To be fair, I am quite grateful for the advances the digital world has made in the past 7-10 years. I certainly would not have been able to capture the photographs I found during that time frame using film cameras exclusively. As I see it, the problem is one predominantly of culture.
Art is always downstream from the culture that creates it. Having been around long enough to watch the world spin on its axis so many times (my first commercial photo was made in 1967), and having had to embrace the formality of the film world and its rigid disciplines in order to develop the eye that has seen and recorded the images in my portfolio, I believe I have earned the right to analyze a bit of the ‘hems and haws’ that have been the major forces in defining what we blithely refer to as photography today.
Prior to the advent of digital, photography was a linear process, one that enforced fairly rigorous demands on the shooter -- if they wanted to make it from ‘click the shutter’ to ‘look at this image and tell me what you think.’
The steps were simple and straightforward, with the understanding that blowing one meant blowing them all. If you didn’t know how to use a light meter to properly expose the film, no amount of fiddling in the darkroom could fix the flaw. The actual latitude of film is only about a single f-stop. Step outside that range and the image suffers.
The selection of which f-stop and which shutter speed were 100% contingent upon the subject matter and if it was moving. Also, the mechanical nature of the shutter meant your ‘eye’ had to be 1/60th of a second faster than your subject, since that is how long a Nikon F requires from the time the shutter release was pressed until the shutter actually opened.
Processing film was as much art as science. The simple act of loading film onto a stainless steel reel caused many a strong man to drop to his knees weeping in anguish. Proper agitation was as critical as it gets to ensure even development. I graduated photo school in 1971 (Syracuse University with some of the soon-to-be major movers and shakers in the fashion photography industry (I chose a simpler commercial path), and it took me a full 5 years of constant experimentation to determine the agitation cycle that was necessary for proper (even) film development. My friends gave up and sent their film to commercial photo houses.
Reading a negative to determine the difference between proper exposure and development is another skill that requires time. There’s the rub: TIME.
I could continue on this path: composing and framing the image in the camera, proper focusing, etc. The point here is that everything that we take for granted today was a hard-earned skill during the film years. Developing the patience and discipline to acquire these skills took time – lots of it.
It slowed us down for a reason. Each image was important. Each image was a slice of time that could not be revisited or reinterpreted later – and the ones you missed – and I missed plenty, formed its own portfolio in your mind that would never fade away.
I can hear the naysayers shouting the obvious. Don’t need to know how to agitate film. Don’t need to know how to process film. Don’t need to know how to ‘read’ a negative.
Accurate but irrelevant. The skills are still linear. You need to know how to read the light. You need to know how to expose the image properly. You need to know how to frame and compose. “We’ll fix it in post.” That’s actually a pre-digital statement issued frequently by art directors who wanted the photographers to move a little quicker – they could not, for the life of them, cope with the arduous task of using a 4 x 5 view camera and studio lighting.
Yes, Photoshop can cure most cases of poor vision. Photoshop can hide the fact that you didn’t see the telephone pole growing out of the model’s head.
You can quickly remove the mole from the model’s face, but that doesn't cure the underlying cancer. The cancer here is the monumental disregard for the history of photography and what can be learned from it. I don’t need to be a landscape photographer to absolutely swoon over Ansel Adam’s “Moonrise, Hernandez, Mexico” and know that he knew the reflectivity of the moon at that time of the month -- he could place his Zone IV value precisely so that the moon didn’t morph into the sun.
The fundamental problem with the digital world is the pedestals that certain physical features are thrust upon, deifying them in the process. The next person who utters the word Bokeh to me is going to lose some teeth. Out of focus ‘circles of confusion’ are too unimportant to have any significance in photography at all. They are meaningless drivel, and those that elevate this gnat’s eye view of the world are truly missing the forest for the trees. Yes, a pleasant background that does not distract from the subject is important. End of story. Quantifying the value of certain lenses by the degree of tumescence generated for the viewer, is, well, yucky.
Again, what we are actually seeing here is the vacuum in the culture that embraces this ideal. That typical 15% of under-utilized brain matter is dwindling – very rapidly, and very vapidly.
Another concept hammered-until-way-past-death is ‘noise’. In the film world, it was called ‘grain’, because, it actually was grain. There is a physical relationship between the clumping of silver particles based on film speed that is more a law of nature than anything else. Yes, both Ilford (Delta) and Kodak (T-MAX) tried an end run with some of their more esoteric films. Both attempts were partial successes, but at a cost that the photojournalists would not accept (complete loss of film latitude during exposure, and ultra sensitivity to highlight blocking during development).
Back to history please. Grain was an inherent feature of fast films used under difficult lighting conditions. It actually enhanced most of the images that chose to embrace it.
Today’s digital world has created a pariah of grain (noise) on par with an STD that can be actually acquired by simply looking at a photo of it. Yes, you can get AIDS from a toilet seat now…but only if you are shooting digital.
While there are plenty of other aspects of digital that roil me, I’ll repeat my original thought. I do have plenty of images that could only have been created on my Nikon Z8, and I am grateful for that. But bokeh and noise are simply different sides of the same piece of lint I am now flushing down the toilet…
Here is where we must dive deeper into the culture that strove to defy and destroy history. Way before the internet became the life force on the planet, effectively replacing oxygen as the element required to replenish our red blood cells in order to sustain existence, the concept of ‘instant (or immediate) gratification’ was successfully pushed out from between Mother Nature’s legs. While I wholeheartedly despise the notion of abortion (a topic for another day), the birth of this infant, had I been able to peek into the near future, might have been one I would have turned over to Planned Parenthood to peruse.
