I worked for a company that regularly does half in person and half remote employees. You could choose either or. The problem with being the remote worker on a partially in-person team is that you miss all the face-time and exposure to new opportunities simply because you are not a person but a task completing widget.
You are never the presenter at company events. Nobody outside your team can recognize you. Nobody talks to you except to get something or clarify information. People can casually take credit for your work as you aren’t there to defend it. You lose out on all the background information like conference funding availability or the cool new job in Innovation.
You miss all the little opportunities for going the extra mile as you never look over your colleagues shoulder to see how they do their job and nobody looks over yours.
So much of success is being in the right place at the right time to meet the right person and that can’t happen as much remotely.
Lolz. I'm sure you wouldn't mind using pictures of mulleted '80s dude in your advertising. And in 20 years, all these bearded gentlemen being photographed today will look so silly. Fancy a NY skyline with a couple of extra towers?
The problems with professional photography have nothing to do with durability and everything to do with technological advance in the overall process. The easier it gets to take good pics and tout them to the whole world, the more competition there is, the lower prices are inevitably going to get.
Photographers are like recording musicians, their bread is becoming tied to real-life presence - something that remains unique and effectively not scalable.
Stock photography has to catch up with lifestyle, technology, fashion, society, culture and architecture, among others. On top of that, stock sites sell news images as well.
So no, there always will be something to be photographed.
Sure, there will always be a market for hyperlocal and hyper-relevant stuff, but most of it is fairly timeless. Many of those landscape photos will be good 30 years from now.
Add in that an image competes globally and is infinitely scalable and that is essentially perfect competition with the prices to match.
There are trends for what looks good. If you look through some stock photos you can easily spot things uploaded years ago just from the style and quality alone. Just like all UIs are essentially the same thing, but you can tell which era the XP windows decorations came from.
But there is an upper limit to consumption. I know we keep pushing to see how much we can consume, but ultimately some FPS times the number of seconds in a day..
Wait, why? Because eventually everything will end up in the public domain? Not arguing for or against anything here but Shutterstock is the distributor not the creator, so they theoretically never "loose importance" in the scenario where stock photography hits a ceiling, right?
I attended an elite private high school ($30,000 a year). The school gamed everything for them. It wrote their essays, created leadership positions for everyone, and made sure to spread the applications around so that every student in the references could be “once in a generation.”
One guy who went to Princeton used a flagship story of “building a forest”. The school was redoing its grounds and hired a bunch of homeless people to do it as they worked for cheap cash. They let him “oversee” it as a social initiative.
Another kid got into Columbia by creating a “nationwide startup innovation movement.” His parents paid the school to book all these convention centres and they flew him out to chill at these fictional events. They claimed all the funds from the events went to startups. They claimed to find over 50 startups and sent each a small check for $30. They sent random startups $30 and used it as a claim to funding innovation.
With grades, they had an internal grade to allow for actually rigorous education, but then they would multiply the grade by 1.2 to get your “public school grade.” That’s the grade reported to universities.
Oh and the teacher left the room for AP tests and we were taught how to efficiently “come to group conclusions.”
The only thing that kept them from doing that kind of stuff for everyone was the SAT as plenty of AP National Scholars couldn’t crack 1800 on the damn thing.
We won over a million dollars in our 60 person class in scholarship money off these absurdities as most of them don’t ask about the SAT.
You are never the presenter at company events. Nobody outside your team can recognize you. Nobody talks to you except to get something or clarify information. People can casually take credit for your work as you aren’t there to defend it. You lose out on all the background information like conference funding availability or the cool new job in Innovation.
You miss all the little opportunities for going the extra mile as you never look over your colleagues shoulder to see how they do their job and nobody looks over yours.
So much of success is being in the right place at the right time to meet the right person and that can’t happen as much remotely.