The figures

Price-wise, a year’s subscription to the entire Creative Cloud package will cost you £46.88 ($49.99) a month. If you only want to purchase one application, let’s say Photoshop, you can subscribe to that for £17.58 ($19.99) a month. The boxed version of Photoshop was around £600 ($1,000), depending on where you bought it. You would have been looking at around £2,500 ($2,600) for the complete gamut of Creative Suite. With Creative Cloud you also get 20GB of storage thrown in and access to the Behance network that Adobe recently bought and integrated into its business.

Over the course of a year, you’ll be spending £562.56 for Creative Cloud or £210.96 for the Photoshop-only package. It’s going to take you three years to shell out what you would have for the stand-alone package. Within those three years you might well have upgraded your stand-alone package, at whatever price Adobe set, but the upgrades to the Cloud subscription will have been automatically deployed. Thus for a few years, it is a more cost-effective solution but there will reach a point when your subscriptions exceed the cost at which you could have previously purchased the product.

For existing Adobe customers, the situation is a little different, because your first year as subscribers is slightly cheaper, but does that really make up for then having to shell out month-on-month for a product that you’ve effectively already bought?

Negatives and positves

The primary concern with the subscription model is that it locks you into the system in perpetuity. In the past, once you’d bought the licence to Photoshop CS3, you had it for as long as it continued to work. With the subscription model you only have access to Photoshop for as long as you continue to pay for it. And what’s to stop Adobe from doubling or tripling their subscription fees next year?

If the cost of subscription were to become prohibitive, would you still be able to access your native format files? Right now, there are other programmes capable of opening PSD files, for example Pixelmator, but could Adobe move to a more restrictive format in the future? It could, but all of this is speculation right now.

If you were at all concerned that you would not be able to use Photoshop, or any of the other Creative Cloud applications, without an ongoing connection to the internet, Adobe have assuaged that fear. You will of course have to be connected to install and license the software, and you’ll be asked to connect every 30 days to validate the licences, but you’ll be able to use your applications for unto 180 days offline. If you’re trekking through the jungles of Borneo, you’ll still be able to edit your photos on the move, even if the trees don’t provide wi-fi.

Winners and losers

Many people have suggested that Adobe’s primary move towards the Cloud is to avoid the scourge of pirates. Whilst it might be conceivable that it will help to prevent people from pirating their products—although I’m not convinced; if you can make something, you can break it—what they will prevent, at least until someone finds a workaround, is people using their products, and not necessarily encourage their purchase.

People pirate software for all sorts of reasons. Those who are ideologically opposed to paying for software aren’t going to be mysteriously converted by a subscription format. For those who can’t afford it, some will now be able to afford Adobe subscriptions, some still won’t. As for those who pirated it just because they could, some of those might choose to pay, others might chose to look elsewhere, or to stick with their obsolete but free versions. Adobe will likely win some and lose some in terms of subscribers, but those that it wins will almost certainly be in it for the long haul.

Stayers and leavers

Should you then stick with Adobe for the long haul? If you’re a professional who relies on Adobe’s products in order to fulfil your obligations and complete your projects that provide an income for you that is in excess of the subscription fee, almost certainly. You’re not losing, per se, by paying the fee and it keeps you on a par with your peers and competitors. It’s also a legitimate business expense that you can write off against your taxes, which is handy.

Should your figures be more marginal, you perhaps need to consider your options. Then it will depend on how attached you are to Adobe and how comfortable you would feel switching to another provider. If you can find another application or set of applications that provides you with similar outcomes but on better terms, a switch could be in your favour.

For hobbyists, don’t feel that Adobe is the only option, especially when it comes to Photoshop. Photoshop Elements is an extremely competent alternative, and significantly cheaper. It is, after all, Adobe’s solution for people who don’t require Photoshop’s full fire-power. GIMP is free. Pixelmator is very highly thought of. Photoshop’s capabilities are extensive and impressive, but if you’re not making full use of them then you might not need to pay for them.

If you’re wondering what I’ll be doing, I shall almost certainly be taking out a Photoshop-only subscription to augment my use of Lightroom. Lightroom is my go-to editing suite and Adobe has confirmed that will remain a stand-alone package for the foreseeable future. However, I am keeping a close eye on Pixelmator. I think it has potential as a Photoshop replacement.

To the future?

