Photography Is Changing: From Photographer to Content Creator

An article recently published on Light Stalking looked at the decline of camera clubs. Its author, Jason Row, started from an interesting paradox: these clubs often bring together a considerable amount of knowledge and experience, yet struggle to attract new members, particularly younger ones.

The problem would therefore not be a lack of expertise. Rather, it may be that a certain photographic culture is struggling to evolve.

The author highlights two points in particular.

First, the importance given to equipment. In conversations between members, the camera used, the brand, the lenses owned or technical performance can sometimes take up a considerable amount of space. Yet many younger photographers are less concerned with whether an image was made with a Leica, a full-frame mirrorless camera, a medium-format camera or a smartphone. They primarily want to be judged on the image they produce.

Second, some clubs remain attached to the idea that there is a right and a wrong way to take photographs. This view can quickly come into conflict with practices that have emerged with digital photography, smartphones, drones and social media.

This observation goes far beyond the question of camera clubs.

It points to a much deeper change: photographic practice itself is changing in nature.

Some of the rules also came from technical constraints

For someone who learned photography using film, producing a technically correct image required a certain amount of knowledge.

You had to choose an exposure without being able to check the result immediately, anticipate how the film would render the scene, control the framing precisely, understand the limits of the available dynamic range and wait for the film to be developed before discovering your mistakes.

Digital photography has considerably shortened this learning loop.

A photograph appears immediately on the screen. You can check the exposure, shoot again, change a setting and compare. Autofocus can now recognise a face, an eye, an animal or a vehicle. Image stabilisation compensates for some movement, while modern RAW files allow substantial corrections after the photograph has been taken.

It is therefore understandable that a new generation might wonder why it should necessarily follow all the methods developed at a time when these possibilities did not exist.

Take framing, for example.

A photographer trained on film or with a view camera may consider that an architectural photograph should be composed precisely in the viewfinder, with perspective controlled at the moment of capture and verticals correctly positioned.

A younger photographer may frame much more loosely on the screen of a camera or smartphone, then crop the image and correct perspective in post-production.

For the first photographer, this may seem unacceptably approximate.

For the second, the question is much simpler: if the final image corresponds exactly to what they wanted to achieve, why should the method used be considered incorrect?

This obviously does not mean that understanding perspective, light or framing has become useless. Anyone who masters them still has additional tools with which to construct an image.

But we probably need to distinguish between what genuinely belongs to the language of photography and what was once imposed by technical limitations.

Breaking free from the rules... only to adopt new ones

Social media has also created its own photographic codes.

For a while, landscapes had to be photographed through a crystal ball. Then came buildings reflected in puddles, long exposures, tiny figures standing in front of mountains, vans photographed from above, winding roads seen from a drone, teal & orange colour grading...

These effects are not necessarily bad. Some can even produce excellent photographs.

But their repetition reveals another phenomenon.

We break free from an institutional aesthetic only to adopt an algorithmic one.

The rules of the camera club are replaced by those of Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.

The image is no longer necessarily conceived for a print, a book or an exhibition. Its first task is to stop someone scrolling for a few seconds.

That naturally changes the way it is constructed.

Immediately recognisable colours, contrast, spectacular subjects, framing adapted to vertical formats, extraordinary locations, visual effects that can be understood instantly: increasingly, a photograph has to work before the viewer has even really started looking at it.

The freedom gained from older conventions can therefore become a new form of conformity.

The camera-club judge has sometimes simply been replaced by the algorithm.

From photographs we look at to images we consume

A few decades ago, a photograph had a good chance of being viewed on paper.

In a magazine, a book, an exhibition, an album or as a print.

Today, the vast majority of images are consumed within a feed.

A landscape photograph may appear for a few seconds between a humorous Reel, an advertisement, a recipe, a friend's holiday pictures and a news video.

Then the thumb keeps scrolling.

We have probably never produced and looked at so many images. But individually, we devote very little time to each one.

This abundance also creates a process of visual banalisation.

