Is photography as a hobby dying?

I'm not sure how to judge whether photography is dying as a hobby, but over the twenty years or so since I've been visiting the RSPB reserve at Ham Wall in Somerset, there has been a steady increase in the number of people visiting it with good quality cameras and long lenses.

When I say increase, I just mean I have "noticed more".

This increase hasn't just been men, it's also been children and teenagers, women on their own (across a spectrum of ages) and couples where both are carrying a good camera with a long lens.

Occasionally, on some days you feel that almost everyone is a "photographer", and I get a surprise when I realise it's actually a telescope attached to a tripod and not a camera.

The National Trust property at Stourhead in Wiltshire, is another place where I feel I am seeing more "good" cameras than I used to. Last week there were even a few people with DSLRs: one was Nikon D780, one was a Nikon I couldn't identify, and a third was a "gripped" Canon.

The week before at National Trust Montacute, there was someone with a Nikon D850 and another with a Leica Q (no idea which model).
 
Perhaps the irony is that cell phone photography hasn't killed traditional photography; it's becoming "traditional" photography...

I'm not convinced the underlying desire to go somewhere, see something and make a photograph has declined at all. If anything, the ease of doing so with the phone in your pocket has increased the take-up of the hobby. Look at how many famous photographic locations are now mobbed with people wanting to make the same image.
 
It has nearly died for me. Since going digital the 'magic' of film is gone.
Taking pictures is undeniabley on the up.
"Photography " died with film.

I've said it before, happy to be shot down again.
 
Someone alluded to this vaguely earlier: that it is the process of photography that enthusiasts and increasing numbers of people enjoy, more than the end result. Even with a phone camera, people enjoy taking the image and looking at the results in the moment, but they rarely if ever go back to it. If they do, it's to recap the moment when they took it.

Even with digital, the process is there to be enjoyed, but it is different to the film process. I really enjoy doing film, all the different sorts, then processing it in some cases myself. But then it merges with the digital process because I then might edit the scans, or make new ones to edit from the negs if it;s film, and I have a further new process which I do enjoy too. I'm not very good at any of it but that actually doesn't matter much to me because I enjoy the "doing". Some people work for a better quality image, and that's important to them. It's nice for me too. But it's always the journey more than the arrival that floats my boat.

As to a comment earlier about groups on FB and the like: they don;t work so well. another popular forum closed and went to FB, then people started complaining about how the algorithm was decided what they were able to look at and in what order. Not a problem in a proper forum.
 
lindsay said:
As to a comment earlier about groups on FB and the like: they don;t work so well. another popular forum closed and went to FB, then people started complaining about how the algorithm was decided what they were able to look at and in what order. Not a problem in a proper forum.
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There was a popular American forum, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was called, let alone find out. Could it be this one you are referring to?
 
sirch said:
I suppose we need to try to distinguish "photography as a hobby" from the ubiquitous snapshot. I imagine we all have some sense the distinction but its quite a slippery thing to pin down.
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A camera shop owner once told me that he owed his nice house to Michelangelo Antonioni and David Hemmings. When the film "Blowup" came out in the mid 1960s, he claimed, his turnover doubled. People saw the film and decided they all wanted to be a photographer.

en.wikipedia.org

Blowup - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Phil V said:
I believe in my lifetime there’s been 3 ‘booms’ in photography as a hobby. In the 70’s, the 80’s and the 2000’s. In the 90’s and since the early 2010’s there were (and are) fewer visible ‘people with cameras’.

What is different now though, is that casual photography is bigger than ever, but it’s with phones not cameras.

I believe in one of the early years of smartphones, there were more ‘photographs’ taken than in all the years up to that point. Everywhere you go you’ll see people taking pictures, it’s just not with cameras.

SLR’s became DSLR’s and are now mirrorless. The technology of the R5 though? Like magic compared to an old DSLR.
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Yeah, when my children were young in the late 00s-early 2010, you saw so many people, other new parents out with “proper” cameras, but as phones got better, you see it less and less, to the point that I just don’t see many people at all, snapping with a big R5/6 equivalent camera any more. Even in touristy places, the big mirrorless / dslr is quite a rarity.

My own observation, looking at Flickr and various other social sites, is that more photos than ever are being taken, but because of that, it’s actually quite hard to find genuinely really interesting and artistic photos. Not just photos of beautiful things, but something actually created or crafted. Ones that make you go, wow, and save it to your phone for inspiration.

There is a lot of stuff that’s very trite, not very challenging, and I think that’s what you see, imo.
 
cuthbert said:
My own observation, looking at Flickr and various other social sites, is that more photos than ever are being taken, but because of that, it’s actually quite hard to find genuinely really interesting and artistic photos. Not just photos of beautiful things, but something actually created or crafted. Ones that make you go, wow, and save it to your phone for inspiration.

There is a lot of stuff that’s very trite, not very challenging, and I think that’s what you see, imo.
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There always were a lot of photos taken, but they never got seen in public. The internet now means they can all be seen by the public! :D
 
There was probably a middle ground that has collapsed, someone with a vague interest needing to buy a camera, learn how to use the thing by attending evening lessons or joining groups, might buy magazines for tips etc, they're the photographer on family days out, events etc.. and then print for the album. So for this, an element of craft needed to be learned, but now the phone has replaced all this. There's no need for as many magazines, evening classes, clubs/groups - so the visual signifiers of a hobby are reduced.
 
Ed Sutton said:
There always were a lot of photos taken, but they never got seen in public. The internet now means they can all be seen by the public! :D
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It was also expensive, and proportionally probably a lot more technical failures, so even though a lot of people were taking photographs, there were in smaller numbers, and as you say, no easy way to inflict them on others.

