Digital camera shipments worldwide

It is a pleasing irony that as digital cameras become fewer, the scenery they used to photograph becomes clearer. One imagines the last remaining Canon user standing on a mountain, breathing deeply, aiming at nothing. The air, uncharacteristically, is cooperating.

Digital camera shipments have been in long, smartphone-driven decline for over a decade, while US counties reporting good air quality days climbed sharply in 2020 as lockdowns idled traffic and industry. Two trends with entirely different causes that both inflected in the same pandemic year. One curve marks what a smartphone made obsolete; the other marks what a lockdown briefly improved.

So we are left with clearer skies and fewer dedicated cameras to photograph them, which is almost poetic if you don't think about it too hard. The air got better; the witnesses got fewer. Still, the view was worth it.