Pixels are free and digital cameras are everywhere.  I had a quixotic thought that there might be a pixel shortage after all of the cell phone photos taken at the Obama inauguration but no shortage has been announced.

It has always been hard to make money as a photographer.  In the digital age it is even harder.  Cameras are everywhere and the sheer number of pictures taken must be following some kind of an inverse Moore’s Law.  At the same time it is almost impossible to keep ownership of work distributed on the internet and the number of print outlets that pay for photographs is plummeting.

But don’t despair this is almost the same problem that confronted the music industry a decade ago with piracy from sites like Napster.  Then Itunes came along and lowered the price to a point where it wasn’t worth stealing anymore.  I propose that roughly the same thing will happen in the photography world.  Flickr or a site like it will allow people to buy images for a few cents each and pay for them using Paypal.  The pictures will be well sorted and easily resized to fit the users needs and will have a watermark that says the source information.

Can photographers make money if pictures sell for a few cents?  Yes if the market is thousands of pictures instead of a few at a hundred dollars each.  Are there other solutions?

The problem of people stealing creative works has existed since there was creativity.  Dickens wrote his stories as serials and published a chapter a week to keep them from being pirated.  Gilbert and Sullivans musical The Pirates of Penzance was about Americans stealing their songs without paying royalties.  Enforcement works best if there are large targets.  For the music industry the solution seems to be lowering the price until stealing is not worth it.  I predict the same for the photography business.

Next I’ll show you copies of my favorite photos from 2008 and talk about the photoshop effect.