
The Death of the Photo Studio - karanganesan
https://medium.com/@saitec/the-death-of-the-photo-studio-fe1fd76b91cb
======
crazygringo
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.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
You forgot dating.

Since it has moved online, my younger male friends have spent quite a lot of
money on professional photographers(not in studios, but outdoors) to get that
perfect candid shot at dusk in their new attire, hoping for an edge in the
overcrowded dating market.

Thanks to tinder and Instagram, dating is now a continuous arms race for young
males and I assume it comes with it's own set of potential mental illnesses.

~~~
annpierce
Can confirm as my startup addresses this market
[[https://www.photofeeler.com](https://www.photofeeler.com)].

The top dating apps are designed such that photos are literally all that
matter. What's worse is all of the popular cultural ideas we have about photos
are wrong.

Photos don't just show people accurately -- in fact, you need some level of
skill just to look as attractive as you do in real life. So no, that unsmiling
selfie you took in your basement isn't "just what you look like" or
"authentic."

Not to mention, people think and do. Images are still. This creates a
situation where humanity can be easily lost. And where the need to brand
yourself and put a lot of effort into showing hobbies etc. is paramount.

It's sad to see so many young guys tie their identities to the good or bad
performance of their profiles when it's not really _them_ being judged but the
pictures they chose.

~~~
saddestcatever
I really love the idea of photofeeler, and I want it to work.

Just to share my 2c: I can't get over how strange the pricing structure for
photofeeler is. I've come to the site a few times with my credit card ready,
willing to drop a few dollars to get results.... but the abstraction of your
pricing model is just confusing enough that I've dropped off the funnel each
time.

Ok, so I need credits or karma to run a test. So I answer a few photos, get my
karma to medium, and leave the test over night. The results are often
inconclusive - my photos are consistently rating as "meh->ok" across the
board. Ok, that's fine, I'll try another. Upload another, get more karma,
leave that over night. Ok, this photo has +.8 attractiveness, but -.6 smart.
Ok, not sure what to do with that information, but it's intriguing. The
results are close enough, that I'm curious what the margin of error is if each
is getting ~10 votes.

Ok, well maybe this is just the downside of the freemium model. Let's take a
look and see what I can buy. 40 credits for $10. Ok, so 1 credit is .25c.
Cool. What's a credit get me. A CREDIT GETS ME ONE VOTE! Ok, hold on, that
can't be right.

Let's think about this backwards. How many credits do I need? So I probly want
15-20 votes on any one photo to get enough data to be conclusive about the
results. Sure. And I'll want to run at least 3 photos. So, I'm looking at $15
per test to know which of 3 photos is preferred.... but realistically if I
want to get rid of my own biases, I'd be testing 5-10 photos... Hmmmmm.

At this point I do some work to get some free karma (note: if there were
hotkeys for voting it would make a WORLD of difference).... leave the test
over night. Look at it the next day, say "meh, results are inconclusive based
on sample size" and forget about the site for 8 months.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
>Ok, this photo has +.8 attractiveness, but -.6 smart. Ok, not sure what to do
with that information

Use that photo for dating, but not for potential employers, unless you're
searching for a modeling job - just my guess.

~~~
PaywallBuster
You can choose different categories (work, casual, dating) but all of them
have 3 characteristic which you're voting for.

If I remember these 2 are part of dating

------
ruminasean
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
Another end of the company I work for (I'm in media operations, digital) is
focused on custom content which is largely comprised of marketing materials,
catalogs, etc (and they still print on paper!).

The company actually maintains a selection modern photo studios solely for use
within the company. The clients still want that kind of quality. (There are a
couple of glimpses of their large studios in the slides on the homepage
[https://www.stjoseph.com/](https://www.stjoseph.com/))

Of course, I can't speak for the entire industry—but it's not dead yet! At
least in the less sexy areas like product shoots for grocery stores, or car
promos.

------
scandox
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.

------
VLM
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.

~~~
cosmodisk
It's a bit funny how it's illegal to submit CV with a photo( in most
countries,at least) yet the second some HR drone opens your CV, they'd go on
LinkedIn or other platforms to check what's going on.

~~~
ido
Submitting CV with a photo is actually an expectation in the German speaking
countries!

------
ekianjo
> 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'.

~~~
Sebb767
> and it looks completely awful and utterly fake

To people who know good Bokeh. Your average user is pretty used to the fake
one.

~~~
ekianjo
You will easily notice it as the edges are usually completely wrong.

------
masona
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.

~~~
fredophile
I'm curious why you didn't shoot the surroundings and stitch it together into
a panorama. Since you're in a studio you control the lighting. It shouldn't be
hard to shoot the pictures for the panorama once and then spend most of your
time shooting the baby. Any of the baby images should be able to be stitched
into the rest to get a wider or taller image.

~~~
masona
That would definitely make sense if all the shots were from the same angle.

We designed/built a nursery that could accommodate shooting from all angles so
that all the different shots would look like they could be in different
places. That was important because there were infants (on the changing table)
to crawlers (on a blanket) all the way up to toddlers (bumbling around).

------
crmrc114
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?

