Trey Ratcliff

The photos are credited to Trey Ratcliff, http://www.stuckincustoms.com/

I think Trey Ratcliff (http://www.stuckincustoms.com/) and many, many others, would disagree. The market isn't being "eroded" by people giving away their work. The market was "eroded" by the fact that there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of people in the U.S. alone who are now skilled enough to regularly take what were once considered "professional" level photographs. There is simply too much supply. If you want to blame someone, blame Canon and Nikon and Olympus and Sigma. Blame capitalism for giving us such unprecedented wealth that huge swaths of the population now have free time to study, scout, take, edit, and publish photos. Don't blame the artists.

> Besides, taking these are not trivial, so it does show some "ability". Technical ability. As in, the ability to operate devices to their specifications. There can be insights in this which have yet to be widely learned. For example, the recent rise in popularity of high speed cameras as a form of motion-still photography (http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2009/10/13/a-new-kind-of-photography/) is a good example. But panoramas? While there have been a lot of advances in panorama stitching software, but as for technique, the only real recent change has been an increase in the use of the technique for gathering ultra-high res images (or ultra-shallow depth of field) for more conventional shots. > But maybe you only value artistic ability? To be honest? In this age of pushbutton HDR, cameras that can recover from 2 stop underexposures in post, and a digital darkroom that can completely change your photo infinitely... Artistic talent is one of the few techniques that cannot be bought, it has to be learned. And this piece, while worthy of praise as a difficult shot is not of particular artistic value. To me, anyways.

You could probably say similar for Hans Zimmer's "office"[0]. [0] http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2010/01/29/the-secret-lair-of-hans-zimme…

Google+ does that: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2013/09/25/raw-photos-in-the-cloud-now-o…

Most of them are still pretty Mac heavy, I said 'moving to PC'. The agencies I work with and worked at have begun to purchase more and more PCs over Macs. Adobe Creative Cloud apps tend to work better on PC now so this is a big reason. The areas I mentioned (video, photography, audio, gamedev, 3d etc) are moving to hefty PC machines that need 64GB/128GB/256GB+ of ram, latest GPUs, many drives and many cores (16-40+)[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], no iMac can do that and Mac Pros have left the building. Many of the PCs are cheaper and more powerful as well, custom built ones especially. Many web developers or graphic designers still on iMacs, but the other areas on PC. Basically, anyone that needed a Mac Pro, where an iMac or Macbook Pro was not enough, has probably switched/back to PC. You'll see most people do this around 2013-2014 when the Mac Pro was un-cheese grated and put in a jet engine/trashcan, looks cool but too expensive and not for hands-on pros or expanded easily. One video/photography/3d guy I know is running 40+ core/thread machines 256GB RAM, hard for Mac Pros to compete with that[9][10]. [1] https://www.creativebloq.com/advice/the-digital-artists-guide-to-switc… [2] https://www.slrlounge.com/apple-is-dead-to-me-trey-ratcliff-mac-vs-pc/ [3] https://www.stuckincustoms.com/2017/02/10/switching-from-mac-to-window… [4] https://petapixel.com/2016/12/03/im-leaving-apple-microsoft-switching-… [5]…