On the one hand costs in photography should be going down overall, because there is no longer the expense of film (material, development, digitalisation) and on the other hand competition should increase as the cost of entering the business is getting down (with a digital camera anybody can quickly improve his/her skills as it costs nothing to shoot images). Any thoughts ?

Use fees are getting higher if you just want a stock image, was looking at the fees for stock photography, and they had more than doubled in the last 10 years. But that is a stock agency. You now get more for your day fee photography, more images, no scanning, no mark up fee for printing (if the photographer is so equipped). Some photographers are charging other fees to make up for the fee loss from processing and printing mark ups. These are image processing fees (for opening RAW files and some color correction). Customers are being more savy too, asking about fees etc. Then there are the ones that say "I bought a digital camera and don't need you anymore". More than 50 percent of those are back in a year.