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I’m dead serious: the photography hobby almost died in the late 1990s and very early 2000s. I was a sales manager for a huge television and movie studio equipment company in Hollywood in those days. I decided it might be more fun to drive around with a half-million dollars worth of photo demo gear in my trunk instead of the post-production studio gear I sold. I asked around at Hasselblad, Canon and Nikon, and the reply was the same. Sales were down, and dropping even more. No one was hiring. As others left, they were not rehiring. The sales forces were shrinking by attrition, hoping that things wouldn’t get much worse. Why? Simple: even with pro gear, the biggest consumers are rich hobbyists. There are a lot more rich people than there are pro photographers. As hobbyists spent more time on the Internet instead of in the darkroom, or out shooting, no one was buying new cameras the way they had been for over 100 years.
