Better ... or is it the equipment?
By Sarason Liebler
LIBERTY (June 1): My father, working with a German Leica camera acquired from a merchant seaman just after World War II, took wonderful photographs. The small camera, with a perfect lens, had a range finder but no light meter.
When he prepared to take a picture he used a hand-held light meter, mentally averaged the readings, made his aperture and speed settings accordingly, and waited for the moment. If a cloud came by he started over again. Those cameras had no motor drive. Winding was done with a knob and took some time. You either got your shot or you didn't.
Using his brains and with a great ability to concentrate, he got a lot of good ones. I was quite interested in taking pictures as he did, and my first big-time effort was with a small Agfa-Gavert 35 mm, also lacking a light meter. I got some good shots but not like my father. In time I moved up to a Nikkomat, a Japanese SLR (single lens reflex) with an integrated light meter. You set speed or aperture, working to move a needle into the center of a small range on the side of the eyepiece view screen. It was better, but still not as good as my father and the old Leica.
My father, in his later years, was given a more advanced Nikomat EL as a gift. It permitted automatic setting of speed or aperture but still lacked a motor drive. He rarely used it. I have been using that camera since he died, more than 15 years. Results, again, better, but not as good as my father.
Now, as a milestone birthday approaches for me, as a gift from my entire family, I was given a top-of-the-line digital SLR digital camera. It comes preset from the factory and lets you start shooting as soon as you get the battery charged and insert the memory card. To properly set my own specifications will require at least two years of advanced training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But out of the box, on automatic, I finally outdid my father and his old Leica.
Skiers now have better materials and ski faster. Pole-vaulters passed the old record marks, as if they were accomplished by Pygmies, as soon as the poles were switched from bamboo to fiberglass, and then to carbon fiber.
Fly fisherman wrestle in large fish with rods of exotic graphite composites that let them stress the fish far more than one could with the old, impossibly fine, hand-engineered bamboo rods with tippets no thicker than a No. 2 pencil lead.
My banging out 12 electronic, digital exposures, without having to check speed or light lets me get the perfect picture with far more ease and less skill than my father had. But I never have displayed the concentration capabilities of my father, or his aesthetic eye as he framed a shot. With the optics integrated with the remarkable electronics, I can fake it.
Barry Bonds recently tied Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs over his career, and unless whacked by a bus he will surpass the Babe's total.
Many things of course are not comparable here either. Balls have been juiced since the Babe, and it appears that so was Bonds. The Babe on the other hand fueled himself with booze and good times and was just as physically broken down at the end of his career as Bonds is now, as his career comes to an end. Still, in a sense, the white Ruth and the black Bond are related as father-and-son figures of Major League Baseball. But comparisons do not work so well when there are so many variables.
Athletes of today preened and sculpted by trainers and fueled by all sorts of substances, legal or otherwise, can not be compared with the lesser-trained "amateurs" of the past, or even with the pros of the past, who lived a far different life.
And my "skills" cannot be compared to my father’s, who worked things through in his head with no computer. Did I mention that he also wrote without spell check or anything like Google? But he could take notes in shorthand and type with such speed and fury that the machine would literally leap to his command.
With the tools of the present we may be able to do more than those of the past.
But better? Uh-uh.
