The future of Photography

[SwissJon]

I've been thinking recently about the past (I'm getting old I guess) and can remember distinctly when I saw my first computer. My dad took me into a cleanroom where there were men in lab coats tending to magnetic tapes and punch cards, lots of noise. The room was approximately 40 feet square (12 meters by 12 meters for you metric people) and my Dad proudly announced that this installation cost a million pounds and my dad proudly announced that it had 1 MEGAbyte of memory (Yep, he spoke in capital letters!) and told me that meant the computer could remember 1 MILLION things at once. It was 1978.

Roll forward 5 years, and my first computer.. A Tandy TRS-80 that ran PC-DOS. Two 512kb floppy disk drives and no internal hard disk..

Roll forward today, my step son is the same age as I was then, and he's talking in things that start with Giga and Tera and my mobile phone (An iPhone) has 32,000 times as much memory as that mainframe my dad showed me 32 years ago, and it fits in my pocket. Nobody could have dreamed back then that this tiny computer would allow me to make video calls to people all over the world for free.. Back then, you would have used this plastic thing as a door wedge and said "don't be stupid", only the Star Trek fans had the vision to imagine things like "Universal Translators" that have emerged from Google.. Oh how times have changed....

So then I'm wondering about Photography.. Which, for the past 100 years, has remained pretty much the same, until VERY VERY recently.. 100 years ago, we had a box with a piece of glass at the front focussing light onto a plate of film. The film was developped in chemicals, and hey presto, a picture emerges. Changes to Negative film, SLRs 60 years ago, colour film, etc etc didn't change that process much, it just made it easier. SLR's became the defacto standard for people who wanted to take decent photos, and the rest of the world had to put up with Range finders.. Some people became range finder guru's and turned their shortcomings into "The thing" and from there we get beutiful photos that are still today something people want to hang on their walls.. The grainy ness, the strange colours, everything that went into producing the photo is what made it what it was. Today, the computer has found its way into our cameras. With a camera worth less than lunch at a decent resaurant I can take photos, hundreds of them, thousands.. And if I'm lucky, some will be quite nice..

So how do we know what's art any more.. It's simple.. Art is what you want it to be.. A photograph, prefectly produced, where the camera does what it wants, and all you needed to do is press the shutter release (or even allow it to do that if you wanted) could quite easily produce a picture that you'd like on your wall. Is it art? Who cares. But you'll need to take an awful lot of random pictures like this to get decent ones without any post processing, but you'll get some. However, you'll get far more if you learn how to control your camera, and then teach yourself to forget the camera.. A rally driver doesn't think about the car, which gear he's in etc, he knows.. What he thinks about is where he's going, subconsciously he might think about speed etc, but when you're in the "zone" that isn't what's on your mind.. What's on your mind is what's in front of you.. And my guess is that's what is starting to happen as I learn my camera.. Some of the things on my camera are second nature now.. The exposure triangle has become a tool to create the photograph I want. The Vibration control is on or off, depending on what I'm doing. The camera is usually in manual, unless things are changing so fast and the lighting is good enough for me to be able to trust the camera to handle that so I can handle the focus and composition.. It's all beginning to fit together, but it's taken a lot of time and practice, and now I need to learn to look at the world with a more critical eye.. See what "out there" works.. See the things the camera can't. No matter how good the lens and the camera body. THIS is where the art is, it's "lookign" at your world in way that allows you to "see" the art and capture it.

So my guess is this.. Cameras will continue to get smaller. DSLR's are likely to become obselete for whatever the next thing is, but at no time will you, the photographer become obselete.. There's nothing that can replace the human appreciation of art.. it's one of the things that makes us unique, and the reason for this is simple.. Art is unique to each and every one of us.. We each like something different to the other.. How can you replicate 7 billion concepts of art into a computer and make it create something we like?

But then maybe I'm wrong..

The other day I allowed my 12 year old stepson the freedom to use my D7000 and 70-200 f/2.8 and he produced this (along with a few photo's of girls in bikini's on the beach! )

[faeriegodess612]

I kinda get where your coming from. I'm younger than you and I think of the things that have come such a long way. The Apple Mac personal PC came out the year I was born. ( 1984 ) As a kid, in Elementary school, we were taught how to use a computer. We had typing classes in 5th grade. We had to create presentations, that had to include a button that took you to the next page. We learned what a spreadsheet was and how to use it. Things that some people didnt learn until college. I think about those computers then even, and now, and how everything is a computer now. Our phones, our cameras, our TV's, our entertainment as a whole, even the common everyday calculator.

