I think you're missing the point, or at least missing MY point if I'm one of the people supposedly lacking common sense (an outdated commodity itself; whenever I hear someone lamenting a lack of "common sense" it just means that the people they are talking about don't think like they do and the speaker doesn't comprehend the source of the communication problem. "Common sense" is just a euphemism for "thinking like I do" but that's a different rant.)Originally Posted by Marko
Well, they taught us common sense too back then, and you need only look at some posts here to see how little of it has remained. It's easy to wax poetic about "Roaring Twenties" until one remembers what it was like to not have penicillin for example or how many people died of TB in those "good old days" and other such periods... And let's not even mention dental care.
Yes, I'm sure those times were awesome and that if I had my kids then, those two or three out of five that would've survived the age of 2 would've enjoyed unrestricted childhood much more than the kids today do. But ungrateful that I am, I'm really happy to be living in the now, which enabled me to raise *all* my kids to successful adulthood and which gives me better than good chance of living long enough to see my grandkids grow up. If that means having to suffer the nuisance of frequent technology breakthroughs, so be it...
And just so we keep this on topic, those same "Roaring Twenties" were the beginning of the Age of Kodak - "you press the button, we do the rest". It (Kodak) survived and outlasted most of those other great technologies of its time, but now the time has come when there is nothing left to do after pressing the button. Largely thanks to technology they helped develop but then failed to transition to in time to save themselves.
I can't speak for anyone else but I too am glad to be living now with its creature comforts. I would never claim that vacuum tubes were better than solid state in general (outside very specific distortion characteristics for certain high end audio) or that CRTs were across the board superior to LCD flat screens, or even that digital isn't superior to film in most ways that most people care about. But I'm not most people, many of us here aren't either, and we care about different things.
For me it comes down to the fact that I simply enjoy working with the film medium. It is in many ways more difficult and challenging and I enjoy that. It's more primitive in some ways and I frankly enjoy that too. I work with computers 40+ hours a week. It's a refreshing change to do something that, aside from quality of materials, has hardly changed in approach in decades. And it has some craft and skill to it other than solely the visual or knowledge of a computer program.
It may be a shock and heretical to admit, but the truth is for many of us hobbyists it isn't primarily about the image! I'll repeat that because it's important - it isn't primarily about the image. Most of mine could be made just as well and more quickly and easily with digital. I simply prefer film and the greater challenge of it, and I do it for myself, so that's how I do it. I use digital for snapshots that go on Facebook or into email, too.
Funny thing, but I find that most "traditional media" artists understand this right away. My artistically inclined girlfriend, largely responsible for rekindling my interest in photography and immediately enthused about my old Linhof and the realization that not only film for it but even very similar cameras are still made, grasps it pretty much intuitively. Photography is still hung up on the artifact when most other artists realize it's really (for many of us) more about the process and what one can get out of it.
I recall reading a Pop Photo editor in the late 70s complaining about increasing automation in film cameras by saying that pretty soon it would get to the point you just stick the film in your ear and blink when you see something beautiful. The film is a memory card and the camera, while very small and light, isn't quite audio-insertable, but otherwise it's pretty much come to that. I just don't enjoy doing that.
I noticed the following comment on that Japanexposures website linked above:
At the risk of stating an utterly obvious and absolutely not new realization: it has become extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to take a bad photograph with contemporary cameras. At least technically speaking, there is very little that can still go wrong nowadays.
Very true. And for me at least, the very next thought becomes, "then what on earth is the point?" There isn't one, for me, when using a system like that. But for those of us for whom it's more about the process than the artifact, we just use a different process.
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