Some destinations that were once discovered through a handful of photographs are now seen from every possible angle before we have even set foot there. The Dolomites, Iceland, the Lofoten Islands, New York or the dunes of Namibia have been photographed, filmed, flown over and shown millions of times.

Drones have intensified the phenomenon. At first, they offered a genuinely new point of view. Then that viewpoint itself became familiar.

It is becoming extraordinarily difficult to produce a new image of a place when everyone already knows its aerial views, sunsets and best photographic locations before even arriving there.

Video even shifts the moment when the photograph is made

Another change seems even more profound to me.

For a very long time, taking a photograph meant, among other things, deciding when to press the shutter.

That is the essence of the decisive moment associated with Henri Cartier-Bresson: anticipating the fraction of a second when forms, movement and subject come together.

Digital photography had already begun to alter this practice with increasingly fast burst rates.

Video goes even further.

A frame extracted from UHD 4K video at 3840 x 2160 pixels contains approximately 8.3 megapixels. With UHD 8K at 7680 x 4320 pixels, that rises to approximately 33.2 megapixels.

For a website, social media, online publication, television and even some print uses, that resolution can be more than sufficient.

Of course, a frame extracted from video is not strictly equivalent to a photograph shot in RAW. The shutter speed chosen to produce natural-looking motion in video may create blur in an individual frame, while compression, bit depth or chroma subsampling may also limit how far the image can be processed.

But the principle remains.

With a sequence recorded at 25, 50, 60 frames per second or more, it becomes possible to choose the moment after the event has been recorded.

The decisive moment does not disappear: someone still has to recognise the interesting image.

But part of its technical dimension shifts.

The photographer once had to anticipate the moment and press the shutter at exactly the right time. Today, it is possible to record a sequence and then search for that moment during editing.

The choice of the moment can move from capture to selection.

That represents a considerable transformation of the photographic act.

From photographer to "content creator"

The vocabulary now used by camera manufacturers is revealing in itself.

They no longer speak only to photographers.

They speak to content creators.

Canon, for example, markets kits officially presented as being designed for content creators, with cameras intended simultaneously for photography, vertical video, streaming and social media.

Sony presents some of its cameras under the banner "The Choice of Creators" and has developed an entire environment called Creators' Cloud.

Nikon's pages devoted to the Z30, TikTok or vlogging also speak explicitly to content creators and place as much emphasis on video, sound, streaming and rapid transfer to social media as they do on photography.

This change in vocabulary is not insignificant.

The customer camera manufacturers are addressing is no longer necessarily someone who buys a camera primarily to produce photographs.

The same tool must be capable of producing a photograph, a video, a vertical Reel, a vlog, an interview, a time-lapse or a sequence intended for YouTube.

Photography becomes one component of a much broader category called content.

And the boundaries are becoming increasingly porous.

Someone can begin a sequence on a smartphone, use a few shots made with a drone, add images from a mirrorless camera, extract a still image from an 8K sequence, edit everything on a computer and publish the result on Instagram.

Are they a photographer? A videographer? A filmmaker? An influencer?

The term content creator neatly avoids having to choose.

Photography media are following the same evolution

It is also worth looking at some of the content devoted to photography on the Internet.

A significant proportion of videos and articles now focuses on equipment, software and methods designed to make image production easier or faster.

• Tests of new cameras.
• Lens comparisons.
• Autofocus.
• New Lightroom and Photoshop features.
• Presets.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Noise reduction.
• "Ten settings you need to change immediately."
• "Five mistakes every photographer makes."

There are, of course, still analyses devoted to photographers' work, their intentions or the way a particular photograph was constructed.

But they sometimes seem to be drowned out by technical content.

There is a curious paradox here: we talk a great deal about photography while ultimately talking relatively little about photographs.

And the phenomenon is nothing new.

In La Photo, written in 1976 with Patrick Chenz, Jean-Loup Sieff was already humorously describing the questions he was asked during discussions and exhibitions. According to him, most of them could be reduced to one question: "How was it done?"

