Photographic Magazines: Circulation Figures for 2013

The sales of photographic magazines continue to fall (see my post of 22 March 2013) along with virtually all magazines in the UK. Owners, editors and employess must be asking themselves, where will it all end?

Of those magazines audited by ABC, the year on year fall in circulation for photographic titles in the second half of 2013 was, starting with the worst: Digital SLR Photography -31.5%; Practical Photography -13.5%; Digital Camera Magazine -11.7%; Digital Photographer -11%; Amateur Photographer -9.9%; Digital Photo -5.6%. I do not know the circulation figures for other magazines that are not covered  by ABC, like Advanced Photographer.

The average change in sales of all UK magazines was -6.3%, so that photographic magazines, in general, performed worse than that.

Average sales for the monthly magazines ranged from 7,504 for British Journal of Photography (no figures available for year-on-year change) to 35,281 for Digital Photo. The average sale for the weekly, Amateur Photographer, was 15,505. 

Just as worrying for editors must be the result of the survey published in Amateur Photographer on 5 July. Yes, I know it is a self-selected group of readers responding but 52% said that they had been readers of AP for less than one year. No wonder the articles are at such a low level. But do the results of that survey also show that AP is not retaining its readership beyond the beginner stage, or that people stay in amateur photography, like most hobbies, for just a short time, or both? The ‘All New AP’ launched a couple of weeks ago is presumably an attempt to decrease or reverse the downward trend. Will it succeed? On its present showing I doubt it.

If magazine sales are falling, were are people getting their information? Even a basic photography book provides more information than a run of magazines but are people buying books? Or relying on the internet for information/misinformation?

Amateur Photography: As Others See It. Annebella Pollen and Either/And

You do not find this topic in the photographic magazines. It will be obvious why this is so when you read what is said on the website with the link below. Annebella Pollen of the University of Brighton has an entire online project (Either/And) devoted essentially to the sociology of amateur photography, including the role of magazines like Amateur Photographer. While I find some of it irritating because of its use of social 'science' speak when plain English would do,  the contributions to this topic are well worth reading. Many aspects are covered. One example the authors picked up on was the massive amount of advertising in AP (not so much now as the photographic trade has contracted dramatically) and the encouragement of consumption in the articles.

The link is:
http://eitherand.org
and then read the articles under Reconsidering Amateur Photography

Video in Amateur Photographer? Perhaps Not Really

A letter from Stuart Smith, also I see writing from Ayrshire, to Amateur Photographer (31 May) welcomed the news that the magazine would give more attention to videography. Like me he finds 'it odd there has never been a magazine for the amateur in this field'. However, the reply from the Group Editor (I am not sure one can edit a group) backtracked: 'we are not going to start writing about camcorders but we will be offering advice on getting more from the movie-mode button on still cameras'.

How can one describe the performance of  a still camera's 'movie mode' without comparing it to a proper, made for the job, high-level camcorder? The video performance of many if not most still cameras on the market seems to be pretty poor, judging from experience and comments on the internet.

Will then AP take on the task of explaining the simple language of cinephotography? One has only to look at amateur video on YouTube to see that such guidance is desperately needed.

Before the now-defunct camcorder magazines of the 1990s, AP itself embraced cinephotography. In the 1950s and 1960s pages were devoted to the topic in most issues. Much of the advertising then was devoted to cine cameras and projectors. With the decline in sales of amateur, low-end camcorders (as 'movie mode' has appeared increasingly on still cameras), leaving just a few 'pro-sumer' and professional camcorders at the high end of the market, perhaps AP feels there is not enough advertising revenue to justify the proper treatment of moving pictures.

Video from DVD to External Hard Drive and Memory Stick on an iMac

All my early videos from the early 1990s on were stored on playable DVDs. Digital storage in the days of Hi-8 and then miniDV tape was very expensive. DVDs deteriorate with time and with ‘smart’ televisions having USB sockets and streaming from macs to televisions being a matter of routine, I decided to transfer all the completed videos on DVD to hard drives and memory sticks.

All the information on the best way to do this on the Mac can be found on web sites. However, I never did find it all in one place. This is the routine I eventually used for DVDs having no menus or only one item in the menu.

1 Copy the VIDEO_TS folder from the DVD to the desktop

2 Use the VIDEO_TS folder as the Source in the free software, Handbrake, and Desktop as the destination

3 Copy the resulting .mp4 file to two external hard drives

Large files cannot be copied to the standard format (FAT32) of a USB memory stick on a Mac. Our ‘smart’ television (a Samsung that with its video recorder has the worst user interface I have ever known and wish I had never bought) uses Windows compatible memory sticks that cannot be produced by the standard software on the Mac. I therefore bought Paragon’s NTFS for Mac OS X which adds the option to format any drive to the Windows NT filesystem in Disk Utility. Windows NT Filesystem appears as an option when using Erase to reformat a drive, in this case a memory stick, in Disk Utility.

