Is it Me or The Technology? [long]

[Rogier]

I am in the middle (buried) of processing thousands of images my wife and I took during out trip to Myanmar the first two weeks of this year.

We shot with to manny camera's:

• 2 x iPhone 5
• 2 x Holga
• 1 X Yashica 128G
• 1 X Holganon 612 (Holga 120 Pan modified with a Angulon lens)

Scanning the 55 rolls of MF film my old statement is once again confirmed. "Expensive camera's are way overrated..."
Yes the X100 and 128G take technically perfect images. But the humble Holga shots have a character that makes them stand out. Both Holga's have different flaws and its up to the photographer how to take advantage of that..

 

[Godfrey]

To me, what this all comes down to is another flavor of the 'film vs digital' silliness.

I don't let what other people do affect me. I enjoy photography, and don't care whether good photography is done well with a digital camera or with a film camera. I appreciate the differences when the results are successful, don't account as one is better than the other, and ignore the crud that I think is just bad photography in either.

I also like nice old film cameras and have developed a similar affection for some of the more interesting digital cameras I've owned and used. I'd chuck a half a dozen of the supposedly glorious old film cameras I've owned and used in favor of the Olympus E-1, for instance. It's just a brilliant camera.

So don't let dyspepsia get you down, look at other folks' work for what they have done to inspire you—ignore it otherwise, and use whatever equipment makes you happy.

G

 

[Godfrey]

Exactly! Most of the places I go disappoint me, as I have seen photos taken there before I was born, and when I get there
It is all a tourist trap. Maybe I need a Tardis instead of a new camera...

I dunno. I love to travel. But what I love about traveling is meeting people, visiting with people whom I've met before, and looking deep, not surface.

I go to the Isle of Man every year I can. I have been there twelve times, for periods up to three weeks. It's an island 40 miles long and 10 miles wide. There is a lot of history there, but mostly it's a perfectly modern, small, semi rural for the most part little place.

I think I've seen about 20% of it now. I'll be there again in a few weeks, for a couple of weeks, and I'll be happy to see another 2%.

In Ramsey - Isle of Man 2011
Ricoh GXR + Skink pinhole​

There are an infinity of things to see in the world, subjects to photograph, ways to photograph them. Adjust your expectations and enjoy the world as it is, not as you would want it to be.

G

 

[Roger Hicks]

Well, you're right, Roger. Even Ansel Adams' work, love him or hate him, can't be duplicated today because of air quality issues. I can't tell you how many times over the years in the '80s and '90s I tried to get a shot of Half Dome... and got haze instead. The world has changed, and although we may be more physically comfortable in many ways (at least in the industrialized nations) I'm not sure all of those changes have been for the better.

On Edit... one more thought... I had the opportunity to visit the east coast of Australia in 2006. I expected... well... to see things Australian. And I did, in fact, get to see a few things that were natively Australian, but Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast are, for all intents and purposes carbon copies of southern California from Morro Bay south to the border. Burger King, MacDonald's, and the Hard Rock Cafe were everywhere. Culture, at least in the English speaking world has become very homogenous.

Wenn ich Kultur höre...entsichere ich meinen Browning!

Translation: When I hear [the word] 'Culture' I release the safety catch on my Browning [pistol]

One reason I like living in (continental, non-Anglophone) Europe.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Bille]

One of his friends suggested that he try digital, which at first he resisted. However, he did try a medium format 645 back and was quite impressed by the quality. Since the medium format back setup was a bit large, he eventually settled on the Canon full frame (1Ds-something?). However, he still uses it like in the film days: his assistant makes contact sheets for him, and his camera is modified to give the same 645 ratio he is used to. He also has the images processed to look like Tri-X. For prints, a lab converts the data into a 645 negative and prints using traditional darkroom process!

http://rfman.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/an-evening-with-sebastiao-salgado/

 

[maddoc]

Then, something odd happened. Digital photography took over. It became easier for amateurs to get great results. It made it easier to eliminate technical issues in lighting and composition (just reshoot, on the spot), processing and printing (WYSIWYG, on the spot). It democratized the process. There were MORE images to see. All technically 'perfect.'

But, isn't anyone else regretting the 'compromise?' Convenience in lieu of that 2%? The MAGIC 2%?

I feel the same way, since digital took over the amount of technical perfect pictures increased significantly but nuances due to the process involved in film-based photography vanished. Same lens, same sensor, same processing algorithm and often enough same subject and treatment created a huge pool of more or less identical looking and technical perfect pictures.

