From time to time I see one of the street view cars driving around in the SF Bay Area and start to think. If you don’t know this is how Google (and presumably others) get the pictures you see when you activate street view in Google Maps. If you’re interested you can find out more about street view on the Google Street View Help site.
We have satellite photos which bring detail closer and closer with each upgrade. We have cars driving the streets taking 360 degree pictures and surveillance cameras recording all that goes on around them. You can purchase remote control plains, helicopters, and blimps from which you can attach a camera and get pictures which were previously restricted to a small set of people. People are sending rockets up with cameras and dropping them in lakes and oceans in homemade submarines.
We also have all of the photographers, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of them, moving about the planet taking and posting their pictures to online sites. Those sites indexing, flagging, tagging, and making them available to everyone who cares to look.
We are already at the point where stock photography agencies are asking people to be more creative. There are enough pictures of the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge, a woman looking forlorn, and the jock with the game winning (goal/home run/touchdown). All of the major sites have been done, and done, and done again.
There will come a time when you will be able to find a picture of any place, almost any time, from almost any angle. When that happens what will it mean for the art and profession of photography?
I read in photography discussions that may feel that the quality isn’t what people expect and that there will always be a place for the professional, but what if that isn’t true? When you can get a point-and-shoot camera with a 1o megapixel sensor and take as many pictures as you want the likelihood is you will be able to crop something interesting out of it.
Software is getting better and can already recognize sites, there are programs out there that will stich images together. Put the two together and suddenly you have entire towns available in 3D just from all of the 2D pictures taken by tourists.
What does it mean? I don’t know, it’s something I think about from time to time. Something I would never have dreamed 20 years ago with my trusty Pentax and rolls of B&W film. Everyone has to adapt, and perhaps professional photographers will adapt with is (like so many have moved and are moving to digital).
But with as much change as there has been since I started, I wonder what it will be like in another 20 years.
