I have had the habbit to write a blog post around New Years and predict things that will be trending in visual content creating. Well maybe its not a prediction, but rather some of my thoughts that comes to my mind reading about the trends.
Raw and ready, really?
In last years in my predictive blog post in December 2016 (in Finnish), I wrote a lot of about authentivity. That same trend seems to be the also the case in 2018. Article in Digital Art magazines websites says: …photography involves subjects represented as they are – raw and ready.” Of course this has to do with social media. It has changed photography, maybe for ever? We are more and more used to seeing straight photography again. Naturally there is still the question of image manipulation in its all forms. People still try to make expressions and for example “polish” their travel photos by shooting in places that gets a lot of likes in Instagram etc.
People are heroes!
Another trends that seems to be rising, is that people are in the center. People become “the main heroes of their visual storytelling”. (source: Digital Arts). This trend is no surprise. We are, or should I say they, are taking more and more selfies. Those selfies are being shared in different social media platforms. Stories-feature in Facebook and Instagram are very popular. In those stories people are the heroes. This trend was already quite big last fall. Story telling is here to stay. People just love stories and social media platforms are made for story telling.
Dead Pan is back, ou no!
Deposit photo listed photo trends for this year. Dead Pan photography has made a comeback. I think its because we want to made photography believable again. The truth of photography has been challenged by image manipulation. So its no wonder that deadpan aestetics is popular again. I have a mixed feeling about deadpan style. In portraiture its a no no for me, but in street photography and street portraits its very nice way. Dead Pan is usually described as “it is what it is”. That refers to the subject. The photographer just documents the scene and do not get involved in it in any way. I am not sure if this is a megatrend. When people take selfies or photos of their friends everybody seems to pose or at least try to look good as possible. You see people taking their time to shoot selfies. They use selfie sticks to get better composition. They take a lot of different ones to choose from etc.
Harsh light is so 2017!
Natural light and environment is preferred over controlled studio environment. The trend is moody lighting and darker midtones. (source: SLRLounge). This means that the times of harsh light is over for now, until it comes back…
Naturally video is still a big trend and its not going anywhere. It includes also moving images, cinemagraphs and gifs. I think livestreaming will come even more popular in 2018 compared to 2017. Equipment gets better and cheaper. It does not need any post production. When streamed you are ready to move on. Consumption of images has been a trend for a few years. We just scroll through images and the same will happen with videos, live and not-live. The time that people will watch a video is getting shorter. Its about 10 seconds and then we move on to the next video. I do not have statistics about live videos, but I would assume that its longer.
Horisontal is also ok!
Another trend that was not mentioned in the articles that I read about visual trends was vertical video. All the main social media video platforms support vertical video. I think the reason for its popularity is mainly the way we hold our phone. Most just do not turn the phone horizontally when taking pictures or videos. For those who watches videos on laptop etc. its annoying. I do understand that there is a place for vertical videos. Street ad signs are often vertical especially in cities etc. In talking head -videos vertical is a good format just like in portraits. But vertically just because one does not think is just dumb.
Millenium pink is out.
Color are big part of visual trends. Pantone publishes The Color of the Year every year. This year its Ultra Violet (Pantone 18-3838). Millenium pink is out. Pantone also gives different color palettes to make differnet color combinations around Ultra Violet.
Why does all these trends matter to a photographer or a videogrpaher? Watch the video below to find out.
