Thinking about how much photography has changed

Thinking about how much photography has changed in my lifetime is astonishing. Since I began 20 years ago with a simple manual film camera to now, where I take these self portraits with my Sony A7Rii digital which I preview and trigger from an app on my iPhone (hidden in my left hand in the above portrait today). I think about where photography began with a complicated mix of chemicals, large heavy equipment and exposures that lasted for hours just for one image to now, where I can shoot hundreds of images in mere seconds. Has the value of photography diminished because it is not so hard to capture a photograph or is it more valuable because it is quickly becoming the most common tool of communication? You don’t have to tell people how you feel anymore or what the place was like, you simply show them. And if everyone can take a beautiful photograph, where does that leave photographers like me who create them? provenceselfportraitseries