~~~
crazygringo
I think it's based on how often you visit Medium. If it's your first time
visiting in a ~month, you just see the article. If it's your ~third time, they
ask for an account.

Just open the URL in an incognito window when you get that -- it's what I do.

------
imagetic
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.

------
TOGoS
'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/](https://chunky.llbit.se/) [2]
[https://github.com/TOGoS/SolidTree/](https://github.com/TOGoS/SolidTree/)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0)

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

------
tomaszdiesel
> 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.

~~~
gerikson
I'm confused. Bokeh refers to the quality of the blur. Applying a filter to an
originally sharp background (because of a deep depth of field) can absolutely
simulate bokeh. It may be bad bokeh, but then plenty of lenses have bad out of
focus rendering.

~~~
LyndsySimon
I’m only a “semi-serious” photographer at this point, but I’ve spent thousands
of dollars in the past ten years based largely on the subjective quality of
bokeh.

~~~
gerikson
I tend to shoot at f/5.6 unless the light is low.

~~~
LyndsySimon
I’m actually not sure what I “normally” shoot at. I shoot manual and
dynamically adjust my settings to the scene almost unconsciously.

Now I’m curious to see if I can run some statistics against my Lightroom
library.

I shoot a Fujifilm X-E2, and am hoping to upgrade to an X-Pro3 fairly soon.
I’ve put off upgrading my camera for years in favor of buying better glass.

My favorite/most used lens is a 23mm f/1.4. I know I rarely use it wide open
unless I’m shooting at night, and in that case I’m also usually also shooting
monochrome. That lens is awesome for low light and indoor candidates, and even
with my generations-old X-E2 I have enough resolution (16MP) to crop in when I
need to.

My next favorite is a 35mm f/2\. With the crop factor, it’s ~50mm and nearly
perfect for street photography. There is a quality to that lens that I have
difficulty describing - the closest I can get is that it’s “Leica-like”.

I also recently picked up a used 18-55mm f/2.8-4. Zoom lenses aren’t really my
thing, and variable-aperture zoom even less so. This lens was so cheap that it
didn’t make sense not to buy it, and it’s turned out to be very capable as
long as I’m outdoors in full light. It gives me a bit more reach, which is
important sometimes for me. A lot of my photography is done either of my kids
or for the dance studio I and my wife own, so while it’s not my favorite lens
it does see quite a bit of use and is often the right tool for the job.

Examples:

XF23mmF1.4 R | ISO 400 | f/4 | 1/250s - Outdoor, stage shot of a dance
performance: [https://adobe.ly/3f9rbmH](https://adobe.ly/3f9rbmH)

XF23mmF1.4 R | ISO 1600 | f/2 | 1/60s - Indoor, with terrible lighting and a
glossy background: [https://adobe.ly/332b9IN](https://adobe.ly/332b9IN)

XF35mmF2 R WR | ISO 200 | f/8 | 1.170s - Outdoor, street photography in
Cleveland: [https://adobe.ly/2X6CTbk](https://adobe.ly/2X6CTbk)

XF18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS | ISO 1600 | f/4 | 1/500s - Outdoors, my youngest
daughter riding a go-kart:
[https://adobe.ly/3f5o6Ec](https://adobe.ly/3f5o6Ec)

~~~
gerikson
Thanks for sharing these!

This is my page with my lenses, it includes links to the relevant Flickr pages
for most of the lenses: [http://gerikson.com/blog/photo/Lens-
list.html](http://gerikson.com/blog/photo/Lens-list.html)

------
hownottowrite
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.

------
chiffre01
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.

~~~
Wistar
There used to be a site that showed the advertising version of a fast-food
item versus the reality of that item as delivered to your hand.

Dramatic difference.

~~~
johannes1234321
[https://youtu.be/oSd0keSj2W8](https://youtu.be/oSd0keSj2W8) here is a
McDonald's marketing video on how they improve the burger for the shot. Of
course that's marketing and they have other tools in addition, like not using
real ingelredients but mocks etc.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Think the reality of fast food photography has some crossover to the subject,
photo studios are less important because you can just take 200 photos with
your own camera and then pick the 1 good shot from that.

With fast food photography, it's the same ingredients they just brute force it
and have a whole stack of genuine buns, pickles, patties to pick the best of a
bad bunch.

~~~
johannes1234321
Even when having the ingredients you have to take care that lights are
probably warm and if you aren't quick the salad of your nicely setup burger
might lose its structure and color and the sauce and grease might start
flowing.

But of course: producing _good_ mockups isn't cheap either.

In the end it will always have to pick between picking the proper ingredients,
some mockups and Photoshop. And as they tell: Point is that one can see what's
inside and nobody seriously expects the delivered fast food product to match
the picture. (If there's a tomato on the picture however I hope there's a
tomato slice somewhere on the real thing)

------
syntheno
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-dude
The birth of the Video Studio.

~~~
imagetic
Already dead too.

------
SeanFerree
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

