Surprisingly on my little Caribbean island a lot more people are picking up DSLR's and shooting wedding very well. My jaw dropped to see some of their work...then again they seem to really take this thing a lot more seriously than I did. I have an acquaintance that flies into the US to do work for clients there.

It's another example of the hollowed out middle that was mentioned upthread. It's much easier than it used to be for someone with a modicum of talent and interest to take an SLR and produce competent photos of weddings and events--and to set themselves up online to run a small weekend side business.

Some will be better than others certainly. And we can probably stipulate that most won't be as good as someone who does this as a full-time profession. But, guess what. They're in a position to earn some extra spending money on weekends while undercutting anyone who has to make a living at it. And many will produce results that are quite competent. Competence at a relatively low price is good value for a lot of young couples without much money. (I shot a couple weddings myself when I was in school--back in the film days.)

Then on the other end you've got photographers with distinctive styles who deliver something special. They'll often be in great demand and command large premiums.

Thing is, a lot of professional photographers were truly lacking either talent or clue.

They'd have a studio - a room with lights and a handful of backgrounds - in a town or village somewhere, and they'd get most of the portrait, wedding, and yearbook work for an area. Sometimes they'd get work from a local paper.

But their output was average at best. They got work because they spent money on equipment, and they had enough basic competence to use it without making really obvious mistakes. But that was literally all they offered.

>And many will produce results that are quite competent.

Which is the core of the issue: it turns out that the basic creative skill level of much of the population is much higher than anyone realised.

There's still a huge gap between dabblers and geniuses. But if you make professional equipment cheap and easy to use, you'll find that a lot of people can produce results that used to be considered professional.

This is true of photography, music, video, and digital art - and now it's becoming true of programming.

In a way this is a good thing. But it means real experts with truly outstanding skills are going to find it harder to find a niche that pays well - just as many outstanding musicians, photographers, and video makers are struggling because the market for innovative and slightly difficult work is smaller than it used to be.

Web design + programming are going the same way.

Industrial web dev - giant systems that work at scale and which deal with huge data sets - is still valuable for now.

But small-scale freelance web dev is losing to automation and simplified design tools.

It's not the same as the photography/creative market, because the big industrial conglomerates still want talent, and so do start-ups that hope to become big industrial conglomerates.

But that basic level of mom 'n pop boutique "agency" design is going to die off completely within 5-10 years.

It's probably also true that the "geniuses" historically did a lot of pretty constrained rote work in photography to pay the bills. To the degree that work goes away, it becomes harder to fund the truly creative work.