The three commandments of digivangelism:
1) It is forbidden to criticize or negatively compare analog vs digital photography.
2) It is forbidden to not mention the equivalency of digital and analog photography (as in "its all photography")
3) It is forbidden to offend a digital or hybrid photographer by mentioning items #1 and #2.
In objective reality, at this site, it's not. It's a nominally 4x5 or larger camera. By definition.Originally Posted by Heroique
More snide. Doesn't add to the discussion.
Here's a fun poll that I naturally remember to help people recognize the humor about beards around here:
http://www.largeformatphotography.in...p-their-beards
According to the poll, if you're an LFer, chances are about 50% you have a beard; but the hilarious comments are even better than poll results.
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
Wasn't fun/humorous when you started it. Isn't now either. Adds nothing to the discussion.
Right there, I think.
Tin Can
This may be the most entertaining link I've ever followed outside the confines of this forum – thank you Peter.
For anyone curious, it's a lively speech about vision-based consciousness and evolution; that may sound daunting, but click it and you get a 15-minute magic carpet ride about the human mind.
My favorite moment is the speaker's suitable sum-up: "Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth, it's about having kids."
After that article, one may never think in the same way about images on the GG – or digital capture, either.
“In the future, there will be no such thing as a ‘straight photograph’ … Digital capture quietly but definitively severed the optical connection with reality … The digital sensor replaced to (sic) optical record of light with a computational process that substitutes a calculated reconstruction using only one third of the available photons.” - Stephen Mayes
I may be over-generalizing here, but art critics like to define new trends and make statements that can be seen as new and insightful. Much of what Stephen Mayes states should be pretty obvious to anyone with knowledge of photographic technique.
Digital imagery is inherently more open to manipulation than traditional photography, in as much as the light sensors must be read electronically and an image created from that data by a computer. But that does not mean that a digital image is any less a record of what we see as the “physical world” or “physical reality.”
A traditional photograph also uses only a partial sampling of the photons falling on the film as the basis of the image. Think here of grainy film or a low-resolution lens, or a photograph printed in a newspaper using a dot screen. Further, as a number of posts have pointed out, a photograph is a two-dimensional translation of the three-dimensional world; a black and white photograph further “sever[s] the optical connection with reality” by translating the different wavelengths of light that our eyes and brain interpret as colors into shades of grey.
Manipulation of images is not new. We all know that many traditional photographers (e.g., Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, as MDM noted in Post #6) manipulated photographs in the capture and/or printing. Photoshop allows one to do the dodging and burning, and cutting and retouching and multiple printing, in an easier and more reproducible way. But is it really such a sea change, as the Time article says?
What is newer and more interesting is Mayes’ discussion of digital imagery becoming more dynamic, where a static print can no longer capture all of the image. He suggests that images that incorporate multiple "dimensions" of data and can only be viewed by using a computer (and a smart phone is a computer with cellular communications capabilities) is the wave of the future. That could be the “Next Revolution in Photography,” but I doubt that, as he argues, “In the future, there will be no such thing as a ‘straight photograph’.”
The article ref'd in the OP is a load of bollocks wrapped in hyperbole. It is incoherent. I can only summarize it as: Technology changes. People find ways to incorporate different kinds of technologies into new packages. This trend will continue. Yay!
Going from some static image to dynamic is, what, a movie? I traffic camera? A slide show? A Lytro 'slice' show where the point of focus is varied over time?
People may want something that is dynamic but that is also still recognizable in a conventional sense. I doubt very seriously that people want to take pictures of their babies using the latest Cubist camera.
The article by Taylor Davidson is the better article. He mentions the Lytro which is, IMO, a true imaging innovation, something that is a completely different method of image capture than what came before. (Some may argue that the digital sensor fits this description too, but its ability to capture information is much closer to film in that each image has a single point of focus and depth of field.)
There is one sentence in Davidson's article that I take particular issue with: "The meaning of a photograph has changed alongside the behavior change: photos have become a form of communication, and the unending flow of imagery has changed everything about how we interpret and value photographs." Photos have always been a form of communication and their flow has been unending. Technology has made the production rate of photos much higher and less costly. You could argue that sites like Snapchat changed the way we value photos. Photos sent via Snapchat are meant to be ephemeral, not timeless. Perhaps prior to digital devices people valued photos more highly because of the cost of producing them. Now that they essentially cost nothing, it is much easier to communicate using a picture instead of words. Pictures taken and used in this way are more like jokes told at the water cooler. They are timely, not timeless and are not meant as works of art.
It was not the advent of smart phone apps (software) that present some sort of shift in photography. Software has been eating the camera since the first microcontroller appeared in them. For many years, software in cameras amounted to higher levels of convenience, exposure determination systems that were less easily fooled by difficult lighting situation, etc, and auto focus. Image stabilization was the next big step and required a combination of hardware and software to work. (I'm discounting here the image processing in digital cameras as a necessary by-product of converting the data captured by the image sensor into usable images.) Software can now in-camera, correct for lens distortion making the output of mirrorless cameras rival pro DSLRs. In almost all cases, the initial software performing these functions did so relatively clumsily but have improved over successive generations of products.
The same can be said of the quality of the smartphone camera. The first were relatively crude. The cell phone is now killing the P&S market, not arguably because of the apps that are available but because of the convenience (one device, sharing) and acceptable quality of the images to most people. It is interesting that many of the apps that manipulate images give them a retro look (sepia) or degrade them in a Lomo way.
If we hadn't invented the canvas and roofs to protect them, people would still be creating images in caves that are meant to be lasting. Since the cave painting days, it has all been about making images more cheaply, more conveniently, and making them more easily seen.
Regards,
Rob
My flickr stream
rbultman, I like you ...
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