One of my digital rants

A phenomenon has taken place with the advent of the Digital Age of Photography. There has been a shift in the perceptions about photography. Digital has made all aspects of photography more accessible to the general public. Anyone can now take decent pictures, adjust them on the computer, and even print them without having to go anywhere. Amazing! This has truly been an incredible leap in the photographic revolution that has been taking place for the past 100 years.

However, as with most great advances, something has been lost. Of course, it is up to each of you to decide how important that loss might be, but let’s at least explore it.

For one thing, I still mix in some film for most of my jobs. When I use film, my lab scans in the negatives to digital to give me all of the amazing benefits of digital, but I have the negatives as backup. There are many times that my lab calls me hoping that I have negatives as backup because either a file might be corrupted or they need to crop so much that they would prefer working with the quality of negatives. By the way, a negative is the equivalent of 60 megapixels. The best 35mm digital camera is now 22 megapixels. Most professional photographers use cameras that produce 10 – 12 megapixels.

However, even more important then the technical discrepancies are the new perceptions of photography that have suddenly become prevalent.

Yes, it’s extraordinary and wonderful that most average people have access to taking really nice pictures and working on them in the computer and even printing them. What that has done is take away the “mystique” of photography (when we didn’t know what the picture would look like until the film was developed) and give people the impression that it is easy to be a photographer. Yes, that’s true from an amateur perspective. But there is now a lower standard of what is acceptable for a “good” picture. In the old days of film, people had the choice of a wide range of experience and artistic sensibility when they were choosing their photographer. Now, especially combined with the difficulties in the economy, price seems to be the main factor and experience and artistic sensibility just aren’t as important.

That’s a shame and a real loss for what will be passed down to future generations compared to what we had. If photographs aren’t important to you, then that’s fine. But if you think that there is value to be cherished in your

photographs, then you might agree that this factor is relevant and still important.

I often use the analogy of painting my house. I just painted my dining room and living room. It looks much better then it did, but if a professional painter looked at it, he would be very critical. For my family, it was worth saving the money in not hiring a professional. It just wasn’t that important. That’s unfortunate, and I’m sure the painting profession is suffering during these times. People have now decided that ordinary pictures are fine, and the added expense of getting extraordinary and special pictures just isn’t worth the extra expense. THAT is the change in perception. Because you can now look at the picture as you are taking it, there is a perceived impression that the digital image in the camera is the same as the live picture in front of the camera. That isn’t true, of course, but that IS a shift in perception.