Therefore, I don`t believe in the often stated "Only the final image is important, the recording media doesn`t matter". For me, the recording media is the key to the final image.

 

[FrankS]

The OP is responding (I think) to the tension between those who see no significance in process and medium, and care only about the "final product", and those who know that the process is an integral part of what is created. The process is where the "magic" lies.

This is a debate that appears on RFF in various guises, usually film vs digital, but also "real human relationship" vs social media. I think it is a central issue of our time, and I appreciate the OPs thoughtful take on this .

Randy

+3 or 4

I love film photography because the process is rational and ritualistic. For me, I simply don't connect with the digital photographic process, convenient though it is, it is not satisfying. For me, I don't value computer post processing skills as much as traditional darkroom skills. The film photography process makes the final image more meaningful to me.

This is all about me. I don't care/mind if others feel as strongly pro digital. Good for them, good for me, good for us all.

 

[KM-25]

+3 or 4

I love film photography because the process is rational and ritualistic. For me, I simply don't connect with the digital photographic process, convenient though it is, it is not satisfying. For me, I don't value computer post processing skills as much as traditional darkroom skills. The film photography process makes the final image more meaningful to me.

This is all about me. I don't care/mind if others feel as strongly pro digital. Good for them, good for me, good for us all.

Pretty much, and I still use digital for a good amount of my work, do great things with it. I think there is far too much inquiry placed on the person who prefers film like "you need to give digital more time, you hate digital, you are not good at it, you think film is better when it is not, you are anti-digital, blah, blah, blah".....insecure much?

When it just comes right down to how do you want to spend your time, what do you value in life and most of all....where is your heart at?

It's real simple, my heart is in film and darkroom work, so the resulting photos will show that.

 

[Godfrey]

Pretty much, and I still use digital for a good amount of my work, do great things with it. I think there is far too much inquiry placed on the person who prefers film like "you need to give digital more time, you hate digital, you are not good at it, you think film is better when it is not, you are anti-digital, blah, blah, blah".....insecure much?

When it just comes right down to how do YOU want to spend your time, what do you value in life and most of all....where is your heart at?

It's real simple, my heart is in film and darkroom work, so the resulting photos will show that.

I guess I walk on both sides of this fence. I get to enjoy the greener grass no matter where I put my feet.

I developed many many techniques for processing and producing great negatives ages ago. They all still work. Never had a decent enough home darkroom to really achieve what I wanted in prints ... the equipment makes a huge difference there, which I found out when I worked for a photofinisher/custom lab. Never had the budget, the time, or the space to do that to my satisfaction.

I applied those skills to creating development processes that allowed me to make the best negatives for scanning when scanning became feasible, and I developed image processing routines to render what I wanted from the scans. I enjoyed that immensely.

When decent digital capture became available, I threw my head into it and found that much of what I learned about exposure analysis for film worked just beautifully ... all I needed to do what understand the capture characteristics of the new medium and apply the same principles. Learning the image processing for raw image data and color management made perfectly logical sense to my techie geek mathematician head, much more so than manipulating PV/NT chemical equations. I was never a chemist. ;-)

When decent printers for home use surfaced about 7 years ago, I bought one and learned how to make top notch prints with inkjet. It's all been upside since then as papers and inks have gotten better and better.

Today I shoot with film and digital cameras. I process and scan the film, I render the scans and the raw files, and I print them. It's all wonderful process, and the equipment to produce superb results on the processing side costs a trifle compared to what the professional darkroom that I needed in the '80s and '90s would have. The cameras cost more or less the same at the level I'm using. And it all even fits in the small office I've got at home...

It's all good. Do what makes you happy, and what produces good photographs.

G

 

[Ronald M]

If you have bad light, you should see it before film is wasted. Bad expressions, same.
Bad compositions, same. You should learn to meter.

Now the only immediate advantage digital has is the exposure can be confirmed on the spot. The high MP digital cams, Leica M9, M, Nikon D800, D4 will put a film image to shame if both are executed properly.

 

[Al Patterson]

I dunno. I love to travel. But what I love about traveling is meeting people, visiting with people whom I've met before, and looking deep, not surface.

I go to the Isle of Man every year I can. I have been there twelve times, for periods up to three weeks. It's an island 40 miles long and 10 miles wide. There is a lot of history there, but mostly it's a perfectly modern, small, semi rural for the most part little place.