When Google announced that it was shuttering Reader, it felt as if the RSS universe were imploding. How could they possibly? What would we do? But the universe didn’t implode: a feast of alternatives has sprung up, some of them far prettier and likely even more functional than Reader. Adobe’s move is a divisive one, but it isn’t anywhere near implosive. For anyone with the talent and the tenacity, the time is ripe for striking out with an Adobe alternative.

This element of truthfulness has been a matter of hot debate in photojournalistic circles over the past two weeks. It started when Paul Hansen was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year prize for his image of two young boys being carried to their funeral in Gaza. It’s a raw and emotive photograph, overwhelmingly blue and dusty in tone. You can feel the cold numbness of heartache seeping through the screen when you look at it. And that, for many people, was the problem with the winning image. This chilled, depressed feeling had been processed into the image specifically for its entry into the competition in order to evoke an emotion in its audience. The tone of the image, the feeling that you get when you compare the competition version with the press version is quite different. Rather than acting as a record of events, it had been transformed into a work of art.

This is problematic for the inegrity of the competition. If it’s a press photo competition, should the images not be as they were submitted to publications? Shouldn’t they be about assessing the photos used to report the news over the past year and settle on which one tells the story best? If we are content to see images that have been manipulated in post-production in order to produce a response win the industry’s major prize, are we also content to see these sorts of images tell the story of the news?

News reporting isn’t about art and isn’t about winning competitions. First and foremost, it is about telling the stories of those unable to tell them themselves, of keeping the world informed, of bringing light to situations that might otherwise remain festering pits of darkness. It isn’t pretty and it is often thankless, but it is vital.

Then comes the Paolo Pellegrin situation, which also arose from his entry into the World Press Photo competition. This is a degree messier than the Hansen situation. His entry into the documentary category was of an ex-Marine sniper in The Crescent, a dodgy (putting it mildly) area of Rochester, New York. Except that the caption on the image was outed by Michael Shaw of BagNewsNotes as not being entirely accurate. Shane Keller, the subject of the image, claims that although he was in the military he was never a sniper; furthermore, the photograph was not taken in the Crescent, but in his basement in an area of Rochester that most definitely isn’t the Crescent. Rather than being a proper documentary image that is part of telling the story of the area, it’s a bit more posed, maybe even staged, than that. What’s more, it looks as if the caption for the image had been lifted from an article in the New York Times published in December 2003.

So we have a situation where a documentary photograph that has been entered into contests and in some cases recognised, isn’t necessarily what it claims to be. If this alone isn’t disturbing, I’m particularly perturbed by Pellegrin’s response to the situation. (And no, I’m not even going to venture into the debate about whether or not BagNewsNotes should have contacted Pellegrin for his comments prior to publication. That’s a whole different issue.)

As far as Pellegrin is concerned, this isn’t an issue. He might have misunderstood Keller’s description of his role in the military and he wasn’t sure if the area where the image was taken was indeed The Crescent. But because it tells the story that he aimed to tell, about the deprivation, the gun crime, the drug abuse, and the complicated relationship that exists between them all in Rochester, it doesn’t matter. As for the captions, that was a simple mistake.

I’m sorry Signor Pellegrin, but none of those explanations is good enough. You see, if you’re a photojournalist or a documentary photographer, I have to be able to trust you. I have to be certain that the stories you are telling through your pictures are accurate. So this means that you need to be certain of whom you’re photographing. You need to be certain of where you are taking photographs. And you need to be certain that the captions you attach to them are accurate and indeed your own.

This kind of storytelling isn’t about setting up shots to tell the story that you want them to tell; this kind of storytelling is about telling the truth. If I can’t trust you here, can I trust you anywhere else?

Photojournalists are the eyes of the world and we rely on their integrity as we rely on their bravery. We have to be certain that the stories that they are telling are the truthful ones, not the fantastical, beautiful, artistic ones. The truth is often ugly: so be it.

Stashed in an envelope and nestling amongst some papers, I found some photographs sent to me a few years ago by a guy whom I used to date. The photos aren’t anything special, either in terms of our relationship or their photographic merits – he was no photographer – but I’m loathe to throw away photographs.

To start, who am I to discard someone else’s creative output? That would place me in a category of Philistines with whom I have no desire to associate. I am not the Lady High Overseer of what Deserves to be Preserved, except with respect to what I produce myself. My photographs? Yes, I can choose to delete, to bin, to even burn those. Someone else’s photographs? No, they are not within my gift to declare inferior, to determine insignificant, and then to destroy.

