Crystal ball gazing: Predicting the photographic ecosystem in 10 years, part I

During a recent flight and some (unusual) downtime, my mind started to wander idly towards both how much photography has changed in the last ten years, and idle speculation towards how photography would change in the next ten. The pace of change has been rapid, limited by technology; but I think the next big shift is that it’s going to be limited by the operator. Let me explain why: for hundreds of years, the fundamental principle of using photosensitive chemical media and printing onto non-photosensitive ‘permanent’ media has not changed; whether that media is larger or smaller, celluloid or glass or paper or something else. The process of photographing was destructive in a way: you had only one chance to fix the chemicals to preserve the graphic interpretation of luminance – i.e. the photograph – during which if you messed up, there were no do-overs. The biggest change from a single-use chemical medium to a digital one has really been getting the public used to the concepts reusability and easy post-capture manipulation*. Whilst the start was slow due to a) incumbency of film and film devices; b) cost of entry; c) output options – like a runaway train, we’ve now lost control of our collective visual output. Where does this leave us in another ten years?

*Always a popular/controversial topic: but reality is that manipulation in many forms has not just been around since the very beginning, but is very much at the core of the whole photographic process: you could not even view the image without applying some chemical changes, which might make areas of different brightness more or less visible. In reality, nothing has changed other than your average consumer can now do it at will and with greater ease and flexibility than before. Taste, as always, remains a subjective matter.

I won’t talk about more: more resolution, more sensitivity, more dynamic range, more color accuracy – heck, more images: this is taken as a given following the nature of technological progress, except perhaps the last item.

One of the not-so-long-ago predictions was that video and stills would eventually converge to the point that we would pick out stills from video sequences; proliferation of 4K video modes has made getting a sufficient resolution still for social media or small print easy, but note the caveats of application: when non-demanding. More resolution isn’t going to solve this, neither are higher frame rates or similar. Let me explain why: good video is structurally very different to good stills, and it goes back to the way our brains process images. With a still, some part of the frame must be critically sharp and with high contrast/acuity for us to register both deliberation, technical focus and subject/conceptual focus. With video, persistence of vision means that previous images linger in our visual cortex and are subsequently overlaid by new images; the duration of fade/overlay and transition between images is what gives us the impression of motion. A certain degree of blur is actually required to make the motion feel smooth; this is one of the reasons cinema has stuck to 24/25fps and not gone to 100+ – even though it’s more than technically possible. It just doesn’t look or feel right. The upshot is that even with more information in each component still frame from a clip – a good looking video clip always has too much motion in it to make a good still**.

**If you don’t believe me, shoot a clip of motion with high shutter speeds – say 1/1000s, and compare it to one at 1/25s – which one looks more fluid? Which one makes for better still captures?

That little exercise in the notes above illustrates something else, however: the fact that most still cameras can easily perform this task now speaks volumes about convergence. Whilst technically possible to shoot very good stills and very good video on the same camera – it isn’t optimal. The Panasonic GH5 and Olympus E-M1 Mark II duo are a good example of this. They’re ostensibly both M4/3 format, 20MP, dual IBIS/OIS stabilised systems with high video rates (at least 4K, with HDMI out etc.); however, it’s clear in use that the the GH5 is very video-centric, and the E-M1.2 is stills-centric – small things like the presence of log gamma, or the ability to have exposure zebras when recording etc. make a big difference in practical workflow. The other challenge is a much more practical one: how do you have a control setup that works for both stills and video, when they require some fundamentally conflicting things? A good example is exposure: ideally, a video camera should have stepless exposure to give smooth control over changing light conditions; you want quickly adjustable steps in a stills camera so you’re not endlessly scrolling. Autofocus is another thing: it’s difficult to beat a good manual focus pull for video, but you want flexibility over points and location and configuration for stills. Having switchable groups of settings goes some way towards alleviating this, but I feel still results in confusion of muscle memory in practice.

Prediction #1: we won’t see stills-video convergence.

I’m going to loop back to the start now, with Prediction #2: there will be an end to more, or at least a slowly changing steady state

Those are fighting words and buck the trend of the last ten years, I know. But where were we before that? Film, in its steady state, was basically ‘image quality by the yard’: if you wanted more, you just went bigger. The building blocks were the same below the scale of the smallest format: you could get pretty much the same emulsions in every size, from 35mm and APSC to 8×10″ sheet film. I think we’re going to see the same with sensors: firstly, because economies of scale justify putting more resources into developing technology that can be applied over different sensor sizes, and because it makes it easier for both the sensor makers (i.e. pretty much only Sony at the moment) and cameras makers to stratify their product to consumers: if you want better, buy bigger. But we will eventually reach a point where we hit limits of optics rather than electronics – for the 1.x micron sensors that are in most mobile devices hit diffraction limits on resolution even at f2.8. Building faster lenses is not exactly practical, and increasing pixel density isn’t going to yield significant improvements in output – just bigger file sizes.

Sheer data quantity is the other reason I predict an eventual end to more: even though storage and bandwidth are ever increasing, the display medium has been very slow in catching up. This is probably again due to cost of adoption, but also more practically: a lot of the time, the difference just isn’t visible or isn’t visible enough to justify the effort. It might be the resolution losses from sloppy shot discipline or challenging conditions cause enough camera shake to actually be visible at higher display resolutions (as opposed to being somewhat averaged out when down sampled); or more likely, human vision causes the limitation: not everybody has perfect eyesight, and even if we do, there are limits to how much the eyes can resolve. Going slightly beyond this yields the impression of continuity and transparency (the idea behind the Ultraprint, for instance) – but anything more doesn’t yield any gains because we simply can’t see them. A good example is actually the Ultraprints themselves: a younger audience instantly sees the difference, but older audiences do not because their overall vision tends to be poorer, especially at close viewing distances.

Prediction #3: we are the limitation.

Beyond the obvious fact that creative limitations are a human problem rather than a machine one, the concept of ‘Data rate’ has other implications, too. It isn’t just the amount of information captured in a single image, but the total number of images. It’s never been easier to shoot more and unleash it on an unsuspecting world. The problem is, everybody else is thinking the same and in general – the population lacks any sort of curation filter. The upshot is that with so much content out there, it simply becomes impossible to view everything, much less view anything much with any degree of proper contemplation. This is the other reason we’re not going to see the stills-video convergence: how many people are going to record everything, and then comb through an hour of footage for the one still you want? I suspect none, given that most people don’t even look at the stills they’ve already taken more than once or twice before moving on to the next thing.

Prediction #4: a shift in creative standards: the average level lowers; the top end increases.

Unfortunately, sheer quantity has negative impacts on everything creative: we’re already seeing this in the professional supply of images. On one hand, the threshold for ‘good enough’ on average seems to have lowered because less attention to individual images and more to quantity and gear, which means there are people charging for work who really shouldn’t be (though I suppose this says as much about the clients as the photographers). Inexperience and sheer volume and weekend pros are putting the mid level guys out of business. The top end has always been competitive and if anything, is stretching its legs a bit with more creative enablers (i.e. better technology) – and the distance will always remain from the bottom, though it’s going to be increasingly nuanced and require an educated client to see it. The upshot is that the best will get even better, but there’ll be fewer of them simply because there’s less work at that level to go around.

To be continued in Part II…MT

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