Take A Look At This Discussion About The Future Of Photography From 1990

Over in Google Groups, a photographic discussion has emerged but what makes this one particularly interesting is that it was started on 18 December 1990! 

The group, which is almost 26-years-old, were discussing the future of photography with a Carl Madson asking: "Seeing as how 2001 is just a little over a decade away, I was wondering what our resident sages/crazy people thought might be happening in the realm of photography/imaging...etc in ten years (time)."

He goes on to ask if people think film will still be popular, what percentage of people will be using digital cameras, if video cameras will replace stills and if home-editing will become common place. 

The 2016 answer to his questions are: yes, film is still popular among some groups, however the majority of people are not only using digital cameras but smartphones to capture photographs, video cameras haven't taken over and Adobe are an incredibly popular software designer who created Lightroom, something most photographers can't live without now.

With points such as: 'It's much easier to pass a stack of prints among a group of people than to set up a viewing session on the TV. Similarly with photo albums.' and that 'prints can be easily mailed to friends and relatives' appearing in the discussion, I think it's easy to say that back in 1990, we didn't think that come 2016 we'd be sat on a couch with a device in our hands that connects to the internet without a cable and can be used to view / send images anywhere in the world at the click of a button. In fact, not surprisingly, there's no mention of smartphone photography which I'm sure the younger generations of today who are duck pout, selfie-crazed will find hard to believe! 

For camera fans, we've seen the emergence of Micro Four Thirds (MFT) and Mirrorless cameras as well as more memory squeezed into memory cards that aren't growing in size. Drones were a huge part of 2016 with wedding photographers even using them on shoots and mods for smartphones that add 'cameras' to the front of them have appeared from the likes of camera giants such as Hasselblad. 

As someone born in the late eighties, it's rather amazing how far technology has come in just 30 years and it will certainly be interesting to see where it's headed. So, in the spirit of the group set up back in the nineties, what do you think the future of photography looks like? Answers on a postcard... I mean in the comments below.