I’ve always taken the rising tide as another reason to push myself harder. I feel that the removal of the technical skill from photography means that we are now free from chasing technical perfection and we are more free than ever to use all the bits of knowledge we have acquired over the years to make the images we see in our mind’s eye.
I feel like instagram has killed the single image deader than dead, a single image is no longer good enough at all. It has to be a series of images. People can get lucky, sure, but one offs are just that. Luck is luck, but if you have skill you can produce over and over.
Photography as a technical pursuit has died long ago. Autofocus, instant image review, subject detection, image stabilization have automated all the hard parts. Any idiot can buy a camera, point it at something pretty, and trip the shutter. It’ll probably come out well.
Photography as a commercial profession has become incredibly tough. There are still some genres that can be a useful career, but landscape, journalism, stock have devalued so much so as to be almost worthless. Newspapers don’t have staff photographers any more. Neither do magazines.
But personal photography is alive and well. Nobody is going to capture my memories but me. Nobody is going to express themselves like I do. Which is why I disagree with the following sentence:
Perhaps there’s no money in that any more, but that doesn’t make it dead. To me anyway.
Maybe, but I would wait for the actual results from lens + sensor combinations before making my opinion.
Just to do a bit of quick math: suppose that you need 16 MP for an actual image, which allows for a bit of cropping and the overcooking algorithms of the typical cellphone to do their work. Now \sqrt{247/16} \approx 4, so this gizmo allows you a 4x zoom. Even if the lens has enough optical resolution (which I doubt), I would not rush to sell my tele lenses yet.
While I agree with what you are saying, the flipside of the above is how little the features above help the clueless amateur. Yes, some part of the image, selected by an AI, will be in sharp focus, and IS will compensate for holding a mobile phone with two fingers (not that it matters a lot for the typical focal length), but this does not make an interesting image.
A smaller resolution sensor of the same size is more forgiving. To take advantage of the higher resolution sensor, it’s capturing details that the smaller sensor wouldn’t see (or see much).
In other words: Having a larger sensor is basically letting you “zoom into” the flaws of the lens quality and not-quite-right focus by enlarging a section of the image (either by zooming in, cropping, or outputting at very high resolution).
With regard to focusing, it might be slightly off for the lower res sensor, but you won’t notice as much at 1:1 versus looking at 1:1 with the higher res sensor. The big advantage of the larger resolution sensors is being able to crop (or print very large with extremely high detail). But if the lens can’t output any better on a higher megapixel sensor than a smaller megapixel sensor, then you might as well stick with a lower resolution sensor. 24 MP is quite good enough already for any typical images you’re not going to crop (or crop much).
It’s also kind of like viewing something on a standard display versus one that does HiDPI. If you’re far away, you probably can’t tell the difference, but if you’re close to the screen and have good enough vision, you’ll appreciate the better rendering of text on the HiDPI screen. Same for watching 4K versus 1080p from a typical distance. (Most people can’t really notice the difference for video > 1080p when on their couch.)
Basically: There are “diminishing returns” the higher in resolution you go, as the image from our lenses is limited, and there’s also only so much light to collect in a given area. I think we’re reaching that limit, outside of a few tricks like sensor shifting (which isn’t feasible for typical photography).
