Slow Death of Photography?

All I see is that we are doing the same things today as always just the methods are more available. In the past, people who were experts in the darkroom could do some very nice manipulations. The problem was few people had the access to darkrooms and the time to use them.

Today people can use computers to do many of the manipulations that a few could do in the past. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

But if you feel that digital cramps your style then you always have the option to go back and shoot film. Personally you would never get me back to film.
--
Ed
http://www.cbrycelea.com/photos/

coreyh said:

Lots of good points. You even have me convinced LOL

I guess I probably should have picked another title for this thread.

It just seems nowadays there are more and more people able to
capture shots that rival the professionals. Is photography still
an art then?

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The way I look at it is as follows: Great photographs consist of some mechanical aspects (exposure, focus, white balance, ISO, depth of field, etc...) and some artistic aspects (subject, lighting, framing and all the other aspects of composition). A great photo needs both. The mechanical aspects have definitely gotten easier with the advent of technology and, as such, more and more people can produce a mechanical good photo.

The artistic aspects of photography are just the same as they always were and technology may have even opened up more artistic possibilities, but it's still takes artistic sense to produce a great photo and the technology still isn't making any of these decisions for you.
--
John
Gallery: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/portfolio

coreyh said:

Lots of good points. You even have me convinced LOL

I guess I probably should have picked another title for this thread.

It just seems nowadays there are more and more people able to
capture shots that rival the professionals. Is photography still
an art then?

If everyone was able to pic up a paintbrush and paint like robert
bateman or the likes, would it still be considered as artistic? I
doubt it.

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You have a point, but I think that art is like science, it's creative.

If you are just doing the same thing as someone else have already done, then it's not art.

coreyh said:

That is how photography feels to me. The amount of people that can
do it has increased 10 fold. I guess photography isn't dead, but
it definetly isn't on the same level as it was when people used
film.

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Nahh, there are alot of bad photos shoot on film too ;-)

Just becouse there is more then 100 times more shoots taken now isn't a threat to the art. We might get 10 times as many great artistic images as before, per year. Just some figures I made up.

I think we will see more creative fields in photography, like some ppl do now with mixing photography with computer generated art or painting or some other creative work.

The more who uses it, the more new ideas and new fields will be explored.

--
Henrik

coreyh said:

It just seems nowadays there are more and more people able to
capture shots that rival the professionals. Is photography still
an art then?

Click to expand...

I guess I look at it as a great improvement. Why should this be limited.

But I am not convinced that this improvement is because cameras take magically better pictures. Sure technology has improved things like metering and AF. But maybe photos are better because people can afford to practice more often.

Before I was always very careful about how many pictures I would take. Every shot had a cost. There were times I wanted to experiment but could not afford the added cost. Also, I am not so organized as to keep track of all my settings on paper to go back and check how each setting worked on the images.

Today I experiement a lot. I can switch to AV/TV/M mode and later when reviewing the images check and see the results of my settings. This has been great for me, adding this experimentation a long with several books and classes I have taken has made photography a lot more fun and interesting.
--
Ed
http://www.cbrycelea.com/photos/

More artists, less techno-twits... gotta be good

Alistair
--
http://www.alistair-hamilton.com/Gallery/cpg146/
http://watching-the-time.blogtog.com

A most interesting and thought provoking thread. Has technology eliminated (or reduced) the need for professional photographers? I don't think so. Compare another area of consumerism, home improvement. Today, most any home owner can go to a home improvement store and buy all the materials (and rent equipment) necessary to tile a floor, install cabinets, hang ceiling fans, etc. Has this reduced the need for contractors, artisans, handymen (or women)? Not really, as there are more and more home owners wanting, and able to afford, home improvements.

Today, the technology providing good, decent photographic output is available to more people and people are using it more. Many of the posts here have pointed out the skills required to take exceptional photographs. Will the requirement for these skills be lessened by the advance in technology? Doubtful, as more people struggle to take good photographs, they become more informed on what skills are required and the value of this art/craft should increase, not decrease.

Look what has happened in the areas of teaching digital photography, image processing and the photo safaris. This industry was practically non-existent 15 years ago. I agree with most of the posters, photography is having a re-birth, not a slow death.
--
Dave

Live Simply » Laugh Often » Love Deeply

Way too many amateur and hobby photographers taking excellent pictures. Me included. Not only do auto settings give great results most of the time, but more and more people are interested in photography and they are learning more and getting better images with manual results.

The technical limitation is pretty much gone. $200 dollars gets a compact camera capable of amazing wall size prints of daylight scenes and at normal focal lengths. It doesn't cost much to get long or short focal lengths and higher ISOs either.

Basically with no technical limitations and more people interested and trying to learn and experimenting, photography as a business is having its value diluted.

