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The final line up for the 2024 season. From left to right… S1H with battery grip, 70-200 f4 (not shown, Rode WG2) permanently on tripod shooting static full length ceremony & speeches, manual focus, 4k 25p. Z6ii + adapted Tamron 70-180 f2.8 (not shown battery grip arriving tomorrow) with option Tamron 20-40 f2.8, stills only but can do video in an emergency. Sling on shoulder. S5ii + cage + Sigma 28-70 f2.8 + Rode Micro as my all day run & gun, gimbal ready, 4k 50p unit (so 42-105mm equivalent). Right hip. Zf + 40mm f2 candid stills but can also do video in an emergency. Left hip. Single backpack with all lighting, all other audio, all spare batts, cards, power bank, chargers, gimbal etc, but actually lives in my cart along with the 2 big light stands, 40m extension reel and 500W portable power bank.

Interesting takes

Is it ironic tho - or is it a sign of the sheer scale of changes coming to the labor market. But also, when you've got a mortgage and bills to pay at the end of the month - you tend to panic about tech advances like this. Some aren't experiencing this chewing the fat on a forum - I'm watching colleagues in the media world losing their jobs weekly.

I think people brushing this aside are being a bit short-sighted, bordering on naive. I'd say that what we've seen so far from text-to-image from machine learning has been - Quick developing. One month it's all fuzzy, the next month it's all smoothed out. One month there are 11 fingers on each hand, a year later there are only 6.😅 In other words - it iterates fast. Unpredictable. As even a tech-savvy person, it is really hard to predict what 'AI' (I don't like using that term) is going to be good at, and bad at - 🖐️! Far reaching. Useful. I'm not a particular enthusiast, but I have used Adobe's AI tools on around 75% of the projects I have delivered as a freelancer over the past 6 months or so. And that's just casually discovering things that make my life *tons* easier. I also believe them to be reasonably ethical, or I wouldn't be using them. Similarly, I think the impact of this will be quick developing and unpredictable. The biggest threat I think, may be that unpredictability itself. It's going to be very difficult developing a workflow, without knowing whether it will become undermined by a much easier AI pathway at some not-so-distant point. Example - I recently decided to really lean into doing 2.5d and true 3d animations from flat artworks as a client offering (for context, a lot of my clients are museums). To really develop skills in this using tools like Cinema 4D, Projection 3D, DUIK, etc. will take a couple of years of learning as I go. I very much doubt that AI will explode into use in that time, but certainly at some point just beyond that horizon I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a turnkey AI tool that offers very professional bespoke 3D animation from still images. That's very up AI's street. Aside from some very obvious things, like news gathering, I don't see anything that machine learning could not potentially impact within the foreseeable future. This includes - editing a corporate film from start to finish from supplied footage almost instantly, with several versions to choose from; writing a compelling and original television series (yes, I honestly believe that machines will be doing this); creating photo-realistic footage of any location in the world that has been photographed more than 3 times, etc., etc. Of the course the nature of unpredictability is that just as equally, none of this might happen. But I think the main point to make is that the scale of the threat (to professional livelihoods) is so profound, that anybody just blithely ignoring it has their head in the sand to my reckoning.

I would imagine the easiest thing to do would be to go through a training organisation that already runs courses to photographers and would already have a mailing list and let them do the marketing and handle payments etc, and for you to just write your bio and then deliver the actual training. Obviously they'd take a cut, but sales and marketing isn't easy so they've earned a split. I wouldn't underestimate the number of stills photographers who haven't transitioned to video yet either, but as you say, hybrid is a whole thing so your market is potentially both photo-only folks, video only folks, and hybrid people who want to learn and get better. In terms of the random people asking you for free info, for every topic where people get paid well for providing training there will be people who want the info for free too, so I would suggest that your dataset might not be sufficient to draw any conclusions... I don't know what effect it would have to provide training to your competitors, but being able to say that you not only do hybrid but teach it to other pros might give you an advantage as well. Not to mention the advantage of getting them to give you some of their money 🙂

I don’t know about Sony but Panny definitely does and…meh. The issue is, it’s all baked in and for many, this might be OK, but as a photographer, I would much rather shoot Jpeg + Raw where the Jpeg is an in camera and reference at the culling stage. I have done various tests over the years with many Fuji cameras comparing the baked in Jpeg with the final Jpegs I created from the same image using the raw and about 9/10, I (much) preferred the raw conversion. On the back of the camera, the baked in Jpegs look great. On social media, ditto. But take the same properly edited image on a large screen or large print and it’s not even close. The baked in look is a hype job…UNLESS as above, it’s at social media / lower res levels when it can look great. And then some hate editing images which is also fine, but the reality for any serious photographer is a baked in look and a Jpeg image is ALWAYS going to be a compromise compared with a raw file. With the S5ii specifically, I loaded up several of my favourite personal custom LUTS, but again, nah, could not get close to the quality never mind the consistency, I could get out of doing my own process in LightRoom. The reality of it all however is most of my clients probably rarely print anything. This is the society we now live in… They have a wedding, spend as much as they ever did on the capture, but instead of receiving anything physical such as an album as 100% did when I started out, 100% today simply download their files. Ask them what they have done with their 500+ highly curated and individually hand edited files 1,2,5 years later and the response is, “our parents printed a couple for their mantelpiece but we ourselves have not got around to doing anything yet”. And most never will and one day, their kids and grandkids will ask about these ‘photos’, but these digital files will have been last to time in most cases. Industry / social rant over 😜

Having worked in Atlanta and for Perry, I’d suggest the “reason” is a convenient excuse. Production was already heading towards a slump BEFORE the recent strike and is staring down the barrel of another strike. All of the streamers are struggling to make money. They are green lighting less content. I was talking to an LA based Panavision sales rep a couple of days ago and they they said for them production was about 15-20% of what it was 18 months ago. Production has slumped. Strikes have and continue to menace. Not a good time to throw down on a studio. AI was more like the icing on the cake. Perry is just blaming this on a decision he would have made anyway.