Has digital improved photography?

[George Kara]

For me digital has been an excellent learning tool to understand how to envision and capture an image. For years I took family photos etc but never had the skill set to know why some images were successful and others werent.

From the knowledge learned through digital, I find myself now shooting almost exclusively on film, I love having the choice of media for image capture.

The quality of my photos has most certainly improved.

I doesnt seem that photography overall has reached a new level of artistic expression however.

In my opinion lots of commercial digital photos are simply cliches repeated endlessly. Do you think that amatuer and professional photobraphy have improved since the digital age?

[Ash]

digital has helped me in very few aspects:

Killing the film market (well, maiming it significantly) puts high-end gear in an amateur's price bracket
It's great for disposable photography, where quality and hard copies are not necessary
Instant shots for not-so-disposable photo's, but ones that you don't want to wait to be processed


otherwise I'm not really sure what benefits I've seen through digital. Gotta say I learnt everything I know (and am still learning) through film, and through working out HOW to make the image properly. On digital everything becomes an exercise in post-processing

[Bill_1856]

It's too soon to tell. I think that it will take a whole generation of digital photographers to decide if the pictures are any better than those of older generations. My guess is that it will make a significant improvement, both in the art and the craft.

[photographs42]

Everyone has his or her own opinion about what’s good and what isn’t. Some images have a universal appeal and some are liked by only a few. The tools used to make the universally appealing ones are not as important as the vision of the people who make them.

My experience is sort of the reverse of yours. I have used LF for about 25 years. I do 5x7 Black & White for my personal work (mostly landscapes) and Color for Architectural work. A few years ago I switched to mostly using a digital SLR for the Architectural work. To help me over the learning curve I frequently visited a Forum dealing primarily with DSLR’s. The digital camera is an amazing tool. One of its biggest advantages is also one of its biggest disadvantages. It allows anyone to make reasonably good images with literally no understanding of how cameras work.

I have no inclination whatsoever to use a digital system for my personal work. My Architectural work, however, is well suited for it and in many ways it is better for that use. I need to point out here that these images are used primarly for advertising and promotion and are seldom larger than 8x10, usually smaller.

The main problem I have with digital is the mindset that goes with it. When using 4x5 transparency film, everything has to be perfect. I have spent hours getting everything just right for a single image because retouching is expensive and time consuming. With digital, I still clean, arrange, straighten, smooth and whatever else is required but there are a lot of little things that I let slide because “I can fix it in Photoshop”. That leaf or cigarette butt on the sidewalk, the piece of trash stuck under the bush, the crooked sign post or a dozen other “little” things that I wouldn’t think of leaving with film, get left to fix later. Well, that’s a choice I have, but the problem is that I have to fight to keep my mind from slipping farther and deeper into relying on Photoshop to fix things. It makes me lazy and I think my work suffers because of it.

One result of the digital age is that there are a lot more really bad images floating around than ever before.

…….
Do you think that amatuer and professional photobraphy have improved since the digital age?

No.

Jerome

[paulr]

Photography has been through so many technical upheavals and evolutions already. With each one we've lost some things and gained others. The losses are usually more immediately apparent than the gains.

The general trend has been toward the democratization of the medium, and the ever increasing ubiquity of photographic images in the world ... all for better and for worse, it seems.

The rise of digital technology promises to be just like all these previous changes, in all these same respects.

[Ash]

Photography has been through so many technical upheavals and evolutions already. With each one we've lost some things and gained others.

Strangely this forum goes to show that all the technical upheavals have not been universally successful. If any or all had been, then LF photography would no longer exist. Especially considering the age of the technology/materials we are all using for most of our work.

[tim atherton]

Strangely this forum goes to show that all the technical upheavals have not been universally successful. If any or all had been, then LF photography would no longer exist. Especially considering the age of the technology/materials we are all using for most of our work.

Not really. There is obviously a huge range of different uses for photography - LF was still the best technical (as well as aesthetic in some cases) choice for certain areas of photography until very recently

Architectural photography (which is only pretty recently losing its ground); Copy and museum photography; certain types of product and fashion.

Some of these used to use LF film by the pallet load and were the purchasers of high end studio camera (sinar, linhof, cambo etc) that were the pretty much the height of technology for those uses.

Less than 10 years ago you could have seen assistants in NY picking up box loads of loaded 8x10 film holders from labs in the morning and returning them later, from location, for processing. They were pretty much what drove the development and market of many of the best colour emulsions, for example.

[Walter Calahan]

Digital has improved photography only to the ability of the user of these new technologies.

[Scott Knowles]

I agree with a lot of what's been said about the general nature and effect of digital photography. For me personally, it has improved mine in two ways. First, getting a computer system and Photoshop a year ago has provided me an avenue to produce prints and photo cards in-house, to learn photo processing, production and printing, with years more to continue learning and improving. Second, adding a digital camera system has allowed me to expand my work into new areas in ways film was restrictive, that is the cost of film. While I still use film along side digital, the bulk now is digital for the quantity to play, test and take lots of images. Shooting a flash card full for an event is a lot cheaper than 10 rolls of film. And it's helping learn 4x5 photography. I carry my Canon digital and film cameras now when I shoot LF to record the images in other formats and medium. This is allowing me to afford 4x5 film and processing.

[Scott Davis]

I don't think in the long run it will have a significant impact on the quality of photography - it may well improve the technical execution of a snapshot in terms of color and exposure, but beyond that, the vast majority of people will never be bothered to learn how to compose or pre-visualize their subject. Even fewer will be bothered to think about how things like deviating from suggested exposure will alter their images. This is the norm now - nothing really any different. It certainly won't increase the number of "artists" working in the media who produce work worthy of the title, and I don't think it will decrease them either.

To paraphrase Edward Weston, "there are some things that can be said in digital that cannot be said in analog". The inverse corollary is of course also true.