Is Photography going to change?

NIKON KIU

Did you say Nippon Kogaku
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I wonder if Photography as we know it today will change? Lets say in 50 years? Year 2060

I don't mean change as we know-- but a real drastic change. Drastic enough where one can record an image one sees in their normall daily life. A sudden capture of a moment one remembers.

Think about it.

I learnt Photography the old fashioned way. Aperture, Speed, Focus...
Those are the primary factors of taking a Photo, they still apply today, doesn't matter if you have the latest Zoom or the super duper 50Megapixel camera, one still have to make sure they set the correct speed, aperture and focus as one deems necessary, to produce the mood or effect one desires.

But, with cameras pushing ISO limits to past one hundred thousand, shutter speeds faster than ever before, digital zooms going to 100 factors, Megapixels going up to millions...


Will Photography stay the same?
Will we be taking pictures using the same old factors that still apply today?

Will focus matter when everything is in focus?
Will "Bokeh" matter?
Will there be Shutter speeds and ISOs?
Aperture?


Kiu
 
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This post comes at a good time because I was going to start a thread on a notion which I think puts all of this in a different light.

It is interesting how all the conversation is about how everything will change because of electronics replacing chemistry. There is a lot of stroum und drang and yet I wonder if it is all missing the point.

Growing up in the 1970s my life was filled with intense lust after Leica cameras. Saving pennies I finally bought my first Leica. But looking back I think that it was more lens lust than camera lust. Yeah a Leica is quite and the viewfinder is okay but in truth the body of the beast was a pain in the ass. I went through bodies and learned to adjust the rangefinder and blah, blah, blah. But I kept the same lenses.

I recently got a Panasonic LX3 because of its Summicron lens and looking at the prints I've made over the last few months I can see a certain special quality to the images. They are much lovelier than dSLR images.

There's something about the Summicron that just rocks.

And that's my point. I think its lens quality more than film or camera body that is really at the core of the love of the rangefinder camera.

So Nikon KIU is missing some of the point. Photography is about the way light is transformed and in a way captured by the LENS. Shutter speeds and ISO are hardly be all and end all, they don't add so much to the quality of the image.

Photography won't change because it about light coming through a lens. Capture by film or digital is important but less important than lens quality.

ISO over 12000? For what? I need to control the aperture setting to control depth of field, bokeh etc.. ISO 12000 is great for something, but what that could be beats me.

And KIU asking "Will focus," aperture, and Bokeh matter in the future of photography is like asking whether we need guitar strings any more now that the world has Guitar Hero.

Hawkeye
 
Yup, yes, and of course! Why? Because photography is more than a mechanical/optical/chemical/physical process. It's also an artistic endeavor, a way to express yourself, tell stories, stimulate memories, and more. Cameras and lenses will change as will film and digital capture and storage. People will still be concerned about composition, lighting, and all the other things that intrigue and enchant us today.
 
Perhaps we can agree on what in the world we mean by change?
Change is the fundamental law of the universe but within that change much remains the same. It is the conundrum of continuity within the chaos of change. So what's change in this context. Is the change from BW to color photography as profound as the change from rangefinders to single lens reflexes or from film to digital capture?
 
Photography is based in technology. As technology changes, how we take pictures will change. Predicting the nature of that change is a much different matter.

That said, I expect cameras to look less and less like a traditional camera. Personally, i think the traditional camera design is long in need of an ergonomic rethink.

I also expect we will see attempts to emulate more and more of the characteristics of optical devices like lenses and viewfinders in software. That is, while a lens is fundamental to any camera, software may be able to take input from a fixed lens and alter it to emulate a variety of lenses at different focal lengths.

The reasons we take photos won't change.
 
concepts change but the basic principles remain the same -

What if concepts change drasticly, to a point when one does not need a (Zoom) lens, no shutter speeds, no ISOs, no aperture control...

All you need to do is capture a moment you imagined or saw, lets say via a revolutionary new image copying device that captures such images, directly from your eyes or even better, your brain!


Kiu
 
We are dinosaurs thinking like dinosaurs. A generation or two from now, nobody will give a flip about lenses, and camera settings and film and sensors. Nobody. Technology will have made them irrelevant. Transparent to the user. We are a decade into the digital camera revolution. We cannot imagine technology advanced two human generations form now.
 
> We are a decade into the digital camera revolution.

1980's, 1990's, 2000's. I'm three decades into it. I found some images made with our Digital Sensor taken in 1981.

The first one was pretty tough. Made our own. The 1990's were expensive. Custom Made. 2000's- just not fun anymore. Might as well go back to film based photography.
 
"All you need to do is capture a moment you imagined or saw, lets say via a revolutionary new image copying device that captures such images, directly from your eyes or even better, your brain!"

Geez I'm still waiting for the flying cars that are only fifty years late. Sure pictures by blinking your eyes that's into the future none of us will see....
 
I think Al is right. We are still talking about making pictures, which people have been doing since we've been people. So content, mood, color, contrast and all the rest will still be discussed. Focus? yes, even if we create images directly from our eyes as they have focus and apertures too. Artist's will still strive to get at the controls, no matter what the technology.
 
I don't mean change as we know-- but a real drastic change. Drastic enough where one can record an image one sees in their normall daily life. A sudden capture of a moment one remembers.

But, with cameras pushing ISO limits to past one hundred thousand, shutter speeds faster than ever before, digital zooms going to 100 factors, Megapixels going up to millions

With tiny digital P+S cameras, we're already there (almost).

I predict that in the year 2060, there will still be the same percentage of cat, flower, and sunset pictures, as there are today.
 
Maybe someday we will download images from our eyes to our brain and captured it in a wireless storage device. That doesn't seem that far fetched any more.
 
Or even more amazing- be able to capture and record images without the use of - E L E C T R I C I T Y-
 
No matter how technology changes, I would still want to be able to take the kinds of pictures that I am taking, and I'd want to do it with a rangefinder. At the end of the day, the image to me is the important thing, closely followed by the satisfaction of composing and pressing the shutter myself.
 
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