1000, 2000, 2500000000, …

With so many photos produced every second is there any room left for photographers?

Facebook is the biggest photo sharing website with 2.5 billion photos uploaded monthly according to Facebook blog. That translates into roughly 1000 photos per second. Can you imagine that? 1 second – 1000 new photos uploaded, 2 seconds – 2000 new photos uploaded, …

Should photographers be worrying that soon any possible photograph will be captured and published? At first I thought it could be then I recalled the old theorem about monkey writing all plays by Shakespeare and an actual test. When University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts setup an experiment with real monkeys, the most they got was 3 pages of letter S.

The same happens in photography. With almost everyone possessing a camera we get a lot of me in front of something and here is something famous photos. In some sense most of 1000 photos uploaded every second are very repetitive kind of like printing the same letter with some variations. At the same time there are still very few photographs like this that is very much different kind of photography.

I hope I did not offend anyone with such comparison. That was not my point. I myself have a lot of family photographs in famous places. I very much enjoy sharing them with my family. My only point is that there is another kind of photography that is worth sharing with the world.