOMA press event with us was shooting with newer gear. Our Nikon D300 was announced a few months after the first iPhone in 2007. Along with the lens we used.
But are the shots you saw from other photographers technically superior to what we captured with 10 year old gear? In fact, we think you won't find technically better images than what we published.
How is that possible?
If you read this site regularly, you know how it's possible. You appreciate the importance of capturing more than eight bits per channel and using sophisticated software to wring the data out of those channels. And, like us, you find that half the fun.
We're delighted to see our readership levels remain as high as they've ever been, setting a new record last month for average daily visits, but we suspect our audience isn't going to grow very much more.
And we're encouraged to see, month after month, that at least among our readers, the stories we publish about crafting an image, like our Post Processing Post, rate as highly as the latest gear announcements. Our Saturday matinees remain popular peeks at practitioners of the art and our obituaries remain well-read appreciations of those whose lives have inspired us all.
So congratulate yourself. One day your attention to what matters will pay off. That, after all, is what we tell ourselves all the time.