<p>Admittedly, a huge motivator for why I got into photography at all was to bump up my cool photo number on facebook…but this was before I noticed that was basically the strategy of 20% of my Asian friends, too. (Especially Asian friends in Asia.) Or is just a recency illusion thing?</p>
<p>(I just don’t notice that many adults into photography. For example, I can list like 20 of my friends who are, but none of my elders or their friends.)</p>
<p>Members of the younger generation have a camera on them all the time–their phones. This is something that did not exist when we were kids, so it makes sense that there are many more young people experimenting with photography.</p>
<p>No, it’s not just you. Your generation (assuming you are a twenty-something, or even younger) has more people into photography.</p>
<p>Our generation didn’t have digital cameras on our phones and the ability to upload gazillions of photos onto the internet. :-)</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s just the phone cameras; though they can serve as the gateway drug. Back in the seventies the cost of the developing every picture on every roll of film was very expensive, even when one was shooting black and white. The ability to easily shoot and see pictures and, perhaps, print (or not), has allowed and inspired my son to spend hundreds of hours and, as it turned out, thousands of dollars, on his photography habit. If he’d had to pay for developing and printing all those pictures (or doing it himself, which he has learned to do), he probably would have quit before he was able to do the work he does. He has also taken photography classes at his U, something he would probably never have been inspired to do had he not been able to “play around” with photography so easily. He will probably never be Ansel Adams, but he has takien some amazing photos during the last few years.</p>
<p>In my day, you bought a 35 MM camera for $150 to $200, took your pictures, brought them to the drugstore to develop, waited a week and went to pick up your pictures. You paid for the film $2-$6 per roll depending on the number of shots and you paid for the prints, maybe $6 depending on the number of prints. If you took bad shots, you still paid for the film and the prints. If you wanted additional prints or enlargements, you paid for those. So being into photography was a somewhat expensive proposition.</p>
<p>Enter the digital camera - relatively cheap, tons of software to adjust the settings for you, no film - just a reusable media card, and no development costs. Once you have the hardware, the pictures are free. The copies are free too - you just copy, upload or email them.</p>
<p>BTW, the above also applies to video.</p>
<p>But the downside - nobody pays much attention for each pic, to frame it right, to make sure that trees and lamp posts don’t stick out of peoples’ heads, to use the wide or narrow aperture to control the depth of field as desired, to set a slow shutter speed and pan the camera in the direction of the action - all things I would do on my AE-1 but no more on the point-and-clickers that are the only ones we’re inclined to be carrying.</p>
<p>^^^Dad of 3, I was going to say that while there are more people taking pictures, there doesn’t seem to be any more photographers.</p>
<p>Today we have image editing software. Don’t like the tree or lamp post? Get rid of it. Or move the subject. There has been an incredible amount of research in digital imaging in the last decade and some of that research has made it into commercial products. There are things that you can do today that you can’t do with a standard 35 MM camera from the old days.</p>
<p>You have more people taking more pictures. You do not necessarily have more photographers.</p>
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<p>oh point and shoots are a dime a dozen. The amount of people on facebook who do that isn’t 20% – it’s more like 90%. (Cameras are critical to the facebook experience.)</p>
<p>However, I do notice an incredible amount of my facebook friends are into DSLRs and fine artistic or expressionistic photography – excluding those who use hipstamatic (which is still a pretty amazing phone app). There they seem to number 20%, at least among Asians.</p>
<p>But among adults it seems the occurrence of DSLR-users is more like 5% or less.</p>
<p>A lot of adults are too busy working, raising families, and working out to get rid of the extra weight to have big, time-consuming hobbies.</p>
<p>But photography isn’t really all that time-consuming. I mean one might obsess over perspective now and then, or invest half a day every now and then, taking advantage of (unusual) weather, but it doesn’t strike me as a high-commitment activity.</p>
<p>I have a bunch of photos shot with a fast lens at 1/100 or faster around sunrise from a speeding car in a wooded forest. (Someone else was driving.) It seems more of an activity that you can do while doing something else; in fact one of the reasons to bring a DSLR is to artistically capture that thing you are doing (and share it with your friends, or for posterity).</p>
<p>Well, I don’t know any younger folks with DSLR cameras, but many people of my generation who have them. And as a wise and frequent poster on this site always says " the plural of anecdote is not evidence."</p>
<p>Any hobby where you get to the point of doing it well to the amateur or professional level consumes a lot of time; if for nothing else, then to learn the hobby well.</p>
<p>Personally, using my own anecdote, I think there are way too many photographers. A conservative estimate would be that 15% of the recent college grads from my neighborhood majored or minored in photography. Of course, I live in NYC, so kids here tend to be more artsy than elsewhere. </p>
<p>Ironically, the photographer who is the most successful never took a photography course, as far as I know. He majored in history. He was a good athlete until he got hurt early on in college. So, he started taking sports photos. Having played just about every sport out there, he senses when the big moment is coming and gets the shot. Is now the professional photographer for several different professional sports teams.</p>
<p>A woman I don’t know, but whose son was friendly with my kid back in high school was a dancer. Got too old to dance and became a photographer, specializing in dance. Very successful…same story, knows instinctively when to take the shot. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, all the kids with degrees in photography either give up or go on to get master’s degrees allowing them to work in archives.</p>
<p>So, take up another interest in addition to the photography.</p>
<p>Well I do work in biochemistry and cellular biology, where I do a lot of high-resolution live-cell DIC imaging, with various protocols to cheat the diffraction limit. (Live cells – not dead ones that have been fixed to make fluorescent and electron microscopy easier!) </p>
<p>I also image fruit flies doped up with various drugs like cocaine, see how certain nervous system genes affect their behaviour while on the drugs, using a high-resolution microscope camera.</p>
<p>But as I was saying, none of these friends are photography majors, except 1-2 of them. It’s more like a hobby they take up, to showcase their life in an artistic sort of way – and they are the kind of people I would never have considered them as particularly artsy-expressionistic (hipster, maybe). Take for instance the Asian version of a beachy Valley girl, or a rave clubber.</p>