As in photography, technology has changed the way music is made. A kid with a computer from a one horse town can create fantastic music in his bedroom and post it to the internet to be discovered by a recording label. A short time later, armed with a recording contract these songs are hitting #1 in the charts all over the world and I'm listening to it while I write this.
Last night I wondered, why hasn't this happened with photography?
Digital photography and the internet has been good for photographers but not for consumers. The way we create our images has changed and a new avenue to learn and market photography has opened up but this has not expanded our market and in many ways it has narrowed it. Then the realisation came - the biggest untapped photographic market is the home user.
In my house I have about 10 of my images printed and framed, I'd love to have more but they are quite expensive to create. But on one device I have thousands of songs, I can carry them around with me everywhere I go and listen to a wide range of styles depending on what mood I'm in. So what product can do the same thing or photography?
Kindle...
It's not quite there yet but the screen used in ebooks such as the Kindle is the future of the digital photo frame. This type of screen can overcome all the limitations of the LCD screens currently used on digital photo frames. Imagine a large digital photo frame hung on your wall, it uses no power to display images - only to change the screen. You could power it off batteries so you would not have unsightly cords hanging down the wall. It could cycle randomly or even select certain types of images depending on the weather, time of day, season. How about seeing nice bright warm beaches on a winter's day or a snow capped mountain during the heat of summer? It's not backlit so you can leave it on overnight and the light won't flood the house. It's inbuilt memory could hold thousands of images and a WiFi/3G connection could allow it to access the internet wirelessly to download more.
This is where the benefit for photographers comes in. I think nothing of paying $2 for a song or app for my phone, who would balk at $2 for a high quality photo for their wall? With millions of these screens around the world and millions of consumers downloading many many images even a low price will produce a more than healthy profit for fine art photographers.
Of course, there are still a few things that need to be overcome. The screens themselves are only able to produce black and white, the resolution is low and their size is small for the price but I'm sure that these limitations can be overcome in a few years. Then we need to ensure that the marketing and distribution is centered around making it a product for displaying professional art - not for those under exposed, blurred, red eye'd images of the family that digital photo frames are used for today.
That's probably the hard part - which organisation is looking out for the commercial well being of artists, ensuring their success and exploiting new markets? The music industry has got a very solid grip on this but visual artists have nothing.
Not to pre-empt the only company that seems to have the will to bring such an adventurous product to the market but I have a feeling that it will eventually be called........
iFrame
If such a thing came to fruition, it would be a great time to be a fine art photographer.
Robert Vine
Web Page: www.robertvinephotography.com.…
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