The art of photography is being subverted by technology, laziness and an ever declining standard for excellence. Kirk Tuck discussed this on his blog last week and I concurred for the most part with this posting:
Kirk Tuck, who makes me think every now and then - and I hate that - has a very interesting article about camera equipment and the craft of photography. Go see his VSL posting Everything has Changed. To quote his thoughtful piece "We’re moving from a craft mentality which demanded a long and detailed mastery of all areas of a discipline into a post-craft world where the latest apps and styles take cultural precedence over perfectionism. " He contends that the 19th century craft sensibility is now gone and technology has brought us to instant production of mediocre quality. While I would not want to return to a time when leeches were the cure of choice for most medical maladies, photographers, especially those just starting out, would benefit from a more rudimentary approach to the art or craft or whatever you would want to call it. It is not possible to find a digital camera without auto-exposure, auto-focus, four hundred and twenty two scene settings and video functions. Hell, it's hard to find a cell phone without those features either. If one wants to learn any craft, one should start with the basics. For new photographers in particular, that means turning off all automatic functions and learning the relationships of aperture to shutter speed to ISO. Some will make that choice, others will leave the camera on full auto and start snapping.
In my April Fool's send up of a new Leica M10.af, I invented a camera without an LCD screen. I said it would encourage a film like approach to photography. Like waiting for the film to come back from the lab, one would have to wait until the files were downloaded to the computer to view them. Were I to make a camera to teach with, it would have a "learn" button that would disable the screen, turn off AF, AE and motor drive functions and limit the amount of captures to 36. That would force a more thoughtful approach to creating a photograph, one would have to think before shooting - wouldn't that be refreshing? The digital shotgun approach to photography, shooting three hundred images to uncover one good one would be eliminated. As an alternative this could easily be done with an inexpensive used Minolta SRT 101 and a few rolls of Ilford FP4. This is all great in theory, but it probably won't catch on and the reason goes beyond photography, art or music, (diatribe alert) it goes to our inability as a society to delay gratification and our willingness to accept mediocrity as a standard.
I have a number of theories as to when this started, one of which is with stock photography. Instead of paying photographers to create a unique image to fulfill a need, advertising agencies and magazines started using existing photography, later to be called stock shots, instead. The driving reason was of course cost. Why pay a photographer thousands of dollars for a unique, defining image when you can license use of an image for $400.00? The public wouldn't notice the difference. Many photographers started creating stock images and cataloging them to fill this need. To their credit, it least the images were to professional standards, many created in studio. Unfortunately the net result for many professional photographers became the loss of assignment work. It didn't stop there.
As the demand for quantity in anything accelerates, quality often falls. For example, You have three hundred cable channels and you still fall back on one to watch well written Law & Order episodes every evening. Digital auto-everything cameras make it possible for anyone with ears to generate (notice I did not write create) marginally acceptable images, and there is always someone willing to use them. With royalty-free images now available, this further lowers our standards. CNN took this to the bottom of the pit with their "i-report" model, described as "Accepts video, photos and audio from a computer or cell phone. A compilation of news items submitted by citizen journalism". Translated this means, you give CNN shitty images so they do not have to send someone out to cover a story and they put your name next to the photo or video, you get 15 seconds of fame, instead of paying for something worthwhile. Last week a tourist was beaten in Boston while a bunch of people, none of which helped him, recorded the assault on their cell phones. The images of course, later broadcasted. This could launch me into a separate diatribe, but I limit these to one per posting.
Leaving this path for awhile, one of Kirk's other points (among several good ones) is that by constantly upgrading our gear in pursuit of the shiniest technology, in essence, we no longer own our gear, we sort of rent it. We buy a $3,000 camera, keep it a year, sell it for $2,000 and buy the next $3,000 version. Cost of use of the camera for a year is $1,000, we are renting it for $85.00 a month.
This brings me to our collective inability to delay gratification, something Nikon, Canon et al depend on. Mea Culpa. I am one of the worst offenders. Since going digital I have not kept a camera more than 18 months, even as these purchases are made in the belief that I have bought the best thing and it will serve me well for a long time. It could of course. My clients use my work in brochures and on web sites. Do you really think there would be any difference between the files generated with last years Nikon D3 and next years Nikon D5? Not for their purposes. I would guess the images of a five year old camera would serve as well.
We should all get off this treadmill. We should be more craft oriented. We should aspire to use our gear to create images of higher and higher quality instead of sinking into the pool of mediocrity. We should give our credit cards and bank accounts a chance to exhale at the same time.
I've been trying to follow my own advice. I've cut back from a 7 lens medium format system to a 3 lens version. I cancelled my pre-order on the Nikon D4 and I have spent more time learning the finer points of post-processing my images. It ain't easy, it is akin to trying to walk away from a perfectly prepared rack of dry-rub ribs. I hear the siren call of megapixels in the distance ... must resist.
