As little as ten years ago, photography was an art form practised only by those who were qualified or by those who fancied themselves artists within a photographic realm. Nowadays, photography is part of almost everyone’s life. With universally used websites such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, every photo is made public and can be changed, manipulated, de-coloured, recoloured, reshaped and have just about anything else you can think of done to it.

On top of this, the image of the lone photographer waiting patiently for his moment to snap a picture of something spectacular is almost extinct. What is the reason for this? There are those who will blame websites such as Instagram but in all honesty the concept of those websites is amazing and the blame cannot really lie there. So where does it lie? The answer is smart phones. People don’t need expensive, impressive looking cameras anymore because their smartphones have inbuilt cameras that are often just as good as a normal camera. Furthermore, some mobile phones are actually marketed on the quality of their camera.

Watch this video about the Sony Xperia Z1 mobile phone and see how they focus almost entirely on the camera in the phone and suggest that it is as good, and powerful, as an actual camera.

So what will happen to photography? Essentially, anyone who wants to be a photographer can now do so as more or less everyone owns a smart phone. We all have the ability to take incredible photographs and share them with the world and this means that those who do it as a profession may find it harder to stand out in a much larger crowd to one that they used to enjoy.

With a bit of luck this will maybe just mean that the standard of photography will go up in the professional sector (as we have seen with some nature programmes on television) but unfortunately it also means that the photography market will be highly saturated and making a name for yourself will become next to impossible.