How long from now will photography jobs be in demand?

I need to know how long from now photography jobs be in demand.

Every publication that you see uses photogs. Everyone wants family photos done the right way, not just the "myspace way".

Photography will be around in some form forever. Prints will be around I am sure, though with the invention of digital frames, electronic files might be the thing of the future, at least for personal and family portrait work.

I think there will always be a demand for them. Even with the raise in personal cameras in recent years, people still want professional pieces. If you showed me a photograph a novice photographer took and one that the professional took of the exact same scene, I would easily be able to tell you who too what. Being trained in proper photography techniques really shows against someone who picked up a camera at a party.

In addition to that you are always going to have the need for newspaper photographers and crime scene photographers. You can't just have someone who no training come into a murder scene and start snapping shots -- probably because they would get really sick really fast. A professional photographer will try to capture the essence of the scene so others later can look at it and understand what happened better.

Until cameras can learn how to take photographs themselves and you DO realise the difference between snapshots from a photobooth and a 'photograph' I assume.

I think the overall trend over the past few years, reaching forward, is that as technology gets better and better, it allows the average person to get technically adequate photographs. Back in the early days of photography, a significant amount of equipment investment and technical knowledge was required merely to achieve a proper exposure and produce a well-focused image. Thus, photography was inaccessible in any meaningful way to any but professionals and serious hobbiests.

Now that modern cameras enable the average user to achieve a properly exposed and focused image under most circumstances, a percentage of the opportunities for professional photography are dissapearing, whether in the form of families that are happy with the family portrait they can manage with their own kit, news agencies that just give a DSLR to reporters with no photo background, or small businesses that feel their home-made product photos are "good enough."

Thus, its no longer enough to produce technically acceptable images to be successful as a professional photographer. A pro needs to apply creative lighting, staging, and compositional techniques to produce something that customers instantly recognize as beyond their capabilities. A pro can't sell images that are just marginally better than what potential clients can produce: they must be dramatically better.

So overall, I would say that the trend in pro photography is toward increased competition, and in many ways the bar is much higher for pros than it was years ago (even as the bar has dropped lower for many of the images published or framed).