The Death of the Photo Studio

Counterpoint: as your online identity becomes more and more of your brand, the need for a professional, high-quality headshot is more important than ever.

(Less so for full-time engineers, but absolutely for management, sales, consultants, etc.)

Headshot photographers not only provide crucial professional lighting expertly adjusted for the contours of your face, but also have a grab bag of techniques to establish rapport and get an authentic, confident, warm expression out of you that is almost impossible to get otherwise for most people. Not to mention work with you to get the right tone and look -- the background and lighting and expression a quirky food blogger needs will be totally different from a conservative CEO, which again is totally different from Brooklyn fiction author.

And because of people's need to brand themselves online, headshot photographers who 20 years ago had actors as 95% of their business, now have business professionals as a majority of their clients. Business is booming.

The photo studio isn't going anywhere -- it's just changing what and who we need to take photos of.

Professional photographer here who does portraits and product. I’d say not “dead,” just very different.

We’ve taken a hit, yes, but mostly amongst the problematic clients who say things like “you shot this in 2 hours, why do I need to pay a whole day rate?” They go and shoot their stuff with a phone, it looks like garbage but in some way they can’t quite articulate but it’s good enough, and we’re happy to not have to deal with them any longer.

There is another segment, that of the client who bought a consumer crop-sensor DSLR and a white box off of Amazon and told us “hey sorry but anyone can do this now.” Or they picked up a cheap strobe kit and a lens that the blogs said had “creamy bokeh” and they can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong. Generally we see them slink back in a month or so later and quietly hire us back. This is very common.

Is the future scary? Yes. Am I sure I’ll be able to work as studio photographer forever? Nope. But as with anything, doing one’s homework and having a commitment to quality while paying attention to what’s happening in the photo world can keep you successful for the time being. The points addressed in the article are good ones and I try to stay up on all of it, but there are plenty of companies who still pay good money for photography don’t have access to the level of digital rendering that he’s talking about. They have a small product and a couple grand and they need a well-done photo in two days.

And yes, you can bang out something with a phone and an app or two, but it’s not “there” yet. Is it a privilege to hire a professional photographer for your headshot rather than something someone did on a phone? Of course. I’ve also shot plenty of headshots pro bono for aspiring folks who have a dream and work their asses off and can’t seem to get there, whether or not I was already set up for a paid shoot. My friends mostly do this as well.

Perhaps slightly OT but nonetheless interesting.

I met a former professional photographer who had become an economic analyst. He used to do fashion and music shoots for major magazines (Conde Nast etc..). He gave me an interesting insight into why his former business collapsed.

First of all he said that his photography business was predicated on the fact that he held the whip hand with respect to his clients: they needed to be absolutely sure that the person they sent out got the right shots on the day. There wasn't going to be another opportunity to ask Bono or whoever to do them over. So Conde Nast had to be absolutely sure that he would produce the goods. For him to be good enough to be sure of always getting the shots no matter the conditions, weather, light conditions etc...the photographer had to have the requisite experience and the only way traditionally they could get that experience was by using up a lot of film. In his view the cost of the film you would need to go through to have got to his level was approximately £60,000. That was the barrier to entry.

With the barrier to entry and with his strong position with respect to his customers he got two important things: a high level of pay and royalties on renewals for his work. So they not only paid him but he had an ongoing revenue for shots they had paid him to take, if they wanted to reuse them over time.

Once Digital got good enough, the barrier to entry fell and the magazines slowly gained the upper hand, paid less and didn't agree to the same terms.

So now he advises Banks on something or other.

Its an interesting tech study but don't forget the business side. I'm so incredibly old (LOL being sarcastic) that I remember high school yearbooks had school photographers for K-11 however seniors had to submit professional photographer pictures.

You see it had only been made illegal a generation ago to submit a photo with every resume. In theory, photos were submitted to see if the applicant could clean up and dress in a professional stylish manner. It was made illegal in the 60s for very theoretical discrimination reasons. As if during an interview a manager wouldn't notice an applicant was black or a woman, but via the miracle of photography they could notice, LOL.

Anyway culture and especially the ed establishment moves slowly so they were still preparing kids to submit photos with their resumes in the 80s despite it being illegal since the 60s. So seniors had to submit photos.

Anyway the whole point of this anecdote is culture moves slow, and until "recently" if you wanted to graduate HS and get a job you needed a zillion copies of yourself from a professional studio.

Also see Department of the Army standard "DA photo" for promotion packets, and the peculiar government requirements of passport photos. The days of 50% of the male population having served in the military are long gone with the WWII vets, the population as a whole, countrywide, is getting waaaay too poor to internationally travel thus no need for passports, etc.

> It will then add a blur to that background to simulate Bokeh.

Yeah, and it looks completely awful and utterly fake. The author forgot to mention that 'detail'.

The article covers a lot of territory but I can say from experience that the limitations to current CGI techniques mean that automation is still a ways away.

I produced all the shots for a global diaper company that is on shelf today. The pack designs were a tough format: images needed to be extremely horizontal on one side, and vertical on the reverse. But you can't just ask the photographer to shoot wide and crop in, because the new HD Flexo printing is way more hi-res. The approach at the time was to take the baby imagery and 'paint in' the extra background in Photoshop, a very time-consuming process that had to be repeated for every single image for every single region, with wildly inconsistent results. We created a replica of the on-set nursery in CGI, all the way down to matching the lighting in the C4D studio.