There is proof everywhere. Read luminous landscape for the recent articles about how stock photography is now a commodity. A photo that ten years ago would earn the photographer thousands will now earn him or her ten. As in ten dollars.

Few people need photographers anymore. Amazing portraits with depth of field are available to anyone with 300 dollars and a willingness to learn and experiment. Weddings are so inundated with cameras that the sound of clicking drowns out the preacher. Many parents take their own portraits now.

It's all fine with me though. I'm more interested in learning and sharing than making money.

--
ShooterPS

...composition and artistry. Don't you have lots of ideas you want to still try out? I do. And I get more everyday. I want to get away from striving for the perfect "pretty" photo (which so far I have not taken anyway) and try to take photos that reach out and grab people or make them think or show them something in a different light. Something rough and thought-provoking. I have a long way to go to reach that point, but that's why I am a photographer.

This is the kind of stuff I want to learn how to do -

http://www.pbase.com/luminous/root

and

http://www.pbase.com/lysdexia/portrait

--
Darlene
Dee Seventy, Dee Fifty, Eighty Eight Hundred
http://www.pbase.com/imacatmom

Every innovation is a rebirth of photography. Just because cameras can almost seemingly calculate the correct exposure for a given subject, I would question what that has to do with anything. Certainly not the death of photography. As for photoshop, people have been manipulating images in the darkroom since the beginning of photography. Nothing new here, except that you don't get your hands dirty and wet, for which I am grateful. A picture with the perfect exposure is not necessarily a great or even a good photograph. The difference is the person behind the camera. It's still the fiddler, not the fiddle. gc

It would seem that no matter what level of automation or "artificial intelligence" is built into the cameras of the future, the photog's "eye" will still be essential to select what is worthy of recording, and the photog's finger will still be necessary to depress the shutter button at the most opportune moment.

Recently my elderly father-in-law gave me his collection of photography magazine back issues. I scanned through them at my leisure over a period of a couple of weeks, paying particular attention to the PHOTOGRAPHS (rather than the equipment reviews or ads). I concluded that the OUTSTANDING photographs of the 60s and 70s don't look much different than the work of great contemporary photographers. On the other hand, what might be considered the run-of-the-mill photographs of that earlier period looked downright mediocre when compared to the run-of-the-mill submissions in today's photography publications. What's changed? Seems to me the obvious answer is more sophisticated cameras and digital post-processing.

I really liked that 2nd one. Anndra has a touch of Dragan in her...

Darlene Goff said:

...Something rough and thought-provoking. I have a
long way to go to reach that point, but that's why I am a
photographer.

This is the kind of stuff I want to learn how to do -

http://www.pbase.com/luminous/root

and

http://www.pbase.com/lysdexia/portrait

--
Darlene
Dee Seventy, Dee Fifty, Eighty Eight Hundred
http://www.pbase.com/imacatmom

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--
Charlie Davis
Nikon 5700 & Sony R1
CATS #25
PAS Scribe @ http://www.here-ugo.com/PAS_List.htm
HomePage: http://www.1derful.info
'I brake for pixels...'

Member said:

Just like power steering, ABS brakes, automatic transmissions, and
electric starters killed driving.

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I don't use the auto modes very much, but I don't fear them liberating the unwashed masses.

The computers and programming in your camera will get to the point where they can calculate the perfect exposure, what ISO value will get you the best compromise between speed and grain. Probably autofocus will continue to get better and better.

But that computer will never be able to compose your photo for you, or pick out the best point in time to freeze by hitting the shutter. It won't be able to help you find the best pose, the most life-like perspective, and how to pack the most emotional content into the frame. It won't help you recognize something interesting and tell you to pull your camera out in the first place.

Technical quality and art are not the same thing.

Nothing will take the place of artistic ability. The macros of bugs and myriad displays of pixel perfection are interesting, but the ability to compose a photo is still as much of an art as it ever was. I learned on film cameras, a Leica M2S to be exact, and was part of my high school photo club. We had a darkroom and we learned how to develop film and print photos including enlargements. We learned burning in techniques, and others that one could say are the crude equivalent of what photoshop and other digital imaging software is today. We used different developers to push film, and learned how to under- and over- expose both film and paper. We used various grades of paper, and filters, and all sorts of neat stuff. But if the image itself, the composition, was weak, the ultimate result could be a perfect "print" but a mundane photo. A teacher of mine once said about a very difficult conceptual area, "I am going to give you a crystal clear picture of mud". Well, if you're worried that digital photography will allow P&S enthusiasts to take those pix, don't fret. They're quite happy with their results. But that doesn't mean they can capture a quality image or even manipulate a fair one with any artistic sense. Things change, and things stay the same. But I agree w/ you on one thing: if you don't go beyond the technology, and learn from the ground up, there is a limit to what you can create.