I have less than fond memories of sitting with family looking through dozens (sometimes hundreds) of unedited holiday pictures, either as prints or as a slideshow.
 
benc98 said:
There was probably a middle ground that has collapsed, someone with a vague interest needing to buy a camera, learn how to use the thing by attending evening lessons or joining groups, might buy magazines for tips etc, they're the photographer on family days out, events etc.. and then print for the album. So for this, an element of craft needed to be learned, but now the phone has replaced all this. There's no need for as many magazines, evening classes, clubs/groups - so the visual signifiers of a hobby are reduced.
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Then again Youtube is swamped by photography channels.
 
benc98 said:
There was probably a middle ground that has collapsed, someone with a vague interest needing to buy a camera, learn how to use the thing by attending evening lessons or joining groups, might buy magazines for tips etc, they're the photographer on family days out, events etc.. and then print for the album. So for this, an element of craft needed to be learned, but now the phone has replaced all this. There's no need for as many magazines, evening classes, clubs/groups - so the visual signifiers of a hobby are reduced.
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Ed Sutton said:
Then again Youtube is swamped by photography channels.
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Big problem with other media is the repetivity - many magazines and you tube channels trot out the same stuff on repeat over a year or so. Orginality in both is quite hard to find.
 
Just a thought here: I suspect that there are now many times more "business" photographers than amateur photographers, thanks to the camera phone.

I've noticed that when we get people in to work on the house they all take numerous pictures to record the before, during and after, When someone kindly took the side off my parked car, the bodywork people and the insurance representatives both recorded the damage and the repair on their phones.
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
Just a thought here: I suspect that there are now many times more "business" photographers than amateur photographers, thanks to the camera phone.

I've noticed that when we get people in to work on the house they all take numerous pictures to record the before, during and after, When someone kindly took the side off my parked car, the bodywork people and the insurance representatives both recorded the damage and the repair on their phones.
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With phones, not only is taking a quick pic easy , so is transmitting it to anywhere in the world on almost any platform, practically instantly. For the examples you quote, quality is rarely a factor. They are the easy use equivalent of the old Kodak snappers and subsequent compacts, which have always outsold 'real' cameras.
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
Just a thought here: I suspect that there are now many times more "business" photographers than amateur photographers, thanks to the camera phone.

I've noticed that when we get people in to work on the house they all take numerous pictures to record the before, during and after, When someone kindly took the side off my parked car, the bodywork people and the insurance representatives both recorded the damage and the repair on their phones.
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So, I suspect a lot of this is duel purpose, making pictures for 'admin' as well as social media content. There's an 'always on' culture now, businesses need to always be posting content through fear of becoming invisible.
 
Re DUMB AI :

I watched an interview of a respected AI reporter with Ezra Klein. In it the "industry" opinion was that Ai will be able to write an Ai program of its own within two years, and that will write another of its own within another year.

I wonder how long it will be before world leaders are having to negotiate with the AI president. Not long I suspect. Ai only has to create a distinct language and we will not have a clue what it is doing, the recent breakouts that took weeks to "discover" only proves to us and to Ai agents that we are clueless, and that we can easily be held to ransom.
 
Mr Perceptive said:
Big problem with other media is the repetivity - many magazines and you tube channels trot out the same stuff on repeat over a year or so. Orginality in both is quite hard to find.
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When I started to be serious about photography I bought Amateur Photographer and a couple of other magazines regularly. After a year I noticed how they would repeat effectively the same articles to the point it became tedious and I stopped buying them. There's a very limited amount to say about the technical aspects of taking a picture, but it had to be said again and again.

AP was not really that interested in the creative seeing side, or at least they didn't publish too many articles about it.
 
Brentor said:
Photography on the net (POTN)?

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It was not that one... but when I searched for it, Reddit popped up in the search. Mmm. May need to explore Reddit a bit too.

But I just found the forum I had in mind that I used to browse, but was not active in: it was "Open Photography Forums".
 
Barney said:
Re DUMB AI :

I watched an interview of a respected AI reporter with Ezra Klein. In it the "industry" opinion was that Ai will be able to write an Ai program of its own within two years, and that will write another of its own within another year.
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Programmes that "write" other programmes have been around since the 1970s, with experiments going back even earlier. In another post, I mentioned working with two commercial programme generators (TLO and Sycero). The technology has been well established for decades.
Barney said:
Ai only has to create a distinct language and we will not have a clue what it is doing,
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A programme can only make use of the facilities in its code or in the code of other programmes, which it's allowed to call.

If you create a sufficiently complicated system, it will inevitably take longer to analyse the generated code but it will still be possible to do so. Isaac Asimov wrote a humorous short story, "The Feeling of Power", in 1958 about people having to relearn basic arithmetic when their computers failed. This pointed up that computers would fail and the more complicated they were, the more likely they were to fail.
Barney said:
the recent breakouts that took weeks to "discover" only proves to us and to Ai agents that we are clueless, and that we can easily be held to ransom.
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People are only "clueless" if they allow themselves to be. The so-called "breakout" was possible only because someone left that possibility in the code. It should have been checked for but "managers" don't want to pay coders for the time it takes to check code properly. As a very sage saying goes "pay less, pay twice".
 
ancient_mariner said:
When I started to be serious about photography I bought Amateur Photographer and a couple of other magazines regularly. After a year I noticed how they would repeat effectively the same articles to the point it became tedious and I stopped buying them. There's a very limited amount to say about the technical aspects of taking a picture, but it had to be said again and again.

AP was not really that interested in the creative seeing side, or at least they didn't publish too many articles about it.
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I think in the world of affordable newsagent magazines only B+W Photography bucks this trend, which is why I have all 317 issues....................................:exit:
 
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