4 Plug in a new USB memory stick and format it using Disk Utility to Windows NT Filesystem

5 Copy the .mp4 file, or collection of files depending on the storage capacity, to the usb memory stick

The only complication comes with the different items of a DVD with a menu of more than one item. The different menu items will appear as options in the source window in Handbrake but can only be converted one at a time. In other words, the different Menu items are output as distinct .mp4 files. This did not affect me since the few DVDs with such menus held separate files anyway and had only been lumped onto one DVD for convenience. If the items are related or follow on one from the other, then the separate .mp4 files can be recombined in Quicktime Player and saved (a slow process) or using video editing software.

In the end I finished the job over several days and now have all my early videos on two external hard drives and on memory stick, the latter being very convenient for playing on a smart TV.

Handbrake: http://handbrake.fr
Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X (US $ 19.95): http://www.paragon-drivers.com/ntfs-mac/

Video in a Photographic Magazine. About Time Too

Still photographers seem to hate video in the same way that they hated cine. During the rise of cheap, amateur cine cameras Amateur Photographer covered both. Eventually, however, that magazine became still photography only. I find video far more rewarding for travel and family. Not only do you capture movement but also the ambient sound. Sound may be the key because even sound with still photographs is better than no natural sound at all.

A reader, Michael Dennis, wrote to Amateur Photographer (19 April 2014) complaining about that magazine's review of the Fujifilm X-T1, 'where you ignore the video capabilities of the camera under review…You probably feel you're being professional by focusing on the stills side, because professionals don't want/need video. But I think that more and more people do want good video—in my case it's 50:50 between this and stills." I could not have put it better myself.

Instead of being brushed off, the editor replied, "…we have plans to give more attention to the video side of things, without detracting from our camera tests, in our forthcoming redesign of the magazine. There will also be some video-related editorial features in the magazine starting in a couple of months' time."

Well, is the amateur photography press eventually catching on to the fact that video is important even if not to members of camera clubs/photographic societies that the magazine was for so long the house journal.

Incidentally, Michael Dennis concluded by quoting from other reviews that the video performance of the XT-1, "is not just poor, but terrible."

Cameras for Birding: The Bridge Camera Superzoom War. Yet More

No sooner had I finished the latest post on superzoom bridge cameras for birding than even more appeared, this time from Sony.

Unless anything major happens, I shall not do any further comparisons in this blog. The major manufacturers are producing cameras that, on paper, are now very similar. The basic information can all be seen at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_camera

My Nikon P510, still to me a new camera, is old in terms of its replacements and all the competition that arrived in the market very quickly.

The key for any future purchase I now see as the autofocusing speed and accuracy at full zoom (i.e. the zoom setting most likely to be of interest to birders). I have found figures in some of the manufacturers' websites but insufficient to make comparisons. Given the methods of detecting focus and of mechanically driving the lens components, is there any real difference between the latest models of the different manufacturers?

The next requirement for me would be RAW output. And then weight would be an important but tertiary consideration, especially for carrying in hot climates.

Is Amateur Photographer in a very dull patch

Is it me, or is Amateur Photographer in a very dull patch? As an on-and-off reader since the mid-1950s, I have noticed that AP has gone into periods of decline many times in the past. It feels to me that we are seeing such a period now, with endless 'reviews' of unimportant cameras sporting minor 'improvements', Lightroom/Photoshop tips, well-known biographies of photographers and numpties writing letters about the nature of photography. With no historical camera articles now appearing, only the Roger Hicks column is worth reading. Properly explained technical articles are also few and far between.

Producing a weekly magazine must be a nightmare and with circulation still falling, maintaining the sort of editorial set up that a magazine such as this needs must be very difficult. On this note, I see that the total (print and digital) sales of AP averaged 16,878 during 2013. Print sales averaged 15,505 and digital sales only 1373 (just 426 in UK). As far as I can see that's a decrease of around 2% compared with the previous year. To put these figures into perspective, AP had sales of over 100,000 copies in the 1980s.

The removal of the last editor by a redundancy procedure, as is the story in websites, must be a manifestation of the decline in circulation. But is AP now in the vicious spiral of lower circulation →  less resources  → lower quality → lower circulation, and where will it all end? Is the venerable photographic magazine now a vulnerable photographic magazine?