I was reading a really fascinating editorial today from 'FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009'.

This article, which is exceedingly prolonged, discusses the transformation from 30-second television adverts to the digital composition of marketing. It’s very interesting and does get your thoughts churning. There’s a paragraph that mentions the future of digital photography and this got me thinking about the future of photography and the decline of 'printing' a photograph. With the expansion of an arena, there will of course become the decline of another.

It is progressively becoming more and more evident today that we are publishing images onto Facebook and Twitpic and other social networking sites. CV's are now favored in digital format, it is faster. We’re now able to view photo albums on the Internet and on our Smart Phones. The supremacy of the Internet has meant that we can view photos posted from a friend on the other-side of the planet. So my question is what’s happening to the photo as an entity?

With the now not so recent introduction of the Digital Photo Frame, it appears that there’s no need for hard copies of photographs. Especially now with ‘save the planet’ becoming more prolific, why use paper when we can store? Of course there are two arguments to everything. Is the future of printing images becoming obsolete and is the photo album becoming a thing of the past?

To a certain extent images look better on a screen than they do on paper, and although we can’t ‘touch’ the image, we are unable to touch the image when it is printed either. But we like having something to touch and hold. We also couldn’t take the images with us, but now with the ever-growing presence of Smart Phones, we can take 10,000 wallet sized photographs of loved ones with us wherever we go. Much more convenient?