Originally posted by biz-engineer We are in the age of instantaneously available results, that are forgotten almost as quickly as produced. Ansel Adams 8x10" prints sold or can sell for millions, while the value of popular digital camera images is zero. Today , the effort and cost of taking pictures with a smartphone is zero, and the value of those pictures is also zero.
While this may be
somewhat true for non-commissioned photos presented as individual works of art for public consumption and opportunistic sale, there are plenty of employed and freelance photographers working with medium format, 35mm digital and occasionally smaller formats, in a variety of commercial settings (press, product, fashion, events etc.). The value of their photos clearly isn't zero.
Still, there are working artists making their living (in whole or part) from photography with a variety of film and digital formats - even high-end smartphones. The digital medium and relatively inexpensive equipment may have made photography more accessible to a wider range of people, but it hasn't democratised the artistic talent and technical know-how essential to creating really good art. Photographers with these skills are still producing work of financial value. I quote a post of yours from earlier this year:
Originally posted by biz-engineer 40x 60" posters framed on canvas shot with 22Mpixels are easy to find at Ikea and Amazon, you can have one for 39 euros or less. No need to go through the effort of using a Pentax camera and going through the creation of the photographs, post processing , ordering it to a photolab and framing it. However, the prints shot on Phase One that are sold by Lumas in Berlin, Paris and Vienna sell at prices from 3500 euros to 8000 euros each. The price for a 40 x 60" C-print on high end paper (from the same lab as the one working for Lumas) costs me between 100 and 200 euros, so you can see my stitching and stacking effort could be worth several thousand euros.
Some of those 40"x60" canvas posters from Ikea and Amazon can sell in their thousands due to low unit cost, wide distribution, and an overwhelming majority of the public for whom the resolution and print quality is more than good enough. 5,000 units at 39 euros each is 195,000 euros... Not bad at all. I suspect there's probably more revenue and profit in these posters than the low-volume sales of individual high-quality prints from Lumas...