Story: Down on digital

bmattock

bmattock

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Don't agree with the tone or tenor of the article, but it is interesting and topical, and so I thought I'd pass it along.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=173155

Down on digital
If you’re feeling lost in a sea of modern tech mediocrity, look to analog to revive you.
By Paul Terefenko
...
Yes, I still take photos on film, and while I have a digital camera, I’m not enjoying it much any more. About a year ago, digital shots started to seem disposable, inconsequential and dull to me. It was like they lacked a soul.

So I picked up my old 35mm cameras from the 70s and 80s, blew the dust off and have effectively revived my love of picture-taking. Anyone who feels the sheen wearing off the digital age might be well served by a little analog augmentation.
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I still prefer film, but I use digital P&S for snapshots, or sometimes other things. I am not religious about it either way. I just prefer film. I think part of it is the process.

As much as I prefer film, I think it is silly to engage in film versus digital wars. The poster of that article is doing what he prefers. That is what all should do.
 
I think maintaining some contact with an analog process is wise in a digital environment if possible.

Excellent article ... thanks Bill. :)
 
sonofdanang said:
It's interesting when people refer to some things as 'soulless' and other things as having soul. I understand, sort of. But what I think they really mean is they had no connection to, or compassion for, or even real interest in what they were photographing. No film - or any other medium - will fix that.
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I feel the same way. I'm tired of hearing how an inanimate object, that was mass-produced, has "soul," in some attempt to quantify the processes' superiority over another...process?!?
 
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well, if enough people can tell you this item has no soul while this other one does, and you see no soul in either, is the issue their fantasy or your blindness?

If the closest English word people have for "it" is soul so be it. What they are talking about is an intangible, non-measurable quality. It makes no more sense to dispute it than it does to try to prove it exists.

I think it's interesting that the same thing is said over and over and over - "Digital is lacking something." Not everybody says it, but enough where I think it's safe to say it's real, whatever it is.

Hell, most people will freely admit that B&W does something to the mood of a picture that color doesn't. At the end of the day they are both images, what difference does the color or lack thereof make?
 
Whatever floats your boat to get you inspired works for me as well - but the camera itself is just a tool without a soul.

Most DSLRs that I've handled have an M mode and switch for the AF.
 
Before digital, I never felt that my film cameras had "soul." Did glass plate cameras have "soul," film being "soulless" when that transition was made? I certainly felt nothing special about film cameras the 40 years I shot them before digital SLR's entered my life.

I think maybe it's a mixture, now, of nostalgia and the sense that shooting old technology make makes us somehow "special," or that the film itself is somehow special, that we translate into soul.
 
I was watching a PBS program about a photographer who was taking a photo of well known natural monument. He explained that the sky was wrong for the photograph and he would add a more appropriate sky to the photograph while post processing the image. The photograph was still not correct he further explained. He then added flowers & ferns in the foreground to add depth. The photographer Ruth Bernhard observed light falling on a doorknob and wanted to photograph it but did not have a camera with her. She noted the date & time in her calendar and returned a year later to make the photograph. For me that notates the difference between soul & soul-less photography.
 
But the viewer did not share the same feeling as the photographer, because they had no way of knowing whether the photographer shot the photo in an instant or waited a year to get the shot. To the viewer, the 2009 doorknob is the same as the 2010 doorknob. Perhaps the photographer felt warm and fuzzy for the effort, but the viewer neither knows nor cares about the difference.
 
I got a Zenit camera like the one shown over the article. It has a cloth shutter and sounds like a loud Leica.

The Zenit 44M lens shown on the camera is a Zeiss Biotar copy, and a very capable portrait lens, 58/2.0.

Highly underrated tool, that set. And can be had for petty cash.
 
To me film can show the ectoplasm or “ether”, in the speak of Rudolf Steiner - which is lacking in my digital SLR pics.
When I look at a movie on TV, I immediately can distinguish a good quality movie from a bad one in a minute.
The good one is made on celluloid and adds that ether. Every tension is felt.
The bad one is plain, dull and cheap digital cam recording. But it is developing.
So I have to see that Avatar/Pandora movie.
 
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Funny how often it is that if you look at the work of people who claim that others place too much focus on process or that the only final print matters, their work is average at best or seethes with photoshop, IE: No real raw talent.

