A follow-on thought from my “Everyone is a Photographer” post:

Andrew Brown of The Guardian hits the nail on the head:

[Technological advances] may have diminished the value of a professional photographer’s skills. But they couldn’t eliminate the need for professionalism: the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones. A talented, hardworking and lucky amateur can produce wonderful pictures on the best days. But that will be one picture in a hundred. A professional can produce something that is nearly as good as their best 50 times in a hundred. That’s why they are worth employing.

But many professionals make their money from photographs that are no longer news – the stock images sold by picture libraries. This is the market that the web will devastate.

Amateur photographers are the long-tail sharecroppers of the photography business (applying an Internet business observation by Nicholas Carr). Lots of people creating quality products with little or no revenue created by any individual product.

But there is still room for professionals to succeed, by focusing on the process and selling the experience, providing the service and the trust in the consistent brilliance of the service at a particular moment in time. Similar to musicians, the profits are less in the product (distributed music, regardless of medium) and more in the experience. Professional writers did not disappear when books became easy to mass-produce. Just because the tools are easier does not mean the skilled craftsmen are eliminated. They just need to change and re-market what they provide.