Looking back, my first experience with “convergence” happened sitting in a movie house in Boston circa 1965. I was a teenager, aspiring photographer, and serious fan of French new wave cinema. I was watching a film by Jean-Luc Godard when the moving images suddenly became interspersed with captivating still images: a face distressed, a look back over the shoulder, a moment of joy. The still photographs were profoundly powerful and, more importantly, fell seamlessly in step with the moving images. The final scene in Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” comes to mind as well, when the lead character is frozen in a still image that sums up the realization of his existential dilemma. The still image flowing from the moving image, and vice versa.

For the past many decades the moving image and the still image have prospered independently. When a young person was interested in images, usually they would make the choice to pursue film school or photography school, and then to pursue either a career in film or video, or go in the direction of still photography. Each of those avenues had myriad career paths, and each career path could take years to master.

Enter the computer, and digital imaging. When I first became professionally involved with digital imaging circa 1991, scanning slides into Photoshop to create photo-illustrations for magazine covers, I started attending Mac user groups. I was struck by the way different professions were pulled towards the magnetic core that the Apple computer and Photoshop had become. One Mac user group I attended was held in a hospital’s amphitheater, populated largely by doctors, and the talk was all about photography and Photoshop! Another user group was attended by architects and graphic designers (who were, at the time, wary of anything not vector based). Clearly when so many industries are using the same tools, there is going to be a convergence of industries, lateral integration of jobs (and sadly the loss of jobs). I use a computer and Photoshop; my client uses a computer and Photoshop; at what point is my customer going to say, “Hey, I can do that, and better yet I can make more money doing that myself…”? Integration, Convergence.

Here we are in 2008, with digital imaging standard fare in the aforementioned trades. There have been sea changes, caused by digital imaging, in both still and motion picture photography, as well as countless other industries including graphic design, medicine, law enforcement, architecture, real estate, and the list goes on. For photographers and videographers especially, there have been several wake-up-calls in the past year alone, that are worth paying attention to and exploring.

When a young person asks me for advice on getting into a career in photography, the first thing I say to them is “learn everything you can about video.” By the time someone has asked me that question they are well along the learning curve in the art of the still image, but making money from still images is another matter and there is no use pigeonholing a start-up career in the visual arts. The devices we use to make images, the software we use to process images, the devices we use to view images, all are capable or becoming capable of handling both still and moving images.
 
The future looks bright for a convergence of the two media, yet there are many pitfalls and market forces that will determine when and how the convergence of still and moving images will come about. Send along your comments and ideas. Let’s explore some of the issues and evolving technologies that are leading still and motion picture photography on a converging path. I suspect even the manufacturers would like to hear from the creative community on this subject, since they are spending great resources in developing products that are ushering convergence onward.
(Posted by Steve Weinrebe, Copyright 2008, All Right Reserved.)