The NYTimes writes about the difficulty professional photographers are facing:

Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.

Digital photography, and the software tools that supplement it (if you haven't seen this content fill demo from Adobe, you must) are really going to separate the wheat from the chaff.

While amateurism has made it more difficult for some professionals to get work, I'd probably argue that those professional probably weren't as talented as they thought. Pre-digital, a photographer could protect his livelihood just based on the initial capital costs of being a photographer - talent had very little to do with it. All of us could be sailors if we had access to a sailboat regularly.

(Even today, to a certain extent it's still true - have you been to a Sears photography studio lately? The photographers just take a bajillion pictures without any real skills involved).

What the amateurs did do was bring more enthusiasm - the more people you have in an industry, the better it is for the industry.

The software industry underwent the same change when dynamically scripted languages gave idiots like me the ability to get my foot into the software game. Am I a software engineer? I don't consider myself to be one (although I can certain do certain tasks that engineers do). But having that enthusiasm I had and the experience I picked up has benefited MT and all of its users, for sure. 

I love software for its ability to equalize, through information dissemination and bringing down capital costs. There's a whole slew of jobs which are currently being threatened: realtors (Zillow), pharmacists (automated dispensaries), radiologists (tech is making outsourcing to India pretty easy). Come to mind, why not car salesmen (Carmax)?

So photographers aren't the only ones that are feeling the pain. But if the software industry is any indication, those that are truly talented and love the craft should do fine. More exposure for an industry is almost always a positive thing.