I live near Fort Cronkhite in Marin County (just north of San Francisco) and go to the beach there several times a week to throw the frisbee for my dog Sugar.  I’ve noticed something interesting over the last year or two:  lots of camera gear.  I’m not talking about tourists with point-and-shoot;  I am talking beefy tripods, long lenses, matte boxes, etc., etc.  Expensive stuff.

Nice lens

Here’s the thing:  Fort Cronkite is not very picturesque as far as beaches go.  The sand is dark brown to grey with telephone poles and other lumber washed up, the surrounding hillsides are eroded muddy brown and green with abandoned gun emplacements, the lagoon is brown and sometimes frothy, and the surfers are usually beginning to intermediate.  It’s nice, but it’s a little hard to imagine that anyone is taking fantastic pictures here.  Yet they come, with $5-10K+ in gear slung over their shoulder.

We are awash in tools today:  smartphones, iTablets, cameras, scanners, CAD design, CNC machines, 3D printers, etc, etc, etc.  It’s all surprisingly affordable too; anything can be produced, and relatively inexpensively.  My question is this:  do we have the talent to match these tools? I don’t have the answer, but I can guess that using an expensive, capability-rich tool to produce a boring product isn’t going to be that successful.  This applies to making furniture, shooting news stories, writing books, designing houses, etc. just as much as it does to photography.  Making exceptional things requires talent and art, not gizmos and do-dads.

So, it’s not the iPad that interests me, it’s the other announcements from the Apple event that I care about as a media producer.  Apple is making it easier for the consumers of media to find the producers of media.  The expanding Apps Store and book category on iTunes paves the way for producers to skip right past the web page (the tool) and deliver the value of their talent directly to the user, whether they are looking at a phone, a tablet, a desktop, or whatever is next…the iBall?

For professional content producers this means they have a new storefront where they can ask that consumers pay for their wares.   If the product is good:  innovative, new, special, etc., it will be paid for, and more will be produced.  Those that have talent will survive and thrive.  For those that won’t drive the 30 miles to a beautiful beach where stunning surf shots are everywhere to be had, they’ll still have Facebook, and it won’t matter how much they spent on their lens.