I was happy when I bought my car that it had the power train of the

"sport model" if you will, the highest end one. But what the mid level model, so stuff standard on the high end one was optional, thus it has no ABS or Traction control. Thus I consider it better then the "better model"

ShooterPS said:

Way too many amateur and hobby photographers taking excellent
pictures. Me included.

Click to expand...

This is a good thing!! Maybe a new "golden age." If more excellent art is being produced, humanity as a whole is better off.

ShooterPS said:

The technical limitation is pretty much gone. $200 dollars gets a
compact camera capable of amazing wall size prints of daylight

Click to expand...

Well ... an expensive FF camera will do much better than a $200 P&S, and a wall sized print from any digital below medium format backs is going to require lower standards ( not just distance ). But most people have no qualms with this. Could it be professionals have been selling people more than they really needed, all this time?

ShooterPS said:

Basically with no technical limitations and more people interested
and trying to learn and experimenting, photography as a business is
having its value diluted.

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Or at least lowered hurdles, when it comes to gear. You still have to experiment and learn. You're right that photography is changing as a business. That's how things work: the only thing that stays the same is change, right? This isn't any different than how photography displaced the painting profession.

ShooterPS said:

There is proof everywhere. Read luminous landscape for the recent
articles about how stock photography is now a commodity. A photo

Click to expand...

'The Economist' would describe this as a shortage of goods and services finally coming to a natural balance, rising up to meet demand. I mean, what you're saying is that in the past people could earn more because they had less competition.

ShooterPS said:

It's all fine with me though. I'm more interested in learning and
sharing than making money.

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If photography is an art, so should we all be. If it's a business, Joe Sixpack needs to learn business as well as art and technical prowess. It's not that there are no barriers to entry, it's just easier for someone with a strong interest to try their hand.

-Nah photogrphy isnt dying its getting bigger and bigger. Automation in most camera functions dont really help much in most normal photo situations. Auto exposure is often wrong for the shot we want and often harder to access over and under exposure features than siimply changing f stop or shutter speed or both. Auto focus is a godsend for sports photographers and wildlife photographers but does nothing but get in the way for subject matter that is more leasurly approached and in street shooting and press autofocus is still slower than presetting the cameras f stop and shutterspeed and focusing ring for focus free shooting. It takes about a minute to choose auto bracketing from the camera menu set it up and shoot the sequence. Using my m it takes about ten or so seconds seconds to bang off three exposures a stop apart and maybe fifteen or twenty to do four half a stop apart.

But all is not gloom and doom. New commers to photography will use these new features in ways we have probably never dreamed of and make images that will if you will pardon the expression blow ones mind.

The digital revolution is revitilizing photography and literly millions who never took pics to any great extent are out there trying the new technology. A goodly number of them will be bit by the but and be the next generation of Ansel Adams etc. Bring on the automation and the digital camers it a very exciting time in this hobby/business

bosjohn aka John Shick [email protected]

the artistic side of photography, sure. In fact some photographers are probably safe because they will transition from service photographer to artistic photographer. But the service side is going to fade.

In fact the company I worked for just went through this major brand re-positioning. Rolled out a new image and logo etc, hired a professional firm to develop materials and letterhead etc. The main corporate flyer that will be handed out had pictures of a number of our projects and pictures of us employees.

The thing that got me was that all the pictures were from a photo directory on our server. They were heavily photoshopped but the point is there. They never had someone drive out to job sites to take pictures. They never had a photographer at our staff events. They used the already excellent pictures we had on hand.

--
ShooterPS

Forrest said:

Forrest41926 said:

The technical limitation is pretty much gone. $200 dollars gets a
compact camera capable of amazing wall size prints of daylight

Click to expand...

Well ... an expensive FF camera will do much better than a $200
P&S, and a wall sized print from any digital below medium format
backs is going to require lower standards ( not just distance ).
But most people have no qualms with this. Could it be
professionals have been selling people more than they really
needed, all this time?

Click to expand...

Right. The technology is getting marginalzied. Consumer level stuff keeps pushing the advantages of pro level stuff (which are still very real advantages) further and further to the extremes.

I agree that it's all fine. The internet and technology have devalued lots of thiings... the world is not worse off for it.

--
ShooterPS

Now they try to get a computer to do it.

3 times more difficult, 5 times the errors, and zero flexibility. Ten times the stress!
But it's hailed as progress.

So long as people use that computer between their ears, the computer in your camera will not take over.
--

1. ######
2. ####_O Tim Yorath
3. ### />
4. ### @ UK.
5. ## \

http://catmangler.smugmug.com/

Even if the only thing remaining for the photographer to do would be composition of the image, s/he would still require skill and a 'good eye' and therefore it would remain an art.