Everyone Is a Photographer, But Not Every Picture Is a Photograph | MediaShift | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it
From mediashift.org - September 19, 2016 10:14 AM

A picture shows something. A photo tells a story.

 

Anyone can put a camera to their face and press the button. It’s called taking a picture. The ability to transform a picture into something interesting – a photo – is a skill.

 

It’s estimated that about four billion people will have the ability to put a smartphone camera to their face in 2017. One conservative estimate puts the number of images that will be taken at 1.2 trillion. Should all four billion of us average 10 photos a day, that number exceeds 14 trillion.

 

News is driven by imagery and, while the use of video online is ever-increasing, photography will always have its place. Unlike days of old (which aren’t all that long ago), where photos were by and large taken by news photographers, photography is now everyone’s domain.

 

Using the U.S. as a guide, just over 50,000 professional photographers were registered in 2015. The number of smartphones in the US in 2016 is expected to be just over 200 million. Allowing for some variance, the smartphone user to photographer ratio sits at about 4,000:1....