Tag: world

Thoughts 27/5/24

Do you remember life before the internet?

Do I remember life before the Internet?

Oh yes I remember it very well. I came from a generation that was around just before computer technology started to appear. When I was at school I was probably in my fifth year as a senior at around the age of 16 and it was only just then, that computer technology was starting to appear on the school curriculum, as I was preparing to leave education.

When I left school and started my first job I remember my first months wages were spent purchasing a Sinclair ZX 81 microcomputer, wow this was amazing. I was a bit confused at first though because I opened the box and I plugged it in and I just expected it to work, it was a bit of a shock that you actually had to learn how to program the device before you got anything out of it, however I soon mastered the programming of the basic computer language and I was soon able to program some good little games. Next I moved onto the Commodore 20 a lovely little computer but all my friends were buying the better quality Commodore 64. From the Vic 20 I went down the route of trying the Amstrad Computers, i think it was called the 364 or 464 depending on whether you had Green screen or a colour VDU.

To be honest i still look today at buying an old Sinclair ZX 81 or spectrum, little collectors pieces now but I did enjoy it before the Internet kicked in.

I was just a standard youngster of the day who would go out with his friends and be playing football, cricket, marbles or conkers dependent on what season it was. We used to have great life climbing trees, making bows and arrows, catapults you name it. I feel sorry for the kids nowadays because they don’t have that freedom.

I went out for a meal with my wife a few weeks ago and there was a family of five, mum dad and three kids and I should imagine the kids were only About 12 years old ranging down to a youngster that was probably two years old sitting in a high chair. Every single one of them was on a computer device of some kind or a mobile phone or iPad and I just said to my wife at that point,”look at that, the art of conversation has totally disappeared”. There’s an entire family sitting there and not one of them was speaking to each other. They were all too engrossed in what was going on in other peoples worlds, rather than discussing their own families funny moments, concerns, or achievements.

Yes I do miss the time pre Internet. I think everyone was a better conversationalist back then, to say something to someone you had to walk around to their house, knock on the door, see if they were in and then tell them what you wanted to say face to face.

That dosen’t happen now, we have now produced a generation of people who just don’t do conflict unless they are hidden behind a screen and a keyboard, and that is where I believe most of the anger and hatred spouts from nowadays.

There’s no going back and I’m not saying we should, there was a lot of bad back in those days that is probably the reason children especially, don’t enjoy the freedoms today that we had back then.

So it’s horses for courses, we must move forward with the times, yes we probably had wonderful childhoods but we must not get stuck in the past and genuinely have to evolve, however much we dislike it.

I remember my parents fretting about the future back in the 70s, we are just clones of them and the never ending circle of life just trundles on.

Peace to you all.

More Camera statistics

Back in March 2023 in the early days of this site I threw some figures out there regarding the amount of cameras on the planet up to and including 2022, you can read that post here: Vintage Camera figures

In this post I’m going show a graph and some figures regarding the decline of DSLR ( Digital Single Lens Reflex ) in the last 12 yrs.

It’s becoming obvious that people are ditching the traditional camera frame for the mobile phone and tablet approach and the figures you see in decline for traditional cameras have probably gone in the total reverse and multiplied many times over for the latter. It hurts the brain to realise the total amount of picture capture devices out there, as well as the waste that this produces as a result of what has become a throwaway society in which we all must share some guilt.

I can honestly state that in the last 12 months I have purchased close to 60 Cameras, 18 radios about 14 portable cd and tape players and not one of them has been disposed of much to my wife’s displeasure. (To be honest she’s very supportive of what I do as it keeps me out of mischief.)

Anyway I’m starting to drift a bit, so in my last post back in 23 I think I stated that there were estimated in 2022 to be something like 45 Billion photo capture devices on the planet, enough for 5.5 units per person that inhabits this Ball floating in space, a phenomenal number. And now there are probably even more.

The traditional camera is being ditched though and as you can see in this graph supplied by Statista It is a seriously declining part of the consumer market.

DSLR decline courtesy of Statista

The number of digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera shipments worldwide has been on a downhill ride since 2012. In 2023, a total of around 1.18 million DSLR cameras were shipped by *CIPA companies all over the world. Despite the decline in shipments, the average price of digital cameras per unit has continued to remain stable.

In eleven years the annual sales of a DSLR has dropped by almost 16 million units in 2012 to a paltry 1.18 million in 2023, as I’ve stated the sales of mobile devices have probably quadrupled and risen in the opposite direction.

