A couple of years ago, I finally gave in and got a digital camera. A long-time SLR aficionado, I preferred the completely manual camera that I could control precisely. When I made my purchase, my 20-year-old daughter, who has been using a digital camera for years, said, “Welcome to the information age, Dad.” Sigh. I may have been a late adopter, but I knew that my experience as a photographer was about to change profoundly – far beyond no longer having to schlep to the camera store to buy and develop film.

Pictures now play a much bigger role in my day-to-day life. I have a laptop in the kitchen that serves as the audio-photo hub for the family. It controls all the music in our home audio system and is where my wife and two children share all the photos we take. Since taking and storing digital photos cost next to nothing, we’ve started snapping virtually non-stop.

You don’t even have to take photos to be affected by the digital revolution. A friend in Toronto sends digital photos to his mother on the West Coast, even though she doesn’t have a computer. His technique? Upload to Black’s website for developing and have the prints delivered to the Black’s store in her neighbourhood. She’s seeing more photos of her grandchildren than ever before.

Another friend loves her photo iPod. Every Monday morning at the office, she shows off the dozen pictures of her adorable dog, Rosie, that she took over the weekend. If she were using film, we would think bringing in new dog photos every week would be slightly bonkers. With digital, why not?

I also have friends with photoblogs. Unlike traditional weblogs, where authors post their words, photobloggers post their pics for the world to see, usually adding to them regularly. There are now tens of thousands of photoblogs, many of which can be found on www.photoblogs.org. While my laptop is replacing the family album, a photoblog is the digital equivalent of the glossy coffee table book, only the printing and distribution costs are essentially zero.

Moving from film and chemical processing to digital sensors and computer manipulation has completely demystified the photographic process. Many years ago, Kodak became the biggest film manufacturer in the world by promising photographers, “You take the picture, we do the rest.” Processing film, especially colour, was a complicated, messy, fiddly process involving a host of toxic chemicals. Few shutterbugs had home darkrooms.

Now, taking and printing your own photo is a snap, and anyone can e-mail it to a friend or photoblog it to the world. Photography has become democratized. People everywhere can capture, produce, communicate and publish images for their family or the world – without any assistance from the old photography-supply chain.

Soon to be obsolete: The wedding photographer who charges $1,000 for the wedding day, keeps an iron grip on the negatives and makes a big profit from reprints. More and more couples are asking the photographer to turn over a CD with 100 digital files for a flat fee so they can handle the reprints on their own. Or they might put together a DVD slide show with their choice of background music, blending in some video taken by the guests. Some couples may even make do with the blizzard of photos taken by their friends and a shutterbug uncle. The point is that consumers are now co-creating the end product.

In the portrait realm, Wal-Mart, the retailing behemoth, uses its digital portrait studio as a loss leader to attract customers. There is no film cost if the customer chooses not to buy. If the customer likes the photo, Wal-Mart’s price is lower than the cost of normal film processing.

Customers that would once hire a photographer to produce photos for company brochures or annual reports now download pictures from the Internet or buy inexpensive CDs that offer thousands of royalty-free images. If they want a truly unique photo, it’s still cheaper to hire a graphic artist to manipulate a royalty-free photo with Photoshop than it is to hire a photographer to start from scratch. Many photographers have slashed their prices in a bid to remain competitive.

We’ve entered a new era of photography. As digital cameras continue to soar in popularity, professional photographers are scrambling to reinvent their business models. So is the traditional photographer now obsolete? Let me put it this way: Ever heard a drum machine that comes even close to the artistry of Gene Krupa?  

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Don Tapscott is a leading international consultant, author and speaker on information technology in society and business and the CEO of strategy company New Paradigm. Visit www.nplc.com or write to him at dtapscott@enroutemag.net.