TV's for instance have come along the same path. The TV used to be some huge box with a small screen. Even TV's in my childhood, we went from having a small 19 inch, color, TV that if you wanted to change the channel, you had to get your butt up and turn the dial. Then came infrared and the remote. And so on, and now we can watch TV on our phones!! Or on a portable screen no bigger than a single subject notebook. ( ipad's etc. ) Books are even becoming something digital, with things like the Kindle and Nook. Before you know it, you wont see a newspaper stand, or magazine rack.

Everything from computers, to TV's, to Movies and how we obtain and listen to our music. But with all of these also comes some really good advances in technology. Like the medical field. They've discovered ( or made ) new diseases because of the technology available to use to research such things. They've made things like the MRI, CatScan, etc. Pacemakers and knee or hip replacements. Chemistry has even benefited from technology. It's a fast paced world, and its our jobs as photographers to use our own lil pieces of technology to capture its ever changing environment and people.

[gptwins]

Nice article. To extend your rally car analogy, a driver/team does not "just show up" with a car in tow. No, they prepare the car for the race. Choosing just the right tires for the conditions. Checking the mechanicals and having backups where they can.

When I take my camera out, I run through a short checklist of options: ISO setting, which lenses am I using today, aperture and shutter settings once I get on site. I often start with the "sunny 16 rule" and vary my settings from there.

Other times I'm just taking the family sedan out. While I rarely, if ever, shoot in fully automatic mode I don't always need the Penske pit crew either.

[scootermcq]

Originally Posted by SwissJon

The other day I allowed my 12 year old stepson the freedom to use my D7000 and 70-200 f/2.8 and he produced this (along with a few photo's of girls in bikini's on the beach! )

Where those images?

[UlpilotSC]

Originally Posted by scootermcq

Where those images?

I concur.... Buy him a 500mm lens, put him to work.

I remember my first pc, an atari 800 with 48k of memory. My dad subscribed to a computer magazine. The programs were printed inside. You typed them into the computer line by line, then saved it all, and after spending several days fixing typo bugs, you could play it.
He took me to his job once, and they had these big washing machine sized hard disk drives. I think they held 500mb on removable units the size of manhole covers, four inches thick.
I'm amazed too at the advance of things. What will the future hold?

[dvtldav]

Originally Posted by scootermcq

Where those images?

I agree with Scott.

Dave

[Jim Bryant]

yup!!!!!!!!!! technology is changing daily!

[Izzy]

I remember hating AF when it was introduced. Now I would not shoot without it. I also remember the advance of computers. I have come a long ways since my Commodore 64 with my 8 core processor monster. There is more computational power in a calculator than it took to reach the moon.

When I think to this whole subject I think of it this way.

Running water has basically been delivered the same way since we started doing it. There are some innovations like plastic pipes and so on but it does not change the way we deliver water. What has changed enormously through all sorts of fads is the faucet. They seem to change with every season.

Or in more general terms we had plumbers in early Rome during the times of the coliseum fights. And they are still there.

I dont foresee slrs going anywhere. Even the new Lytro stuff does not have us excited as a whole. I personally think it is bunk. I think it is another stupid iphone app. The only people who care about the gimmick PhD (push here dummy) cameras are the broader consumer base. Of these people some buy a Dslr. What I would like to know is how many fail miserably at using it and give it up for another P&S. I had one (Canon XS) on craigslist - legit - that I could have had for about $200 just yesterday.

Ask yourself how many gimmick "advances" have happened to P&S's over the last 5 years. These gimmicks do not represent a staple change in photography on the bigger picture. Personally I hate my Kodak M580. The damn thing is just too small. Its for people with elf hands. With that said I do find it useful for things like my 180/360 panos.

[Krusty79]

Clever strategy, Jon. Have your stepson take the shots of the girls in bikinis so they won't blame you, they'll just think it's cute. Later that night, you can peruse the shots on the memory card.

The one advance I want is a sensor that can see more than 9 stops of light. With all of the other technological advances, isn't this one WAY overdue?

[SwissJon]

Originally Posted by scootermcq

Where those images?

Originally Posted by Krusty79

Clever strategy, Jon. Have your stepson take the shots of the girls in bikinis so they won't blame you, they'll just think it's cute. Later that night, you can peruse the shots on the memory card.

The one advance I want is a sensor that can see more than 9 stops of light. With all of the other technological advances, isn't this one WAY overdue?

The photos were of girls his age.. So I deleted them.. Sorry guys, I got your hopes up for nothing.

I totally agree Krusty.. A sensor that has the same sensitivity range as our eyes, about 16ev. And one that shoots at iso 100 quality at 6400 iso sensitivity, and the ability to turm down the sensitivit so i canshoot shoot with f/2.8 depth of for 30 seconds without having to use a 20 stop ND filter.