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 Chris runs his classes at the Pacific Art League Palo Alto, Ca. For up to date information on classes contact Chris, contact details are at the end of the article.
Were film photographers right about digital photography after all?
By Chris Golson
"Perhaps no art, science, or craft has evolved by such an extraordinary combination of pure science, pure witchcraft, and wishful thinking as that which constitutes the popularly accepted procedures in photography".
-Ansel Adams, 1960
King ‘film photography’ is dead. Long live King ‘digital photography!’
 The village of Caterline, Scotland photographed in 1986. © Wilf James
The emergence and dominance of digital photography over the last decade has resulted in a precipitous decline in the popularity of film photography. People are shooting exponentially more photos than ever before. But why is it, then, with so much more opportunity to practice good photography, most of us end up with the same number of “keeper” pictures as we did during the 35mm days?
To be sure, film photographers have maintained for years that digital photography would not overtake 35mm film photography in their lifetimes. Film-shooting holdouts dismissed digital as the common man’s medium – requiring little talent or artistry. And yet, slowly and reluctantly, every savvy photographer I know has conceded the error of this early position. Inexorably, they are all making their way to digital.
Royal Kodak, once the king of traditional photography, has seen its stock price fall from $80 to $25, and has had to lay off thousands of employees – due almost entirely to the digital photography revolution. Stepping in to fill the Kodak vacuum are companies like Canon, which has seen its stock skyrocket from $30 to $60 in the same period. Meanwhile, film photographers are finding fewer labs to process film. Artistic-minded black-and-white photographers have to send their rolls to specialty shops in Indiana or Chicago.
It is estimated that digital photographers have shot approximately 750 billion photographs. According to the Department of Commerce, there are 80 billion new images taken a year. In less than 10 years, digital shooters will have shot more pictures than all of the film pictures taken in history of photography. (As an interesting side note, it is estimated that three quarters of all picture taking is performed during the holidays.)
Digital photography giants like Canon, Nikon and Olympus and are quenching this thirst for digital image capture. Dozens of lower-end point-and-shoot camera models now inundate the market. And at the high end, digital cameras can cost up to $30,000 (lens not included). The space between those market segments is occupied by the most popular camera format -- the one dominated by 75 years by Kodak 35 mm cameras: digital single lens reflex (DSLRS) cameras. DSLRS have lenses that the photographer can look directly through, as opposed to a camera with a separate viewfinder that allows for more accurate metering and picture composition. DSLRS are now being purchased by the same people who, in the past, wanted high quality camera equipment for a serious hobby or business. These cameras look and feel like the 35mm film cameras of yesterday -- they can even use the same lenses that 35mm cameras used.
The upshot of all this is that millions of amateur photographers now own cameras of considerable technical sophistication.
At the same time, digital camera companies use as their main selling point the fact that it costs the same to shoot one picture as it does to shoot 100,000. Gone are the days when you would treasure the 36 shots available on one roll, shooting each shot as if it were the last. Remember having to send film to a lab, then waiting a week to see how they turned out? Today pictures taken on the flight to vacation are transmitted to Flicker and posted for all to see before the plane has even landed.
These 80 billion new digital shots each year, multiplying like bees in a new hive, what do they look like?
Logic would dictate that, like a million monkeys at a million typewriters, there must exist a vast repository of beautiful shots. Millions of incredible photographs must be hidden in hard drives and flash cards, ready to reveal the next Ansel Adams or Richard Avedon.
I don’t really know the answer to the question of what these pictures look like. But anecdotal experience strongly suggests that per capita compared to yesteryear, there exist many more pictures today that deserve erasure instead of promotion.
As one promoter of the medium said, “You really do not begin to learn until you shoot 100,000 shots!”
The economics and instantaneous turn-around time of digital photography have caused people to change the way they shoot pictures. In short, people sacrifice control of their camera on the altar of automation. Point-and-shoot cameras, DSLRs or high-end cameras … they all allow people to give the camera control over exposure, focus, and to some extent, composition. The major benefit of high-mega pixel cameras is that they produce images of such high resolution that the aesthetically un-interesting parts of the image can be cropped away – thus disguising poor photo composition.
The camera manufacturers promote this workflow. They market features and settings which promise top photo results with a minimum of effort. To wit: Auto focus, auto light settings, auto white balance, auto rapid photo-snapping advancement, auto viewing, auto flash sensing, etc. Cameras in the DSLR range and above offer users the ability to manipulate these settings manually, but most owners do not comprehend the settings -- especially when each camera button performs many different functions, and the cameras’ small LCD screens contain dozens of menus. Just as Word or Quicken has grown overly complex in its feature set, the DSLR of today requires tremendous study to truly comprehend or exploit its use. Some photographers have told me after having studied their camera’s manual, researched photography websites, and even taken actual classes, they still end up letting the camera decide what to do -- safe in the knowledge that they will be able to fix the photo later. Photography has moved from picture taking to picture fixing.
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