Proper Photography

[Mike Farley]

While Ron and I were hanging the Citryread exhibition at Croydon Library yesterday, I had a brief conversation with a young man who was not impressed that all the images had been produced digitally. Apparently a "proper photographer" shoots with a 1930s camera and digital technology makes it too easy to get a good result.

I would agree that modern cameras are easier to use than their wholly mechanical forebears and digital imaging removes a lot of the inconvenience associated with film. Does this mean that technology has deskilled photography? Yes, it is easier to get an image that is well exposed and in focus, but there is more to photography than that as a quick trawl through websites like flickr will demonstrate. Finding even moderately good photographs can be very time consuming.

Photographers of the past certainly faced significant challenges and needed both the ability to see what would make a good photograph and the technical skills make it a reality. Is everything so different today? Automation at the taking stage makes life easier, especially for those fleeting moments, and a computer is a lot less hassle to than a darkroom. What has really happened is that proficiency in one area has been supplanted by another and a different set of knowledge is required.

The RPS will tell you that digital technology has meant that more people are pursuing photography and standards are getting higher to achieve their distinctions. I would suggest that technology has made some of the more mechanical aspects easier, but the more important aesthetic expression remains as difficult as ever.

Of course, the young man in question will never see this article. Even if he knows about this forum, what need would a proper photographer have for a computer and the Internet?

[davidc]

** Took a while for me to think about how to reply to this and numerous re-reads before writing a reply I've rewritten a few times too Given it's a case of personal feelings/preference it's easy for opinion to be misinterpreted when it's written down without context. **

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This old chestnut. I've had a similar experience a few months ago - while practicing on the south bank with my film camera I could sense someone behind me. I initially thought it'd be a security guard or something, and I'd inadvertantly wandered somewhere I shouldn't, but it turns out someone had heard the shutter of the AE-1 and wanted to talk to me.

What started as a really pleasant conversation about photography ended up going sour, to my mind at least, when he complimented me on the fact I too was "doing proper photography" and that "digital is worthless and ruining the art". At which point I made my excuses and left.

While my own personal opinion is that film is now outdated and superseded by digital in almost every respect, I don't think that negates it as an option or tool. For me it's an aesthetic choice when I want a different "feel" to taking photos. Usually that feel is extremely random, prone to numerous errors, doesn't help me learn or improve technique and is more luck than judgement to be honest, but still, taking pictures on film is not without it's appeal. I know plenty of people who wholly accept that compared to digital, choosing to shoot 100% film doesn't make sense but then again, it doesn't need to. It's simply personal preference unless there are professional, technical reasons to choose otherwise.

It's like my Dad saying that music on vinyl is better than modern CDs or mp3 - technically, it absolutely isn't but it sounds like it is to him which as far as he's concerned is the important factor.

You should have told the arrogant youth that technically oil paintings are the only true way to capture an image, not his "camera" that makes things too easy...

Broadening things slightly, it's actually this film v digital debate that has been a contributing factor to putting me off AP magazine. Reading the letters and opinion columns they are now almost a parody of themselves! The same arguments, back and forth endlessly, rendered that part of the magazine pointless.

Now... your point about the RPS is very interesting! If they have actually said that because more people are taking pictures therefore more people are becoming accredited therefore they have raised the standard that makes absolutely no sense at all! More people doing an artistic subject does not make achieving a certain standard easier! I do find it hard to believe they could have made - and stood by - that comment, do you have a link to that somewhere? I must admit it's another item putting me off the RPS too...

[Paul Heester]

Its an interesting question, especially as you say he was a "young man" and therefore not necessarily brought up in a non-digital world. Did he believe that the more complicated the camera, the better the end result? Personally when I view photographs online or in galleries I never think "what camera is this". Its just a means to an end, so Im really not interested in the tools used.

(slight off-topic) But what gets me riled is when someone sees an image and says "oh they must have a good camera". As though the camera waited in that exact spot and took the image itself when it decided!! You wouldnt say to a musician whose song you like "that must be a good guitar you have"...

[Mike Farley]

One of my reasons for posting is that this is not simply a "film vs digital" debate. Dave's AE-1 would have been eschewed by this chap as simply being too modern - all that automation to determine the exposure! We did not talk for that long, so I cannot really speak for his motivation, but I suspect that he sees film as being "pure" and involves effort. He poke disparagingly of people using modern camera technology and getting "good" results. Yes, it is likely that an image will be well exposed and in focus, but he was ignoring the aesthetic side of things as the briefest of glimpses at a photo sharing site such as flickr will attest. I was going to raise this with him, but he walked off at that point. I don't think that it helped that I had told him how I had used Photoshop to fix some minor compositional issues in my image which could not have been corrected at the taking stage.

I also wonder about his choice of camera. Why not use the wet collodion process? There the photographer has to be responsible for the complete end to end process, from coating the plate and then exposing and developing it while the emulsion is still wet. Damned inconvenient, especially as only around six minutes can elapse from coating the plate to putting it in the developer, but it demonstrates considerable technical skill! Besides, when the inevitable happens and film is no more, the early processes will be all that are left as they are more accessible to a DIY approach.

Nor is film as unsullied as he thinks. People have been manipulating images since the medium was invented. In the early days, film did not have much latitude which meant skies burnt out. Photographers either made two exposures and combined them in the darkroom or added a more interesting sky from elsewhere. The methods might have changed, but not the desire to produce the best image by whatever means possible.

A few years ago, Harry Cundell - a long time member of the club who moved away from the area a while back - showed me a book of images which you would have said had been produced with the aid of Photoshop. Except that the publication date was 1960.

The letters pages of AP which Dave mentions are actually a great source of amusement. While other magazines publish letters where the author states how great the mag is and the person with the brownest nose wins the monthly prize, AP tries to stir up debate where the writer has not properly thought through the subject. It's amazing how upset they can become when someone attempts to point out the flaws in their arguments and some disputes rumble on over quite a few issues.

The latest topic is where people are saying that images should be made in camera so far as possible and post processing should be kept to a minimum. It occurs to me that ths is actually a very similar argument to the one the chap I met in the library put forward, except that this time it is the purity of a digital image that is being preserved! Even with chemical processing, very few images where there is an artistic intent are actually straight prints. Tones are manipulated and features are highlighted or removed, just as happens with digital.

I cannot remember where I picked up the RPS statement that standards are continually being raised to achieve its distinctions, but it was probably at a workshop. Not only has digital has encouraged more people to get involved with photography, but the tools at our disposal mean that advances in aesthetic quality have become possible. While achieving a distinction has become harder, more people than ever are attaining them.

[Rose]

Its an interesting question, especially as you say he was a "young man" and therefore not necessarily brought up in a non-digital world. Did he believe that the more complicated the camera, the better the end result? Personally when I view photographs online or in galleries I never think "what camera is this". Its just a means to an end, so Im really not interested in the tools used.

(slight off-topic) But what gets me riled is when someone sees an image and says "oh they must have a good camera". As though the camera waited in that exact spot and took the image itself when it decided!! You wouldnt say to a musician whose song you like "that must be a good guitar you have"...

Actually people do say that to musicians !! Ridiculous and it's also something that bugs me too. A friend of mine actually responded by saying "By the way thank you for dinner the other night, you must have a really good oven..." LOL