Ron Shoots

The quantum leap in connectivity over the past few years is amazing. I remember reading, and being profoundly affected, by a 1995 book “On Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte. My take-away premise at that time was if your business can be digital then it should be digital. In 1995, the internet was only a few years old and most of us connected via dial-up. I remember asking Rob Norris, a much more tech-savvy guy than me, what was this “WWW” thing? Photography, of course, could easily be an entirely digital process. In fact, our company had just begun to experiment with digital the previous year. Reading the book accelerated my enthusiasm for transforming our studio.

Today, jets really don’t travel much faster, but the data sure does. I’m at the DFW airport, checking email and updating this blog on a high-speed T-Mobile wireless connection. If I wanted, I could have a 50Mb file on my laptop in 13 minutes. I left Maui 7 hours ago, and I’ll be at our Charlotte, NC studio in another 2 hours.

Our studio now, and for the last 6 or 7 years, has been 100% digital. F-I-L-M is a 4-letter word. Sometimes we also have 4-letter words for digital, but those days are now few and far between. Computers rarely crash and software tends to work most of the time. Yes, hard drives still fail but now we have a solid back-up process so our workflow hits nothing more than a small speed bump.

Digital has completed transformed the stock photo business and the rate of change is growing as high resolution cameras and high speed connections are now available to any aspiring photographer anywhere in the world.

Today, almost 12 years after “On Being Digital” was published, 80+ million people have a MySpace page and 70,000 new blogs are created every day. We rarely buy software in a box and transfer gigabytes without a second thought.

Can’t wait to see what’s next!