A Letter from Gerhard Rossbach, CEO/Publisher October 2, 2014 – Posted in: Photography

Dear Reader,

Just last week, the enormous photography trade and art show, Photokenia 2014, was staged in Cologne and drew more than 200,000 visitors from around the world—apparently more than ever before. While the sheer number of new products shown there was overwhelming, it was evident that the basic technologies for capturing imagery, either on a sensor or on film,have not changed much in recent years. Consequently sales of cameras and photo gear are reaching a plateau after several years of rocketing growth.

On the other hand, the number of photos captured with cameras is exploding. Since I started writing this editorial ten minutes ago, 1,517,325 new photos have been uploaded to Facebook—67 billion photos were uploaded since the beginning of this year. And this is only for Facebook; it doesn’t represent the ones uploaded to Flickr, Instagram, and the many other networks and platforms hosting photographic images. Today, 90% of the U.S. population is equipped to take a photo at any given moment. What does this mean to photography in general, and to the art of photography in particular? And what does it mean to you?

To me, it means that I am continually exposed to and bombarded with photographs, and in a frequency that makes it difficult to rest my eyes on any one of them. It becomes an amorphous mass of pictures, each of them becoming more and more meaningless and anonymous. Even great images are drowning in the big stream. The audio analogy is music versus noise.

What we strive to achieve at Rocky Nook is to give photography a quiet place amidst the hubbub and to provide a stage for good photography, for talented photographers, and for authors who can teach photographic skills. With our books, we publish on the leading-edge developments in photography and imaging that really matter, we filter out the marketing noise often associated with them, and we focus on their practical use in the photographic workflow.

At www.rockynook.com, we have created a place for you to visit us on the web where you can browse through our books, buy eBooks in the format of your choice, find great deals (especially this week!), and read inspiring articles on all things photographic. We are happy to welcome you here and hope that you find some inspiration at rockynook.com.

Gerhard Rossbach

Publisher/CEO

Rocky Nook, Inc.