Objective vs Subjective Photography Tools

[NickTrop]

This is an old article about the advances in autofocus technology I found on Lexus Nexus (therefore, no link...) The author gets into the claim that only manual cameras take "subjective" photos, whereas "auto-everything cameras" are only capable of "objective" photos. He posits that manual cameras will, therefore, always exist.

The main gist of the article, written in 1994, is an overview of the then wondrous 4th generation autofocus cameras... However, I thought the "objective vs subjective" thing might be interesting fodder for discussion.

Here is an excerpt:

The Straits Times
Focus on the autofocus

February 27, 1994

Cheng Chee Seng

"...Increasingly, it seems, all you need to do is switch on the camera, point it at a subject, decide on how you want it to be framed, press the shutter button and you got your picture -- almost always.

Will there come a day when manual cameras become extinct? Probably not. There is still a band of faithful followers who still think that electronics can produce only "objective" pictures while only the human mind can produce "subjective" pictures.

Subjective pictures are those captured exactly as the photographer sees them. Take for example, a black cat on a snow bank. An auto-everything camera will "balance" all the details and produce a picture of a grey cat on a blue snow bank.

What if you want to show just the pit-light lit face of a coal miner in a dark mine shaft?..."

 

[gns]

"...Increasingly, it seems, all you need to do is switch on the camera, point it at a subject, decide on how you want it to be framed, press the shutter button

"All you need to do"???...Doesn't he understand that this is the most important (and difficult) part?

Cheers,
Gary

 

[NickTrop]

"All you need to do"???...Doesn't he understand that this is the most important (and difficult) part?

Cheers,
Gary

Apparently not. And I don't agree with the author. Today I walked around with an XA set at f5.6/near infinity to get max DOF so I could "just shoot", so photogs have been doing this since forever.

I just thought the Objective = automated; Subjective = manual was an unusual "take" on things and apparently a debate going back to the 80's when automation started to take over.

 

[gns]

Nick, I think that debate goes back to the invention of photography.

Just pointing the camera is itself subjective (and enough).

Gary

 

[dave lackey]

Actually, at first I didn't know what this was about but quickly understand where the author is coming from. It's a natural distribution on a scale. All things can be scaled and will fit into some kind of distrubution curve.

I think what he is intimating (based on the excerpt above) is that while a photograph is always a tangible result whether by P&S or with a Toyo Field Camera, it takes more input from a skillful photographer to produce the image with a Toyo field camera and that is subjective. So, on a scale, you have subjective on the left (using the Toyo) and objective, if you will, on the right (using a P&S). However, there are all kinds of photographic equipment that would fall in between the two ends of the scale. If you lined them up from left to right, then you have less input the farther you move to the right in the direction of automated everything P&S cameras.

Sorry about the lengthy thought above, but you would probably have a "bell curve" when all the cameras were plotted on the scale. Kind of interesting.

It would be cool to overlay such a distribution with all kinds of layers representing various traits, backgrounds, dna and other properties of photographers using those same cameras.😱