He described, among other things, an exchange with a visitor who wanted to know which lens had been used to make a photograph. On learning that it was a 24mm, the visitor immediately seemed to have found an explanation for the image. Sieff then tried to bring the conversation back to what he considered essential: before asking which lens was used to make a photograph or which darkroom techniques were involved, one should first look at the image and consider what it makes us feel.

Fifty years later, technique and equipment continue to generate considerable interest.

I can see this on my own website, without of course being able to infer my readers' motivations from the statistics: the articles I devote to photographic equipment receive more visits than my photo reports, my photographic archives or articles devoted to the thought process that led to a particular photograph.

Yet these articles are not designed as laboratory tests. I write about lenses I have actually used, and whenever possible I illustrate them with photographs made while travelling or on assignment, in the kind of real-world conditions for which the equipment was purchased.

What are readers looking for when they come to these articles?

Technical specifications they could also find on the manufacturer's website? The opinion of a professional photographer who has actually used the lens in his work? Its strengths and weaknesses as experienced in the field? Or simply examples showing what can be achieved with it in real-world conditions, rather than photographs made specifically for a test within a short distance of the reviewer's home or office?

The statistics cannot tell me.

They simply show that there is still a strong demand for information about the tools of photography.

The Internet has given that interest a new scale. A specific camera or lens reference naturally corresponds to a Google search. It also provides an immediately identifiable subject for YouTube: reviews, comparisons, autofocus, settings, software, presets or new features related to artificial intelligence.

By contrast, it is much more difficult to search for a photograph, a photo report or the work of a photographer whose existence you do not yet know about.

The question Sieff raised in 1976 "How was it done?" therefore remains surprisingly relevant.

What has changed are the ways in which we find the answer.

So, has photography become an activity for older people?

Probably not.

Younger generations produce images constantly.

They take photographs with smartphones, mirrorless cameras or old digital compacts. They shoot video with action cameras. They use drones. They mix photography and video. Some are even rediscovering film.

Perhaps what is ageing is something else.

A certain definition of the photographer.

The photographer defined by their camera, their technical mastery, membership of a camera club, knowledge of a set of rules, and for whom the print is naturally the final stage of the photographic process.

That culture is not going to disappear. And it retains considerable richness.

This is precisely the paradox of the camera clubs mentioned at the beginning: their members possess experience that a few YouTube tutorials cannot easily replace.

But if that experience is to continue being passed on, it also requires accepting that the tools and some of the practices have changed.

A young photographer using a smartphone may have no interest in the MTF curve of a lens. But they may have a great deal to learn from an experienced photographer about light, positioning, anticipation, building a series or selecting images.

And the reverse is equally true: the experienced photographer can discover new ways of telling a story through moving images, drones or formats they might never previously have considered.

When the camera can handle exposure and focus almost entirely by itself, perspective can be corrected afterwards and a video sequence contains dozens of images every second, one question once again becomes central:

what still distinguishes a photographer from someone who simply produces images?

Probably less their camera or their mastery of rules than in the past.

Perhaps we need to return to something much simpler: knowing what we want to show, knowing why we are photographing it, developing a personal way of seeing and, among thousands of technically successful images, knowing which ones genuinely deserve to be kept.

Technology has made producing images extraordinarily easy.

It has not automated the photographer's eye.

And for a photographer who has been practising for several decades, perhaps the best way to continue to stand out amid this flood of images is not to chase every new trend, but to develop and assert a personal vision.

Equipment evolves, formats change and algorithms move from one aesthetic to another. A personal style, however, can allow a photograph to be recognised for what it shows and for the way its author sees the world, rather than for the camera with which it was made.

About the author

Sebastien Desnoulez is a photographer, author and image maker based in Paris. His work spans architectural photography, landscape photography and travel photography, with particular attention to composition, lines, light, blur and visual accidents. Trained in photography in the mid-1980s, he covered Formula 1 and reported from around the world before developing a fine art photography practice built around the tension between graphic rigour and visual instability. He also shares his technical experience through practical articles for passionate photographers, drawing on a strong visual culture acquired in both film and digital photography.