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Edit: besides that Eisenstaedt was using what was the cutting edge gear of his and NOt some glass plate camera or a Daguerreotype camera from the previous century. If he is shooting today, i bet it would be a D5 with near real time dumping of images to his publishers.
+ 1 :thumbup:
and yet another reason why it's so healthy to now and then go back and use a film based camera
It doesn't need to be a puppet show, you know. It can be a bicycle:Not sure what good it would, Steen?
Even if you go to war torn Afghanistan, you would not find children rivetted by a puppet show nowadays. Most would be nose deep in their mobile phones.
The biggest problem with the D5, and most other digital cameras, is that you can fire off 5 or 10 or 20 shots within a second or so, with AF and face detection and whatnot, and you hope or asume that at least one of those shots will be the killer shot. It rarely is.Edit: besides that Eisenstaedt was using what was the cutting edge gear of his and NOt some glass plate camera or a Daguerreotype camera from the previous century. If he is shooting today, i bet it would be a D5 with near real time dumping of images to his publishers.
Not sure what good it would, Steen?
Even if you go to war torn Afghanistan, you would not find children rivetted by a puppet show nowadays. Most would be nose deep in their mobile phones.
Edit: besides that Eisenstaedt was using what was the cutting edge gear of his and NOt some glass plate camera or a Daguerreotype camera from the previous century. If he is shooting today, i bet it would be a D5 with near real time dumping of images to his publishers.
So, by this diatribe, there is no longer any need or desire for the skilled photographer in the world. Great. All you folks can simply click away while I practice photography ... I no longer need to make a living from photography, I do it for myself. :toocool:Taken to the extreme there is the quintessential stoner argument that rather than using a single shot stills camera. a photographer could use a video camera and pick the best frames for their photos. Technologically we are there, or at least almost there. In a few years we'll have capture devices with multiple lenses making multiple versions of the same scene, calculating the image we want by combining various focal lengths and focus points.
Versus the retro approach of making one image at a time, waiting for that decisive moment.
We can gripe about modern media, I certainly do, but what difference does it make? There are wonderful expressive video clips and stills taken from streams of photos out there on social media and they compare just as well as the classic film stills.
The thing about many of the famous Magnum/Life photos wasn't that the photographer was all that exceptional but that they were there, their organizations got them access to D-Day and war zones, moon launches and exotic locales. Robert Capa was not a particularly good photographer, Eisenstadt was probably a wonderful personality but did he really shoot anything different than hundreds of other press photographers?
We bemoan the loss of classic photojournalism but I rather like that billions of people can be amateur photojournalists. Image making should be like writing, not a specialty but a universal skill, with some practitioners doing it better than others.
Shooting good video and good stills will normally give two totally different results. As a photographer, you will be looking for that one moment that sums up the whole action. When you make video, you will through a sequence of occurences at the scene describe the development of the action, hopefully to end up with a final scene that will be remembered. The latter may not contain the "decisive moment" of the photographer at all, since it's a totally different way of telling a story.Taken to the extreme there is the quintessential stoner argument that rather than using a single shot stills camera. a photographer could use a video camera and pick the best frames for their photos. Technologically we are there, or at least almost there. In a few years we'll have capture devices with multiple lenses making multiple versions of the same scene, calculating the image we want by combining various focal lengths and focus points.
Versus the retro approach of making one image at a time, waiting for that decisive moment.
We can gripe about modern media, I certainly do, but what difference does it make? There are wonderful expressive video clips and stills taken from streams of photos out there on social media and they compare just as well as the classic film stills.
The thing about many of the famous Magnum/Life photos wasn't that the photographer was all that exceptional but that they were there, their organizations got them access to D-Day and war zones, moon launches and exotic locales. Robert Capa was not a particularly good photographer, Eisenstadt was probably a wonderful personality but did he really shoot anything different than hundreds of other press photographers?
We bemoan the loss of classic photojournalism but I rather like that billions of people can be amateur photojournalists. Image making should be like writing, not a specialty but a universal skill, with some practitioners doing it better than others.
Point being that now that the masses can make good photos with ease we’ll have to step up our game to stand out.So, by this diatribe, there is no longer any need or desire for the skilled photographer in the world. Great. All you folks can simply click away while I practice photography ... I no longer need to make a living from photography, I do it for myself. :toocool:
G
Sports is a totally different world. The only things that are not predictable are the end results and any accidents. The layout is known, the competitors are known, the time frame is known, both to the photographer and the viewer. I agree that video converted to stills would actually work for many sports, not least for motor sports which I have been photographing for years. This is also one reason why unmanned or remotely operated cameras are frequently used for some sports photography.If I photograph a skier flying over a downhill race jump, I can not physically capture “the decisive moment”. I certainly used to try back in the manual camera days. However I can mash the shutter on a modern camera and find an optimal frame during editing.