I think I've seen about 20% of it now. I'll be there again in a few weeks, for a couple of weeks, and I'll be happy to see another 2%.

In Ramsey - Isle of Man 2011
Ricoh GXR + Skink pinhole​

There are an infinity of things to see in the world, subjects to photograph, ways to photograph them. Adjust your expectations and enjoy the world as it is, not as you would want it to be.

G

I was thinking of Sedona Arizona. WAY too commercial. A few miles down the road is Gerome. Much more interesting....

I guess once the rich "find" a place it just ends up turning me off.

 

[DougFord]

The film gets loaded into a film camera.
The film camera is a machine a proper machine. With gears and sprockets and levers, dragging the film from one spool to the next. And your brain sings with joy at the atavistic level, not unlike threading a piece of tall grass down an ant hole for some of us, a simple machine. None of that is found in the digital camera. No atavistic yummy spot activation.....nothing.
...and other's, much further up on the evolutionary scale are perfectly happy using both or just digital. Crazy ...right? 😛

 

[Clint Troy]

To me, what this all comes down to is another flavor of the 'film vs digital' silliness.
G

There's no silliness.
They are so different in almost every aspect.

 

[zsas]

Yes, I too notice the differences, and it's the reason I went back to shooting film exclusively a few years ago. It was the best thing I have ever done with regards to my photography. I don't try to over-analyse it, but I know I am much happier now.

^Bingo! Well said!

 

[zwarte_kat]

I'm about ten years older than you. My photographic career has been a very different journey from yours, but I find myself bored to tears with the majority of photography being produced today. I've thought about that a lot, and I'm convinced that the medium is irrelevent... digital or film... what's changed is the overwhelming amount of it; most of it poorly done. The "problem" with digital in general isn't that it's not "film" but that it's available to everyone, everywhere who then feels the need to publish every result every time they push the shutter release, or whatever serves as a shutter release. And then there's some blog or social media site that puts it out there. Very little is original any more. We're overwhelmed and overloaded with images... some of them even very good images, but because we're SO bombarded every day, it's tough to find the joy in them.

In the "old days" we waited breathlessly for Nat Geo, or Vogue, or Life, or Look and saw images of things we knew we'd likely never see in person. Big images. Some color, some B&W. They expanded our world. They inflamed our imagination. They somehow made the world seem challenging and somewhere we wanted to explore. We knew that those images were just the tip of the iceberg about what was really out there and we wanted to grab those experiences for ourselves.

For those of us in the U.S. mid-west, New York and L.A. seemed so cosmopolitan, and so exotic and romantic... London, Paris, Bombay, Cape Town... may have all been on Mars, but we got to see all those places through the lenses of the magazine photographers. And the images were stunning... or gritty... or whatever emotion they evoked... but evocotive they were! They all spoke of lives we could aspire to live... someday.

Today, we're bombarded with images. iPhone images... p&s images... poorly done images... if you want to see something, you just type the place into Google, and there are more images than you can stand to look at in one sitting. And most of them are, frankly, not worth looking at. We're overloaded... bombarded... tired of seeing them.

The old images still talk to us as they still spark those dreams. If they'd been digital they'd still have done that because they were new and fresh, and the world was challenging and exciting. That, is what I believe the problem to be. There are still amazing images out there. There are unexplored places. There are images yet to be made, but how to differentiate those images from from noise is what has become the problem. Places and fashion and art are all mundane because we're inundated with them. That makes images of places and fashion and art mundane because little is new and fresh any more.

Sometimes it's good to take a break for a while. Take the opportunity unload some of the noise... re-evaluate what you want to see, and then really begin looking again with fresh eyes.

I feel exactly the same way. The power (well, one of them) of a photograph is showing things that we otherwise couldn't see, both places and people, even when they have ceased to be.

I recently had a discussion about why we liked the recent James Bond films far less than the old ones (though I think Skyfall was a good action movie), and my conclusion was that James Bond would introduce us to all these exotic places. These days it's not only far easier to go anywhere on vacation yourself, you don't even need to if you just want to see the places, just go on internet.

I am lucky (I think, not all agree) to be living far away from my home country, so I can show my friends,family, and even strangers in the Netherlands pictures from Japan. They have all seen temples and mount Fuji, but the little details in everyday live, funny advertising posters, people sleeping in the train, funky dressed Japanese kids, these are things that are often still exotic and interesting to them. They don't really care if it's film or digital, but I like to do both. They are both real images I feel. So it's more the place or subject, but it needs me to take it, and I need technology to shoot. So to answer the OP's title: Yes!

