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With new small cameras, laptops and wireless communication one talented digital producer can do the work of a 4 or 5 person TV production crew. What might have taken a large crew and a truck full of equipment ten years ago can now be attempted by a couple of students with a few thousand dollars between them. The idea holds huge promise for all sorts of people.

But does anything ever evolve in a straight line?

Consider what happened to the portrait business when the first cameras showed up. Hundreds of years of painting characterized by a more or less relentless pursuit of photo-realism. Painters used ever more sophisticated techniques and tools - detailed geometric templates, lenses, mirrors - to create realistic portraits and landscapes. This continued right up until mid-nineteenth century when the Holy Grail of capturing likeness was made available to all with the advent of chemical photography. As soon as that happened, up jumps Cezanne and painting steps back 700 years.

Photography democratized the portrait business, but the painting business made a u-turn.

David Hockney’s inspired exposition of the process in “Secret Knowledge”:

The portrait on the left is from 1425. That on the right 1430. In “Secret Knowledge” Hockney suggests that the remarkable advances towards realism in European painting during the Renaissance can be traced to the use of optical aids - the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, a practice which originated in Flanders around 1430, and quickly spread throughout Europe.

Van Gogh’s portrait of Trabuc (1889), and a Byzantine mosaic icon of Christ from about 1150. It’s as if the Renaissance never happened.

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