I don’t intend to get too melodramatic about it; afterall, I’m not convinced that me throwing away a handful of photos taken of nothing-in-particular in New York City maybe ten years ago is cultural imperialism on a scale comparable to the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities. But it does seem casually inconsiderate, especially when you read about the extent to which people have gone to protect a collection of ancient manuscripts from senseless destruction in Mali.

It’s not the done thing.

Furthermore, destroying photos rankles with me because even the most mundane image can be valuable, whether that’s emotionally or historically. Actually, especially historically.

We have a tendency to forget that the everyday is the most easily overlooked constituent of our lives, and therefore the least recorded. It is, though, one that fascinates historians and any documentation of the day-to-day are, really, significant for them. Right now, these photos might not mean anything to anyone; but one day they could. (Although to be honest, decontextualised and found amongst my papers in 60 years’ time, they have the ability to confuse rather than elucidate.)

There is a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that these pictures could somehow, someday, complete a jigsaw puzzle for a historian. I don’t know what this puzzle is and I don’t know how these pictures might teach someone about life in the early twenty-first century. If I did, I’d be in remarkably privileged position of foresight. And of course, it is precisely because I don’t know that I’m so reluctant to discard them.

Finally, I can’t bring myself to dispose of these photos because once-upon-a-time they were important enough to him that he decided he should send them to me.

I could, it’s true, return them to him. But we fell out of touch and have not spoken in years. Aside from having to look him up, the last that I heard, he was married. So I’m not sure how appropriate this would be. There is something romantic about the notion of receiving a fragment of your history recorded on photographic paper through the mail, a time capsule wrapped in brown paper to make you stop and think. But I’d want this to be just that, a flicker of time, to make him smile a moment.

They’re in an envelope, sitting unaddressed on my desk. What to do? What to do?

Last week, the New York Times reported on the growing number of eating establishments that are prohibiting their clientele from photographing their food. No iPhones at Ko in New York and no flashes at Seiobo in Sydney or Shoto in Toronto. It’s all becoming too distracting and disturbing, for diners and staff alike, especially when people start rearranging furniture and standing on chairs. Their houses; their rules. And with behaviour like that, I’m not surprised that restaurateurs have called time on wannabe Bon Apetit photographers or people who are too involved in Instagram to actually enjoy their slow roasted pork belly properly.

So I’m here to plead for a little moderation.

I’m the first person to stand up for no flash; apart from it being a terrible disturbance to other people who are eating or working, it does horrible things to images of food that can make them look distinctly unappealing as opposed to wickedly tempting. If you want to do justice to the raspberry and mascarpone creme brulee with brandy tuile, that you’re meant to be enjoying and a pastry chef has burned his fingers making, you’ll switch off your flash. We don’t want slimy looking custard, thankyouverymuch.

As for people who think that they can stand on a restaurant chair in order to get the perfect overhead of their grilled seabass with steamed vegetables, they can go to bed with no supper. You wouldn’t do that at a dinner party hosted by a friend, so why do you think it’s acceptable when you’re in public? Besides, by the time that you’ve finished faffing, your meal will be cold, you’ll not enjoy it as much, and it will have been a waste of time, effort, money, and a dead fish.

Furthermore, if you’re meant to be enjoying delicious food, wonderful wine, and charming company, why are you pansying about on Instagram or wittering on Twitter?

But not allowing a discreet smartphone snap or a compact camera capture? That feels a little draconian to me. Without doubt, I’m biased. I take a lot of photos of food. I love cooking and eating, and obviously I love photography: I photograph food that I make and I photograph food that eat when I’m out. I do it because I’m proud of what I’ve created, because I think that what I’ve been served looks beautiful and I want to capture that, and because I like to make memories of my restaurant experiences.

I don’t want to disturb other diners and I don’t want to ruin my own enjoyment of my meal, especially if I’m paying a lot of money for the privilege. What I want is a swift image to revel in. No flash, no furniture rearrangement, no Instagram. Just a discreetly snapped picture that I can look back on years to come to help me recall how perfect that grilled halloumi salad on a terrace a few hours outside of Auckland was.

When I take photos of food in a restaurant it’s a compliment. Please accept it as such.