The public’s demand for certain types of imagery is seemingly insatiable. Celebrity driven Star magazine for example, receives over 750,000 images per month from a variety of sources including stock agencies, photo syndicators and individual photographers both professional and amateur. They don’t discriminate, you got the shot, they want it. Web sites concentrating on gossip and entertainment abound like ever spreading kudzu. TMZ represents that it receives about 19 million hits per month and maintains its own syndicated television program to boot.

The quality of many of these images is, well… poor, having been shot with low-end equipment or more likely, by an amateur who happened to be in the right place at the right time.  When discussing the monetary value of celebrity images many editors will correctly say, “Context is everything, any quality problems can be easily digitally corrected by our staff”.  The demand for celebrity’s images has created the specter of hoards of paparazzi staking out and chasing every reality star and B-lister in creation. The market for these images is competitive, intense and thriving.

Unfortunately the public that craves celebrity images is far less interested in news and quality photojournalism.  The result, Newspapers in the US and now the UK  have fired entire photography staffs without so much as a yawn from their readers.

We don’t know what bothers us more, the firing of the photographers or the public’s apathy.

It is commonly reported that the average adult sees about 1,000 images per day. The average adult however, spends considerably more time gazing at a given celebrity’s cellulite than at images of combat in Syria.

The famous robber Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. His reply, “Because that’s where the money is”.  We make no value judgments here but rather are simply reporting that while some doors close to photographers, other doors, while maybe not appealing at first to photographers, open. That doesn’t mean taking your camera and stalking nightclubs for the next Bieber or Lohan shot, but rather we know photographers who are actually surviving and thriving in this area of the business. Some are good celebrity photographers, who are actually nice people and not animals. There are also event photographers who get invited into places by publicists and managers.

The point? Keep your eyes open out there to the doors that are opening. There’s sometimes more than one way to skin a photo.