I don't know how many members make their living doing portraits, but I doubt that any would want the kind of clients this ad attracts. I used to do a lot of hand-colored children/family portraits. The kind of clients I wanted weren't looking for low cost photographs, and my pricing wasn't set up to attract them. I know Blansky does portraits, and I doubt he'd see this guy as competition.
The perfect storm of events kicked the shit out of the portrait photography business. And it has massive repercussions. Digital, while a great tool for portrait photographers, had the rather unforeseen affect of allowing the moms-with-cameras that existed in the film days when automatic cameras came out, to expand their work and their ability to mimic what pros could do, with their computer programs. The affect of this was they dug into the children business, since no massive technical skill was needed for kids.
Then they started in on the high school senior market because they could retouch with photoshop and mimic to a lesser extent what pros were doing. Still they had no real technical skill on lighting or "posing".
Weddings have always been under attack by amateurs and when the whole photojournalistic approach to them took hold in the 80s and 90s they too began to slip away from the pros more. Then digital added to that progression.
But in all these cases people that really cared still turned to the pros, except for kid pictures usually.
But how the amateurs really hit the pros was with the fact they would give people all the files, and then people could get cheap prints at costco. Then every time a pro did a sitting people started asking them for the files. And many gave in and gave them to them because they were afraid they would lose the business. This trend also brought down the prices. Amateurs have no overhead. All this whittled away at the pro business, a bit here a bit there and soon, pro studios were dropping like flies. Hundreds went out of business, many moved back to work out of their homes and the industry from 2008 to now is unrecognizable from before.
The recessions took away a large client base, snapshot styles were in vogue, and with all the cheap cameras and camera phones, people no longer needed professional photographers anywhere near as much.
Lots still do well. I do well. But the industry changed a lot. As I wrote in another thread, a photographer, one of the best in the field, lost his studio in 2009, and killed himself this year. He was a great photographer, had massive recognition amongst his peers, massive award winner for his work, highly regarded teacher, etc etc. Another one stated he used to get 150 calls a year to do weddings, now he gets zero.
So to answer the question, does this guys ad affect anyone. No, not really. But the trend of these types of freelancers, with the advent of digital had a major effect.
