Process two and a rant.
The sound, hardwood floor that professional photographers stood on even ten years ago has turned into a chipboard surface full of rot.
Decades of practice and hard won technical progress have been eroded by the explosion of digital technology and the proliferation of consumer level equipment capable of producing images that satisfy media with ever declining standards.
Those photographers still in business have lost out and benefited from the digital age in equal measure. I remember "having kittens" at the airport as £100s worth of film was degraded by x-ray scanners, even as the slab-faced robotic security staff refused to check my kit manually as requested. Now as my kit goes through the x-ray machine, I breath easy as compact-flash cards do not fog. Although in this age of paranoia, when coming through stringent security at St. Pancras recently to board the Eurostar to Paris- (more stringent it seems, than the security at Heathrow and San Francisco International who let my kit through unquestioned but had me barefoot whilst scanning my sandals!), my camera kit and laptop, hard-drives etc. gave no problems to security, yet my back-pack of clothes, books and personal items was inexplicably pounced on by a robot going about his business. He bid me open every pocket, and checked the contents minutely, then came to his "goal" deep in the innermost recesses. My monopod. "What's this", he intoned. "A monopod", said I.
A photographer can now make high quality output of prints in monochrome, duotone, tritone, split-tone and in full colour on archival quality 80 year+ materials to A2 size ON THE SAME £1500 PRINTER just by jiggling. Thank you Epson! Do you remember Cibachrome and contrast masking, internegs and registration? I do! We can send large files over the broadband super highway to publishers 1000s of miles away at the touch of a button. Whoopie.
"Where have photographers lost out?" I hear the reader cry. "All the rights free crap on the internet", I bellow. "Our income base is decimated to the point of lunacy".
A good photographer at one time could earn a supplement to his or her income by selling stock photography through a good picture library. I know because I did. One of the libraries that has my work recently sent me a cheque for £8 for the sale of an image. I rest my case.
A fellow photographer who I have known since college in the 1970s works for specialist magazines who still pay the same page rate as they did a decade ago. Whilst on assignment for a magazine recently he talked to a fellow photographer who also claimed to be working for another unnamed magazine. He, in real life, was a solicitor and was equipped to the hilt with state-of-the-art kit enjoying himself hugely. When my friend happened to mention to the editor of the unnamed magazine that he had met the other photographer they had sent, needless to say the editor denied all knowledge of him.
Clients - please pay a reasonable fee and use a photographer who knows what he or she is doing. We have invested years of blood sweat and tears and ££s learning our trade to serve you well.