The question is, are traditional cameras going to be more of an antiquity in the near future or will there always be a demand? There are so many out there that I can’t see them commanding any good price through rarity as there are just so many out there.

I learnt my trade in photography back in the late 70s early 80s. Back then we did everything by hand from mixing the chemicals, manually printing using enlargers and various types of papers, dryers and drums. Dodging and shading, manually touching up any defects as work was produced. We even made dupe trans, did letrasetting and made the boss man tea. A computer does it all now….apart from the tea but I bet that’s on the horizon.

The chemicals we mixed were in 100 litre batches and were pure poison. E6 Colour developer contained Hydroquinone, and the final bath (Stabiliser) all this chemical was pure formaldehyde, we never had masks or gloves back then and after mixing a batch of these chemicals you were out in the yard for a good half hour coughing your guts up. There were many other chemicals involving ammonia and powdered citric acid and these were just a few of what we used. If you could only imaging the shear hell we went through for you to get your photographs.

Probably why I have such bad Bronchitis and Asthma nearly 45 years on.

What I’m saying is the digital world of today is immense progression and removes all that danger away from the business. It’s killed the business as much as any other big business out there. But it’s probably not as much fun or as much pleasure as doing the whole process by hand using traditional skills. Heck I bet that will kick start a conversation between the traditionalists and modernists.

Whatever way we look at things, time moves on, progression is always going to occur and we must (Even though we don’t always want to) adapt to change. And it’s going to change for everyone big time in the next decade or so.

Even though it’s like saying goodbye for a final time to a dear old friend. I enjoyed my role I played in it.

Supplementary notes

*CIPA stands for “Camera & Imaging Products Association”, which is the trade association of the Japanese photo industry.

The section “digital cameras” includes the following producers: Olympus, Casio, Canon, Kodak, Sanyo Electric, Sigma, Seiko Epson, Sony, Tomy, Nikon, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Hoya, Ricoh.

Vintage Camera figures

Bilora Bella

Cameras go back a good few years since the first photograph was taken back in 1826 – 1827 by Nicephore Niepce. Back then he used a bitumen substance on a pewter plate as his light sensitive base for his photo of a rooftop in France, the exposure was somewhere around 8 hours, oh how things have progressed.

I’m putting this piece together to give the reader an idea of just how many cameras were produced between then and now if I can pull sufficient data together. The issue here is that cameras took many forms, from boxes with holes punched into them through to disposable items that were popular throughout the eighties and that are now seeing a resurgence in popularity due to people wanting physical prints rather than trawling through many thousands of images they have stored on their electronic storage devices.

What defines Vintage?

Well that’s a good question. Even good old digital is classified as a vintage if you go back to the 80s and observe what was around then. Camera companies pump out version after version of cameras each one supposedly better than the last, I should imagine almost every family on the planet has an old camera of some sort in their possession, those old Kodak Brownies et al were absolutely everywhere. Truthfully I’d expect anything over 10 years old to be vintage, they are also reducing in popularity now due to the appearance of the smartphone….. as I have said previously, everyone is now a photographer.

Some figures then..

It’s pretty much impossible to compute the really old lines of cameras as there were so many brands and very little in the way of monitoring output, sales of the big brands were immense as we know, the likes of Kodak monopolised the photographic arena for decades and they absolutely flooded the markets world wide.

Digital cameras peaked in sales of 121 Million individual worldwide unit sales in 2010 deemed to be the height of camera demand pre Smartphone arrival on the scene. Since then sales worldwide have decreased to about 8 Million units a year in 2021 and continue to decline, that said there are an awful lot of units out there more than likely stuck at the back of a drawer or hidden away elsewhere within the household.

The big number is this though. According to Visual technology and investor LDV Capital the numbers of cameras around the world will have risen to at least 45 Billion by 2022. Ok, that does include the smart phone and almost 770 Million CCTV cameras as well. Think about that figure for a moment, there are currently 8 billion people on this planet and this figure equates to there being 5.5 cameras available to each and every one of them. A phenomenal number you’ll agree.

So…

The sole purpose of this page to me is just to highlight the amount of cameras out there, I want to do my little bit to repair, recycle and repurpose a small number of them but I also want to point out that there is no shortage of stock….😎

See a further post on DSLR figures: More Camera statistics