A noun is a useful type of sound that describes:

People

Places

Things

and Ideas.

What is interesting in a photo is:

a decisive moment (time sensitive)

a place (not as time sensitive)

people

things

There could be an entire branch of photography called:

“I went all the way there” photography.

This type of picture brings the exotic right to you.

The camera was brought to a place very very far away and then a picture was taken.

Sometimes the pictures can be quite dull and lacking in panache

but those are disregarded because of the overwhelming interest in the fact that

they went all the way there.

Madagascar.

The South Pole.

Iceland.

The bottom of the ocean.

A market in Egypt.

A cab ride in Rio.

The Eiffel tower.

Usually a postcard type shot, ideal and too beautiful (go wonderfully gritty) will be enough to get you into a C class gallery.

Law of conservation of attractive profits

“When modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at one stage in the value chain, conservation of integration means the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary
products will emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Computer hardware used to be hugely profitable. 1960’s to 1990’s, then the price of that stuff fell because it got commoditized. It became as cheap and common as coal or coffee.Then the profitable are turned to software, and now that area is being hollowed out by open source platforms, and so the real profitability is moving to Google and cloud computing management.

This is what happened to photography; film turned to digital. The value of a photographer used to be the bold fact that he owned a camera and was competent with it. That has become a modular area now. Everyone has a damn camera. And so the way to become special and therefore profitable is to be a different kind of photographer. One who sells a speciality, or their charisma, or a particular style.

In the past, something was considered eternal and profitable, until some new technology or force moved in and disrupted the way of life. Buggy whip makers, candle dippers, cotton mill workers in the American south, and town criers were all secure in their jobs, until some new thing hit the market and their jobs and manufactured goods were suddenly worth almost nothing. This same myopia is occurring right now; some profitable thing in our midst will have the rug pulled out from beneath it and we will be shocked and dismayed all over again as jobs and profits evaporate. (Like a housing bubble popping.)

The trick is to try and predict where that will happen next. A clue is the trend of history. Elbow grease and sweat used to be enough to survive. Now it seems that even University educated people can’t find jobs and are heading back for a second degree. More and more people will have to live by their wits by finding the niche within the niche where they can be useful.

Driving forces in the economy.

Why would people buy one of those?

What distinguishes one product or service from another?

Price. Two things are practically identical but one is cheaper.

Technology makes products and services evolve in specific ways.

Things will get cheaper.

Things will get faster. Time involved approaches Zero.

Things will get more comfortable.

Distances will get shorter.

Effort will be reduced.

Getting across the ocean from England to North America used to take over a month in a sail powered boat and was an awful experience.

Previous to improved sail and boat technology, it was nigh impossible to go at all.

Now by boat it takes a week and by airplane a matter of hours.

Getting from Winnipeg to Edmonton would take weeks by horse and oxen cart.

Now there are nice smooth roads and cars that can go 100 mph.

To communicate with people who are miles away would take days because the letter carrier would physically have to tote the handwritten piece of paper there.

From source to end user the chain of steps gets abbreviated by technology.

The links in the chain, the necessary steps in the procedure get removed by tricks of technology.

Where a human once had to handle something manually in the procedure of making the thing, now a computer or robot or motor is seen there.

Humans used to be needed as operators in the telephone system. Battalions of secretaries were once needed to type out records and correspondence for business.

Each elevator had some one to run it and skillfully stop it at each floor of the skyscraper.

Even the migration of humans from rural villages and farms to cities could be said to be a use of technology where effort is reduced, price is lowered and time is saved.

Salt and sugar used to be so expensive that only the very few could ever see or taste them.

Shoes, cameras, and typewriters used to have skilled repairmen to service them. That link has been removed by either lowering the cost of a new item to the point where spending money on a repair would be foolish, or in the case of typewriters, the technology had morphed into a shape where the machine is not needed anymore.

The manufactured world around us only seems to get cheaper and therefore commoditized and globalized.

There is constant downward pressure on prices from competition. If an innovation can be used to bring the same type of item to market cheaper then it will be done. It seems irresistible, like two magnets attracting each other.

If one factory could figure out how to make nuts and bolts a bit cheaper than four other factories around it, and can also claim the quality is not harmed, then it will be brought to market, and they should sell more than the competition and profit mightily.

What technology wants:

Things to become cheaper.

Things to become ubiquitous.

Things to become more comfortable, easier, less sweaty, and simple. (simple for the mind and for the body)

Time and distances to become shorter.

Using these ideas, we could say that in the future, travel will want to be like a Star Trek tele porter. Communication will be like telepathy. Things are already spookily like that with instant messages from Twitter, Facebook etc… bleeping at us all the time from our hand held devices. Time and distance has been reduced to zero. The telephone, which was once a miracle, looks like a clunky way to communicate now.

“When all things are fake, the fake becomes real” Umberto Eco