Wired on Friday: Back in September, Kodak announced a new addition to their range of digital cameras. The DCS Pro14n sells for $4,000, and has caused a minor frisson in the world of professional photography. It has, as one geek described it to me, "megapixels in the double digits". Which is to say, its images have a finer level of detail than that of its film equivalent. The digital camera - in theory at least - is now as good as a 35mm camera.
Such advance spurred dozens of articles in the professional photography press, asking: "Is film dead?" An old question to ask about technology. Painters asked the same question of portraiture at the eve of photography. Printers asked the same of books when the first CD-Rom appeared.
But these questions have always turned out to be rather incidental to the revolutionary changes that new technology has produced. Like the old NRA adage about guns, it's not digital cameras that are going to do the killing - it's the people who are wielding them.
And it's not the expensive, professional-only 35mm film equivalents at the top of the digital camera market that is posing a threat, it's the spread of cheap devices at the very bottom. And it's not film they're aiming to kill - it's the very livelihood of a professional photographer.
Take Mark Stone's experience. Mark is an internet geek, not a photographer- but he did just get married, which makes him that most precious thing to a working pro photographer: a customer. Wedding photo commissions are the lifeblood of the jobbing photographer.
Mark watched - and documented online - as his hired professional photographer struggled to deal with the barrage of threats to her status, and her profits, at a modern, digitally enhanced, marriage.
At the wedding, every shot she carefully lined up was followed by a clatter of shutters. Every guest with a camera stood behind her, she complained, taking advantage by snapping the same shot.
After the event, Mark's hired professional gave low-resolution proofs to the couple to select which shots to make into glossy prints. She apologised for the degraded quality - but explained that the low quality was quite deliberate. If they were any better, a less scrupulous bride and groom could digitally scan the proof sheets, return the proofs with their apologies, and then print copies on their PC for their album without paying. These amateur scans would not be as good as a professionally developed set, of course - but they would be good enough.
And when Stone asked for digital copies of the photographs he did select, the photographer again apologised, saying that if she did that, he might give free, perfect digital copies to all the other friends and relatives who might buy from her. In a nutshell, the couple's PC would be as good at making prints as the wedding photographer's own system.
As a veteran of the internet revolution, Stone recognised the battle that his photographer was fighting. Like so many domains touched by high-tech, "photography", he noted, "continues to get cheaper and easier, closing the gap between what is available to the amateur and what requires a professional."
While a digital camera that costs four grand and is just as good as a an old-fashioned 35mm is a significant advance, far more revolutionary are the thousands of people wielding cheap digital cameras that are simply good enough. They can take an endless number of photos with these cameras, editing out the numerous bad pictures and selecting the accidentally decent. They can edit and develop them without the need of a darkroom or processing costs. And they can pool and copy them to their hearts content.
It's a process that is a recognisable and widespread side-effect of the digital revolution all across the media world. The constant drop in the price of the tools media professionals use to create, distribute and reproduce their skills; the replacement of deliberation with overkill and careful selection. And all, not as a vocation or career, but as a hobby.
Call it "amateurisation": the slow bleed of many of the skills that professionals use to differentiate themselves from the fray.
That's not to say that amateurs are always better than professionals. In fact, there are almost always far worse. But there are a damn sight more of them, and by force of numbers they'll force their way to the same rough quality as a single professional.
Photographers are not the only ones hit by the amateurisation of technology. The same type of television camera I've seen used by professional cameramen to film prime-time British TV shows is in a Silicon Valley electronics shop for less than $3,000. With that an Apple laptop and a bootleg copy of Final Cut Pro, you could turn out production-level TV in your bedroom.
Sometimes even the bedroom is unnecessary - busking musicians sit in the street next to stacks of their own CDs, produced and pressed on pound-per-hour cybercafe computers. They're not as far along in their decline, but professional video and audio production are feeling the breath of the amateurs on their necks.
I can only sympathise. The amateurisation that is swamping photography and spilling out into these trades has already transformed a world much closer to my home. In his essay, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurisation of Publishing, New York Prof Clay Shirky notes that: "Prior to the Web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing." And, for the most part, those words are written by unpaid amateurs.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the journalist is out of a job, or the pro photographer, or the cameraman, or studio technician. But it does mean that the professions - so often protected by their training and their institutions from the ravages of a changing job market - will have to change the way they work as fast as any casual worker.
And if you are a professional, you might want to look on the bright side. There's one last step after amateurisation that technology brings - automation. A research group at Washington University's announced the prototype of a robotic wedding photographer. At least when the amateurs take over, you can gripe about the quality. When the machines take your job, there's no-one left to care.
