Photography Today

Photography has changed a lot over the past and from where traditional photography stood all those many years ago it now represent's three key areas, Social (Weddings, Social sites, Dating sites), Commercial (Marketing, Food and Beauty Ads), and Art.

Commercial photography is mainly a long line of professional photographer's who will work very hard to a marketing campaign brief, to create a selection of images that will make a target audience want to buy or invest in a product.

Art photographers are seen as the most creative photographers, and will normally want to dabble in traditional chemically based photography. Sometimes this category can mix with commercial photography, but at more likely on a freelance basis. The art photographer wants to innovate and post-modernise the conventional to play with our thoughts, thus in the scheme of marketing, making us more interested in a product.

These two areas have been around for the longest and have changed the way we look at our lives, but probably the most important type of photography to ever exist is Social photography.

A social photographer can be anyone, it starts with people who have no idea about photography and ends with the pros, so what has suddenly turned this profession in to socialism? The biggest most advance resource in the world was born in the 1950s, they called it the Internet and it would forever change our lives, yet it wasn't yet going to change it until a number of years later. In the last five years social networking started to really take off, the idea of being able to have your own space on the web that you and your friends can explore became a strong means of social status. Photography was only a link in to the social element at the beginning of social sites, it was only a means of representation of a individual, this soon changed as the websites became more established, and as we grew older and shared experiences online, photography started to create a timeline of our lives.

When everyone realised that they where now stamping posting there lives all over the internet for everyone to see, it was then that social photography really started to kick in, millions of photographs are uploaded daily as proving ground or as bragging rights to say from one person to another, 'My life is better than yours', it is fair to say that most people will deny this, maybe it sounds harsh but more than often most people won't even realise they are doing it. The most interesting type of photography to look at, that has been around since the birth of the first photograph, and it is wedding photography. The wedding photography of the past was collection of photographic objects that carried memories of a precious day, modern wedding photography is now a creative and decorative attempt to copy and paste this day of union on to the internet and share/show off to others.

Like I put it before bragging rights is a show off of 'my life is better than yours', but it is only the ground works of social photography, the rest is a mixture of documentary creative ability. The reason I have thought and explained this so much is because I am very interested to know if the future of digital imagery could have the same drastic influence on our lives like it has done today. What is in store for us, and what will it lead us too?