I understand that an art house movie not directed by Terrence Malick may have different requirements than a still photo, seems like a pointless analogy?
Heya Jack,This thread is obviously taking a turn, but it's a good discussion.
@Frankly -- I agree that "being there" is half the battle. And taking a still from a movie is essentially what sports photographers have been doing ever since motor-drives were invented
@Godfrey -- I agree that knowing when to click is half the battle. Of course having 30 (or 60) frames per second to choose from alleviates this to a certain degree... Knowing how to set the camera was definitely a thing back when, as was focusing it properly, but now the cam does both for you, and frankly most of the time better than we can. I see the niche for today's photographer being perspective, framing/focal length and aperture for desired effect --- that's where the art of photography now lies. Okay, need to add in lighting modification whether natural or artificial.
You've likely already seen my response to Jack.Point being that now that the masses can make good photos with ease we’ll have to step up our game to stand out.
Or take their cameras away so we can revert to only the weathly and skilled having the privilege to make pictures.
Oh, but the D850 is sooooo 2018, and photography is dead anyway... or was that film?I keep coming back to this thread hoping to read something relevant about the D850. By the latest postings I see that is not going to happen.
Godfrey,Heya Jack,
No intent whatever to take this thread to a turn, personally, but the post I responded to simply struck me as saying "Photography as we knew it is dead." I don't believe that, nor is it what I practice in my photography.
I know everyone here is all amorous and drooling over bazillions of multiple-gazillion megapixel frames to work with, hypersonic AF and prescient-scale-12 exposure automation with every trick in the book ... but quite honestly, all those things just bore me. I focus my lens. I make my exposure settings. I set up where to shoot from. And then I make my exposure. It's that simple: that's photography to me. The notion of the latest WunderKamera as being the next best thing to the Buddha floating in on his magic carpet leaves me cold. To me, it's a big, heavy, complicated, machine. It has none of the light ease of learning, remembering, and using that even my beloved Nikon F still does. (And yes, I still have that one. ) It's kind of like aiming Darth Vader's Death Star to snap a picture of a tulip... (I hope that image gives you a giggle. )
I've moved far away from these things. Photography is about seeing, expression, and timing. Not about ISO, pixels, lenses, and all that palaver. No carefully selected frame out of a row of a thousand wannabes will ever give me the sense of satisfaction having seen, caught the expression with my settings and timing, that a single snap at the right moment with a box brownie does.
As I said, I no longer need to sell my photographs for my income. I don't have to do anything for my income any more, other than stay alive to receive my checks. I do photography for the joy of it, to share my seeing and my photographs with other photographers and artists who see more than pixels, lenses, etcetera. I stay out of discussions of the latest trends in the photography business because it's no longer my world. I'm branching into doing short art motion stuff, just for fun and because it intrigues me now.
I'll keep doing, and evolving, my photography the same way I always have. And please pardon what I thought might be an amusing jest at ourselves.
G
—
"To see the light and wonder at it, to capture a moment and make a heart sing."
Rainy, Lazy Day: https://youtu.be/75K3Wl8dGG4
I shot my best pics with old school technology and inferior electronics. Yet there seems to be no escape from the "upgrading to the newest and best" hamster wheel. M9 and "focus tracking", i.e. called zone focusing in the old days.Godfrey,
great words and great thoughts - i really wish I would have been the one writing this. Had similar thoughts lately but could not really formulate what you have done in such a perfect way. This is also one of the reasons I lust of going back to the Leica M as this camera really forces - at least me - to think out of the box to take extraordinary pictures.
I also don't sell any photographs (at least I could not make a living out of this) and so I can concentrate on what pleases me. In times where all cameras need to do everything including perfect 4k video with all different kind of bitrates and color depth at up to thousands of FPS and also easily mountable to drones so one can add that Hollywood-look to your videos intermixed with iconic photos that were taken directly out of the video - I think I am getting way enough of that trend. Do I need video - sure to film some memories from my daughter or my grown up kids or their friends, but that's it!
I am no filmmaker and I do not want to be - I AM A PHOTOGRAPHER that occasionally needs to make some video - PERIOD!!!!
And for that a camera and technique that makes me think before I take the shot is what I need. Plus for me 24MP are already plenty enough - be it from m43, Leica FF or Nikon FF or any APSC camera.
So once again many thanks for reminding (me and maybe also many others) of the roots of good photography - and also this discussion is VERY OT in this thread I do hope that most reading through this will appreciate these musings ..... because these are the essentials why we finally do photograph.