frizza

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<p>Nobody has killed photography yet. At least to me it looks more alive than ever.</p>

<p>Nevertheless photography as a profitable business is in jeopardy. Digital photography is a mere tile in the larger mosaic of the revolution brought about by information technology. Every piece of digital information (including images produced by today's increasingly sophisticated digital cameras) is easy to produce, process and duplicate. This accelerating trend has created an unprecedented abundance of images (think of Flickr and other popular free image repositories). Many of them, despite being produced by amateurs, are of excellent quality. And, more importantly, their quality and quantity is growing every year as this creative art is attracting more and more enthusiasts worldwide. Abundance is the opposite of scarcity and, in our current monetary system based on scarcity, this means the end of profit. Therefore photography as a profession will most certainly disappear - and it is already disappearing, with most pro photographers out there increasingly struggling to make ends meet, as John A correctly pointed out in an earlier post.</p>

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But please don't ever stop enjoying the inspiring art of photography, which you may grow to appreciate even more when you can shoot free from any time and money constraints. :-)</p>

<p>Michael,<br>

why do you want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy Photoshop when you can get <strong>free</strong> alternatives that are equally good?</p>

<p>Hola Juan,<br>

don't waste money on Photoshop (especially Elements) and download the free GIMP 2.6 instead.<br />You can find tutorials on how to use the GIMP here:<br>

<a href="http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/">http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/</a><br>

There are also many videos on Youtube. Just search for "GIMP tutorials" there.<br />If you need to, the GIMP can also handle RAW files with the UFRaw plugin, which is also free and can be downloaded here:<br>

<a href="http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/">http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/</a><br>

If you are happy with it you can later donate money (like many of us supporters of free software do) to the GIMP project, but that's not required at all. Different people contribute differently (translations, testing, donations, etc. or by just using it!)<br>

Generally speaking, free software is available for any computer application you can imagine and is often as good as proprietary software (ex: Open Office instead of Microsoft Office). Even spending money on Windows/Mac operating systems is no longer necessary. Ubuntu Linux for example is a fast, reliable and free alternative:<br>

<a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">http://www.ubuntu.com/</a><br>

Enjoy.</p>