03.30.2010 | 01:23 PM •
The New York Times has an
article about how amateurs
have been flooding the professional photography
market. This isn’t news for somebody like me.
This is what I’ve been calling the Craigslist
phenomenon. The shitty economy has forced
everybody to get more creative about how they
earn money. And many photo hobbyists are
discovering that they’d happily take photos for
next to nothing, thus the undercutting of prices
and the devaluing of pro quality. Wedding
photography for $3-500 is now commonplace.
Headshots for $75. When you’re an amateur, time
is not money. The complication of course is that
there’s often little that distinguishes amateur
from pro work. This is often the case in the
arts. But technology-based jobs have been
getting outsourced to cheaper competition—India,
China, etc.—for years. Professional
photographers now either have to pursue the
high-end or compete against the lowest-common
denominator. Of course journalism and
photojournalism are dying professions anyway.
Twitter and blogs now deliver the news and
flickr allows anyone to enter the stock photo
business. Competition is healthy of course and
as Cocteau said, a medium only really becomes an
art form when it is affordable by the masses.
So, while I love the increasingly visually
saturated world, I’m preparing for my full
retreat into another non-lucrative passion,
fiction writing.
03.24.2010 | 11:49 PM •
I discovered a neat little
program which records your
mouse movement (clicks, pauses, trails) as you
work on your computer. Above is 3 hours of mouse
activity around my desktop. Below is 7.4 minutes
of mousing without the background. Looks pretty,
means nothing, but is very fun.