Does the “D” in digital – Stand for Dirty?

[Emil Schildt]

i think it's safe to say that most people wouldn't be able to do your work with digital *or* film. You have an amazing eye (i love following someone's homepage link and finding work like yours). If you ever have an exhibit on the West Coast of the US, please post it here.. i'd love to see actual prints.

jim

Thanks, Jim.

I have never had an exhibition in the States (only had a couple outside Denmark (Prague and Oslo)).

But I'd LOVE to try!!

(don't think I have the money, though... )

[Brian Ellis]

It's not just the digitization that kills much photography. I for the first time in years bought a Photo mag, Outdoor Photography. I was impressed, well horrified really, by the magazine full of perfectly exposed and focused pictures all well framed and not one really good photograph in the whole mag.

It's almost as if they expected the camera to literally do it all. It was one of the things that decided my future path. I wanted to do photography again, as I did for years, but not like this.

I bought a Chamonix 45N. One of the smartest things I've done in years.

I subscribed to Outdoor Photography for about a year in the early '90s. I stopped subscribing partly because I didn't like the photographs that were held up as being the standard to which I should be striving. Back then everything in the magazine started out on film of course, digital was in its infancy. I still thumb through the magazine on news stands occasionally and I don't see any difference between the type of photographs that were in it when I subscribed and the photographs in it today. But I wouldn't say the photographs in it were or are "bad" photographs. They just weren't the kind of photographs I wanted to make when they were done with film cameras and now that they're presumably done with digital cameras they still aren't.

You hopefully will enjoy using your new Chamonix more than you would a digital camera but it isn't going make "good" photographs any more than a digital camera would make "bad" photographs. It's trite but true - good photographs and bad photographers, however defined, are made by photographers, not equipment.

[Drew Wiley]

Donald - around here a lot of homes do have things like copper gutters and welded in
place stainless deck railing. These aren't McMansions but finely crafted homes. When someone does build something extravagent, it's built like a yacht. So where do these
folks get all the money to do this? By designing all those disposable techie gadgets
and its software! (Plus Biotech, cute weapons systems which blow up things -
definitely disposable!). Another irony is that these are the same kinds of people who
run into me with the 8X10 out in the redwoods or along the coast and say, "What
a lovely camera, do you have a darkroom too? Wish I had one of those."

[paulr]

I don't think the quick obsolescence of digital gear is intrinsic to its "digitalness," and I don't think it's a symptom of some larger societal decadence.

We just happen to live at a time when the pace of change in digital technology is overwhelmingly fast. This is especially the case in photography, since digital photographic technology has only been viable for a few years ... so the curve is really, really steep right now. I suspect it will mellow out within a decade. Not stop ... but slow to the point where you can hang onto a camera for as long as you want without it becoming a door stop. Better and cheaper ones will always be coming along, but we'll reach the point where cameras will remain useful for a long time.

I'm looking to digital audio (which has a 20 year head start on digital photography) for clues. In the recording world they've gotten to the point where there's just no need for higher digital standards. Even the most old school, hard core mastering engineers confess to not being able to hear the difference between 24 bit/96khz recordings and 24 bit/192khz. It's as if they've reached a number of megapixels that goes beyond what anyone can see (and yes, I realize the analogy isn't perfect, because you don't make enlargements from audio tape ... but please bear with me ...)

However, different pieces of digital gear still sound different from each other. One company's 24-bit/96khz A/D converter sounds better than another's. Because a significant amount of the circuitry (probably most of it) is still analog. And these circuits will continue to refined and tweaked and slowly improved, just as they've always been. And of course, the technology at every level continues to get cheaper, though not at the pace that it once did.

Digital cameras aren't at this plateau yet. But it's bound to happen someday.