Yes it made the process way more flexible, yes we could localize everything with a new render, and yes we could add props or change the decor. But every render required a human eye to match the camera angles/scale of the baby shots. The uncanny valley is real, even with all the little tricks you can do to make it seem more photorealistic.

I do like the idea of AI-generated baby faces - the casting process / ethnicity requirements / rights management challenges are real. And maybe it wouldn't be all that bad if everyone knew that the babies weren't human. But the cost to develop and manage that system require real experts, a huge expense for a company that only needs baby shoots every so often. I imagine a version of 'thisbabydoesntexist' and how that would even slot into the content production workflow - it feels impossible. It's much cheaper to outsource this stuff to production companies that are smart about how they capture all the different kinds of content.

There are definitely companies where CGI makes sense to develop in-house. IKEA's approach comes to mind since they have super modular and global approach to furniture. But most companies have such a big product turnover that photography is still cheaper. Don't even get me started on hard-to-render products that require serious expertise to visualize. We tried to develop a CGI diaper but wow it was insanely complex.

I'm optimistic about the future of the space since there is so much design territory to explore in terms of workflow improvements. But I still love something real - my wife is shooting a story for a national magazine today on a local woodworking artist and I know it could never in a million years be automated. The more that computational photography advances, the more important meatspace photography will become.

Can someone on HN explain why some links to medium try to make me setup an account to read while others go to a clean well designed blog style post, the way they should.

Is this a setting based on popularity of the article? who is posting?

I blame social media and mass low resolution consumption more than I blame smart phones for the shift in the media industry.

If I zoom in to almost any cell phone photo, it's no match for a professional with a larger format sensor or studio with lighting.

But those details are lost.

The appreciation for the craft has also faded. With so much media to create / consume, the bar has lowered across the board.

But industries that used to be profitable are hard to break into now. Food photography is a prime example. I recently did a shoot with a company and their chef convinced them they could just use cell phones in the future. I can't argue it. If the only place you're publishing to is 1800px and the content exists for 1-2 days on the front of your feed, it's pretty hard to justify a full crew and big production shoot. You have to really see your media / product as an investment and be gunning for a bigger picture to really gain a value out of a larger media operation.

'computational photography' is interesting because it requires a different way of thinking about what an image is than what we were used to. As if going through a certain shaped lens is the only way to make "real" photos.

My own thinking on the subject got severely reshaped when I took it upon myself to write some alternative lens models for Chunky[1] (the Minecraft scene path-tracer) and later my own path-tracer[2]. Once I realized that every pixel on the screen could be mapped to any virtual light-sensor position and direction, suddenly projections were arbitrary. I could define a lens that wrapped around the subject, pointing inwards if I wanted, and that was no less 'real' than a pinhole or fisheye lens.

Of course modern phones take things a bit further than just straightforward transformations. Guessing what's between the pixels or selectively blending multiple images together maybe crosses my subjective threshold between what I think of as a 'real image' and a 'made-up' one. Especially as the AI gets smarter. Because I can no longer understand exactly what happened.

[1] https://chunky.llbit.se/ [2] https://github.com/TOGoS/SolidTree/

I feel as if we will see fewer, but far better, pro photographers.

It will probably be some time before we have AI-assisted composition and lighting, and that's the real secret sauce of high-impact photography.

That kind of thing comes from having an emotional being in charge of the photography device. They "feel" the image, as much as they "see" the image, and know how to capture it in a way that will have others feel the power of the image.

That is what separates the pros from the amateurs.

But those pros now have some truly marvelous tools to help them to capture that emotion.

This is like the growth of CGI. When the tools first appeared, they were high geek-factor monsters that only an engineer could use, so only engineers used them, with predictable results. That resulted in some technically marvelous, but not particularly enjoyable, stuff[0].

Then John Lasseter and Pixar happened. Anyone remember the "Luxo Jr." animation?[1] That was where the world changed.

For the first time, emotion was reflected in CGI. Nowadays, true artists can do amazing things with tools like Blender, Maya and After Effects. There are now feature-length CGI movies that can have 300-lb cage fighters sobbing in their beer.

Until AI can produce emotions (shudder at the thought), there will always be a need for pro emotional craftsmen. The tools and medium may change, but artists have been around since the days of the Maltravieso Gallery.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0

> It will then add a blur to that background to simulate Bokeh.

and yet again a blog post about photography where the author can't differentiate between bokeh and depth of field.

I’ve run a creative studio as well an an independent photography practice for many years and much of what this article says about the future is true. The main driver here is to reduce costs and increase output by removing the human element. It gets closer each and every day.

But at the same time, the high end keeps getting higher and that’s why the photo studio is still going to be around for a long, long time.

I for one hate it when buying something online and the only photos posted are clearly done in a studio with lots of post-processing, or worse renderings. I end up having to look at user posted photos or ebay to see what the item truly looks like.

Its all really cool technology, and I love the convenience of having a smartphone camera in my pocket, which I use often, for the right type of photography and when no other option is available. But right now you simply cant beat the results of a high end digital camera. The quality simply blows phone cameras out of the water in every conceivable way, even amateurs can tell the difference.

The birth of the Video Studio.

Having a professional photo can make a big difference. I can see how phones and technology has made it so that anyone can take photos. The studio takes a hit because people don't need to go. Much like a music studio. People can record at home, but the professional makes a difference. The internet is a tool to share the photographer's work (if properly branded). The internet has also made a huge supply of photos, so the general demand for quality has declined. Music is much the same. I have a belief that the demand for high quality, professional photos and music will come back in style at some point. It will come back to people happily paying for music or photos as it once was. You can't expect things to be free and also expect quality