"They are normal people"
Someone writing on a photography forum today, telling a story involving family members, noted: "They are normal people and have only two cameras." (This isn't a posting about the number of cameras I have—suffice it to say it is greater than the number of the constitutional amendment I might allude to if pressed to say how many cameras.) Reading that got me thinking about how the prevalence and penetration of digital photography has changed the relationship of normal people to photography. Carrying forward the automation that began with film cameras, consumer digital cameras make it very easy to take photographs with no glaring technical deficiencies. Something is usually in focus, the shot is exposed well enough, etc. And if you do mess one up badly, you'll be able to see that and shoot it over until you get it right. This seems to me a major source of the increasingly prevalent supposed truism that "digital cameras take better photos" (better than what is not so often stated, but we suppose the reference is to dad's clunky old film gear).
So it's possible to produce recognizable photographs without knowing what used to be considered the first thing about photography. Nothing wrong with that, in a way. However, I'm starting to think that soon the average person under thirty is likely never to have seen an amateur photograph taken with film equipment. (Why I love film cameras.) The result is a somewhat sad kind of multi-level image illiteracy. I'm musically illiterate, so I'll analogize to that. Most people wouldn't recognize that it would be impossible to take the images in this entry with any digicam they are likely to ever touch (I'd be unlikely to notice that a piece of music was played with only the white keys on the piano). Most people would think they could create images like this if they understood their cameras better, as I might think I could replicate a certain piece of music if I knew my white-key-only instrument. Neither they with their consumer digicams nor I with my deficient piano knows enough to understand the instrument's limitations.
These adorable children were in places without huge amounts of light. A typical parent's typical digital camera on automatic would have bathed these scenes with flash. Could you detect that the most critical fact about these images is that they were taken using natural light? Did it also immediately strike you that the backgrounds in the last three images are nicely blurred to indistinction, and that the sea of colorful toys has a nice level of blur too? Without the blur, these would be much different photos—much worse, in my opinion. If you took these with the newly proverbial any-digicam-you-are-likely-to-ever-touch, everything would be pretty much in focus. Yet 99 people out of 100 would presume that results like these are possible with the right "scene mode" setting on a Nikon Coolpix.
Over time, I think, there will be fewer and fewer images like these floating around among what the bulletin board poster called "normal people." Already, few people are probably even aware that it's possible to blur out a background like that. Soon enough, images with certain qualities will more or less disappear from the average person's visual vocabulary, so not only will they not miss that kind of image, but they won't recognize the distinctive characteristics of the few such images they may happen to see. Digital makes competent execution easy, but there is a cost.Labels: film cameras, photography, photos
posted at 10:55 PM
1 Comments:
Yes, this is a nice post. Thanks for the pointer. Being one of the "normal people," I had to think (ooh, hard, tough, ouch) to fill in the gaps of what you were showing/saying. And if you expect me to believe that I can't do everything with my Casio (EXILIM something-or-other) and that my not reading the dense manual (yet!)is not the only hold-up....well, there are so many buttons and settings it just has do everything.
Hey, my children have no concept of music coming in 15-20 minute segments of 6 or so songs. (A nice period for a listening arc) Nor have they felt the music change direction by flipping the vinyl platter between their hands, starting a new arc.
They don't know how intense music listening can get while you stare at the label spinning at 33 and a third -- staring at a digital read-out just doesn't sound/feel the same!
Thanks for cueing up my inner codger!
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