For over three decades, photography for me has been an excuse to be brave, intrepid, bold, inquisitive, restless, unconvinced and live according to those ideals. The journey is what made the final image, not the final image.

The journey matters to me, and in a world where nearly everything we do is digested in a computer, I figure life is WAY to short and precious for a sterile medium like digital photography. If you have an eye for the world and a love of life that is certainly not a computer, why on earth would you waste your precious talent in a sickly medium like digital?

By virtue of it's very design and purpose, to get as much of your money as possible year after year, digital was dead before it was born....
 
Hahaha....I just wanted to express the unseen space in real life that - I find to be - can be captured on film.
You will never see those particles - grain or something else - in real life, but on a picture they represent an unseen force, which was there in reality.
 
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[FONT=&quot]“Soul”? “it”? “Authorship”? [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]I have no problem with someone insisting that a given process, no matter how convoluted, suits them best in their creation of ‘it’. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]‘it’ and the chosen process to achieve ‘it’ are subjective. [/FONT]
 
This is not to initiate a debate of digital v. film because it was done with film too. A photograph according to the philosopher Roland Barthes ("Camera Lucida") incorporates a definitive element of reality. (Afterall, photographs are admissible in court as evidence.) Barthes observes that when he looked at a photograph of his deceased mother he was able to say to the effect that she was a real person who existed at a definite time. The photograph is a testimonial to his memory or a past reality. The questions that I ask about the photographer who photographed the mountain why did you not return at a time when there were clouds? And, why did you not pick a location that would produce a better image? The image he produced was obviously too poor to exhibit. The image he produced was not what he had observed on that day therefore (under Barthes concept of reality and photography) his image was false. Bernhard, on the other hand, observed what to her was the beautiful play of light on a doorknob but it could not be photographed except at one instant of time and she waited an entire year for the moment to re-occur. Bernhard's image was of a real doorknob and light; an image that existed and she realized the beauty in it and photographed it. The idea of soul-less to me is: "There's something. I'll take a picture of it. It doesn't look that good but I can fix it in the computer."
 
Even though this may be considered an "Op" piece, "Now Toronto" is hardly something to take as gospel (or even paraphrasing gospel). By that I mean, I barely read this rag & that's mainly because prostitutes, massage parlours and other 'questionable' advertisements appear in this "paper".

It's a free tabloid form "entertainment" magazine that is known for it's foibles and errata.

That said, this guy is stating nothing new - just like film.

Dave
 
I think some folks believe that all the new digital techniques somehow make it easier to make a great image. It doesn't.

If a 36 exposure roll gives me 36 crap pictures, a digital camera will give me the ability to make thousands of crap pictures.

If you prefer one meium over another, that's a different story.
 
Precisely!

And like I said, this falsification of life's tactility is not unique to photography. It is happening more and more, especially in the last two years, it is a language of change in society that is often too large to grasp. For the record, I am not anti-computer, I am merely a proponent of a balanced diet if you will. So in my case, my life is photography so I now choose to not have it near a computer if I can avoid it, which I can.

Thankfully, I am not alone...


Steve Bellayr said:
This is not to initiate a debate of digital v. film because it was done with film too. A photograph according to the philosopher Roland Barthes ("Camera Lucida") incorporates a definitive element of reality. (Afterall, photographs are admissible in court as evidence.) Barthes observes that when he looked at a photograph of his deceased mother he was able to say to the effect that she was a real person who existed at a definite time. The photograph is a testimonial to his memory or a past reality. The questions that I ask about the photographer who photographed the mountain why did you not return at a time when there were clouds? And, why did you not pick a location that would produce a better image? The image he produced was obviously too poor to exhibit. The image he produced was not what he had observed on that day therefore (under Barthes concept of reality and photography) his image was false. Bernhard, on the other hand, observed what to her was the beautiful play of light on a doorknob but it could not be photographed except at one instant of time and she waited an entire year for the moment to re-occur. Bernhard's image was of a real doorknob and light; an image that existed and she realized the beauty in it and photographed it. The idea of soul-less to me is: "There's something. I'll take a picture of it. It doesn't look that good but I can fix it in the computer."
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