Immediate Gratification actually sprang to life in the 60’s with the advent of fast-food restaurants. The ability to walk up to a window and plunk down $0.39 of your hardly earned money (19 cents for a burger, 10 cents for fries, 10 cents for a soda) and have a bag of food in your hands in well under 90 seconds, ushered in the beginning of a culture which quickly became addicted to the notion that patience not only was not a virtue, but that somehow it was inherently evil.
The business model for many of our commonly used items changed direction literally overnight, leading us to believe that everything that defined humanity up till that point (and we ARE talking about 6000 years of recorded history here) was a useless burden. Planned obsolescence, the illegitimate stepchild of the electric lawn mower and the dishwasher, paved the way for the biggest alteration to human existence up to this point: the portable telephone.
Please bear with me (I know I’m forbidden to ask you to be patient). I’m going to tie all of this back to digital photography, I just need to lay down a few more dots to connect.
This may be difficult to swallow, but the direct predecessor to our beloved cell phones that many people spend upwards of 9-11 hours a day glued to, was the lowly microwave oven. Here is our mechanical link to instant gratification. The technology of the microwave ushered in the pocketable cell phone less than 20 years later. Holy shit! Fast food and Fast Cooking laid the foundation for the New Deity who we all bend down towards (maybe bend over for is more appropriate).
Without the cell phone, the internet would have been another successful Planned Parenthood intervention. In addition to my many years as a pro photographer, I had a parallel career as a software architect (nearly 30 years), and was right there (literally, in a Hollywood basement in the early 90’s as the foundation for the World Wide Web was conceived and shoveled out.
The dots are all here now. Fast food begat the microwave, who begat the cell phone, whose bastard child was the internet. How history was sidestepped and discarded like a two-dollar whore on pay day is becoming clearer. Once information was able to move literally at the speed of light, we circumvented the time previously reserved for honest observation and reflection.
If you have any interest in sociology and psychology, you should look at the cultural changes that manifested themselves over three specific generations: Pre-World War II (my grandparents), World War II (my parents), and Post World War II (me). The most significant and demonstrative change between #2 and #3 is that the 60’s ushered in the notion of self-reflection, introspection, and ultimately: sustained navel gazing. This concept did not commonly exist prior to the Hippie Generation and sub-culture born of the mid to late 60’s.
This was the key transitional element: what we referred to as ‘egotistical’ in the 50’s, fully morphed into narcissistic within 20 years. The healing element of self-reflection was catalyzed by the drug culture into its much darker side. The seemingly harmless nature of 3.5% THC in early grades of marijuana (while I have always loved the Mexican people and culture, they had no idea how to properly grow pot) metastasized in the absolutely ruthless and mind destroying weed today with over 27% THC. The changes this foisted on the next two generations undid whatever good the early culture of trying to understand what motivated us to become who we were might have existed in and around 1965.
We lost the ability to rationally observe and comprehend the deep end we were diving into. History became a useless waste of time when we could have any form of mental, physical, or pseudo-spiritual stimulation simply by spinning from one web site to the next. The time required for organic growth as a human being was cast away. It no longer held any sway on our reason to be, or a motivation for what we could become.
The mindless arrogance of calling oneself an ‘influencer’ placed ignorance and stupidity on a pedestal from which it may never step down. So how do we connect this to digital photography?
Digital photography gave us an unending, inexhaustible supply of ‘do-overs’ in an attempt to create or recreate a moment in time. The ‘eye’ – the goal that would make or break you as a capturer-of-moments, went blind in the process.
When I read stories about commercial wedding photographers who routinely take over a thousand photos at a typical 4-8 hour ceremony and festivity, I really want to projectile vomit. Using a camera set at 10 frames per second and simply holding it up in the air and pointing it in the direction of the activity is one of the lowest forms of depravity to wretch its way out of this fine art form. Prior to the acceptance of 35mm as an acceptable level of quality for wedding photography (around the 80’s), the average commercial shooter might take 20-25 photos for a typical album.
I shot a lot at weddings. Since my background was photojournalism, I was trained to anticipate the moment as it built to an emotional high. I might actually use up to three rolls of film (35 X 3 = 105 images) at each event. MY customers were ecstatic that I caught the passionate content of the occasion. I watch a photo emerge, snapped the shutter and moved on. The mindlessness of today’s commercial endeavors were such flagrant violations of what we strived for (the eye, the eye, the eye), that under certain circumstances it would be easy to imagine an older person witnessing this embarrassment and calling 911, explaining to the operator that they believed they were witnessing a mental breakdown in public. Not a joke.
Digital removed the discipline from photography. Yes, I like autofocus. Yes, I like autoexposure. They are excellent tools that would have dramatically improved the professional tennis photos I took in the late 70’s as Director of Photography for Palm Springs Life Magazine. Yes, I am partial to image stacking – my portfolio of house plants and flowers wouldn’t exist today without them.
While I am grateful for the technical help I get from today’s super-computer-in-a-box, without the discipline I was forced to develop, and the eye that came along with it, the technology alone would have not rendered my photos for what they are today (in my eyes).
I urge you to slow down a bit. You don’t have to run out and by a film camera. That’s not the point. Learn to see the image before pressing the shutter release. Watch the light change slowly over the course of a day to find that one moment (usually a 6-7 minute window) which reveals the true beauty of the subject (assuming that the light is important to the particular image). Switch to single frame exposures, if applicable to the subject matter.
I promise you -- it will help. It will make you a better shooter… History matters. Pick up a few books by the masters that you respect the most in your chosen discipline. See how they did it back in the 1940’s.
Have a look:
Digital (https://www.ishootup.net/copy-of-birds,
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