One thing I sometimes think about is how we will look back in hundreds of years towards photography. Or over a thousand years! Will film still play a significant part in photo history, when over 90% of it has become digital? Will it just be a short technical page in the first chapter? Or will we have moved beyond digital, and film AND digital will just be 2 small eras each getting their own chapter, with many other chapters going to newer eras and techniques. I guess we'll never know! Anyway, food for a whole different discussion altogether!

 

[pakeha]

oh, why did i read this thread.
I had just made my mind up on a micro 4/3 purchase
More procrastination now ....doh.
I gotta stop reading stuff on the web.🙂

 

[tunalegs]

Sorry to have written so much in order to ask this [simplified] question:

Is it just me, or does anyone else acknowledge/notice/care about the subjective, qualitative differences?

I realize I can continue to shoot film. I'm asking about others' appreciation for the photography as you practice it, and with you as the audience. No change? What you see from others still motivates and inspires you as much as it used to?

I look through flickr groups. Today it's what the amateurs are doing that I find inspiring. I could care less about the pros. I can't even name one contemporary "pro" photographer, but I know dozens of names of dead ones. 😀

I go through a group like the I Shoot Film group, and everyday I can find at least one photo that I really enjoy. It's stuff that wouldn't have been printed and distributed years ago. There's no reason to admire the big guys anymore, because you can find work from fantastic photographers now - who aren't in magazines and books. Sure that also means there is a LOT more boring photographs to sift through, but wow I like finding new photographers and new photographs.

 

[KM-25]

I look through flickr groups. Today it's what the amateurs are doing that I find inspiring. I could care less about the pros. I can't even name one contemporary "pro" photographer, but I know dozens of names of dead ones. 😀

I go through a group like the I Shoot Film group, and everyday I can find at least one photo that I really enjoy. It's stuff that wouldn't have been printed and distributed years ago. There's no reason to admire the big guys anymore, because you can find work from fantastic photographers now - who aren't in magazines and books. Sure that also means there is a LOT more boring photographs to sift through, but wow I like finding new photographers and new photographs.

Yeah, go ahead, bash pros buddy....LOL!

Just because we don't spill our guts out on Flickr like you and your Heroes do does not mean we are not breaking new ground. Go attend Perpignan or Look3 and see great work from both pros and amateurs that you have never seen before, because not everyone posts on the web to join the giant circle on sites like Flickr, especially those who still make a great living at your hobby.

I can not afford to have cutting edge work on the Internet anymore, it's a damn free-for-all and I do really well with promotion that is off the radar.

But yeah, keep drinking coolaid as Google hot links directly to your biggest Flickr-tastic files with no attribution. Sort of sorry to be so rude but consider it a return serve in a game of BS...

 

[tunalegs]

Yeah, go ahead, bash pros buddy, just because we don't spill our guts out on Flickr like you and your Heros do does not mean we are not breaking new ground.

I can not afford to have cutting edge work on the Internet anymore, it's a damn free-for-all. But yeah, keep drinking coolaid...

That's a bit beside the point since we're talking about inspiration. For better or for worse even the best photographer has nothing on say - a rainy day, or a good sunrise when it comes to inspiration. Feel free to yell at the clouds though for showing off for free. 🙂

Just because you're not making $$$ off of it, doesn't make it any less inspiring for me.

 

[KM-25]

That's a bit beside the point since we're talking about inspiration. For better or for worse even the best photographer has nothing on say - a rainy day, or a good sunrise when it comes to inspiration. Feel free to yell at the clouds though for showing off for free. 🙂

Just because you're not making $$$ off of it, doesn't make it any less inspiring for me.

That's common sense sir, but why bash pros twice in the last post? Ever since digital and the Internet, some really nasty attitudes and misconceptions have come about as far as amateur camera owners towards professional photographers. I just see more and more of it and its all BS, if you want to lock your self in a room called Flickr and say that is all the inspiration that anyone has....well that is where the BS comes in on your part.

And do you know what inspires me? Life in person, not on the Internet. Light, cold, heat, water, ice, sand, emotions, convergence, joy, fear....all full time too in Sam Abell's citing of the "Photographic Life".

But not wasting hours on end looking at pretty pictures on a computer screen using Flickr when I can be lugging my 4x5 up to 12,000+ feet tomorow after the fresh snowstorm we just had tonight...