Was impressed when I made this snap.
Well actually it was this snap.
I had finished joking with someone that I seem to be making analogue type snaps with the digital. Uploading this one minutes later I thought that there was a use for this camera as I was now making Yamamoto clones.
Then I thought about it. It wasn’t the digital aspect that made this happen it was the fact that I was using an SLR something that get so little use in film that they are all in disrepair. Wandering about I use the leiquinhas and they have an extreme sense of personal space – no closer than one metre please. What the digital did was allow me to see it immediately.
By the way the image ended up black and white after reading the information sheet with the new Ilford Galerie Fibre Silk paper where there are colour settings for digitally toning black and white prints and thought that I would give it a try.
Rant Two
This seems highly contradictory as it would seem that I would on outings I would want something neutral, but digital cameras make generic images. This has nothing to do with what is in front of the camera but how the camera handles that information. There are no quirks. Again it seems strange that a device that actually turns light into information – noughts and zeros rather than a direct correlation to the intensity of light - wouldn’t take that into account.
It seems that all camera manufacturers are trying for the same trait free image so that I really doesn’t matter which camera is used. Actually it is worse it gives raw data then allows the owner to then put in the quirks they wish - see image above – but none of those decisions have to be made before one heads out. Realised this after seeing a loads of Lomo snaps where due to the manufacture of the camera colour seems strange. Again looking of bounties of black and white, I remembered grain and thus remembered surface and because of this realising that I was looking at something not through something.
I wonder – due to the infinite mutability of a digital file – if Pete Hank Emerson would recant his recantation and say that photography was once again an art as tones can be modified completely without relationship to the others.
Rant Three
Because digital cameras hedge bets and really make no commitment to the information, all this stuff has to be built into them so that all these decision can finally be made –are digital cameras the Zeligs of the photographic world? Because they need all these options nothing is straightforward – well except the Leica M8 am accepting donations. The contradiction being that turning on the camera one has to make sure that all the options one wants are set. One can set them to idiot settings – the one that I use – but with all these buttons and the like – I fear that they will be knocked a kilter so after every snap I recheck everything.
With normal cameras one can look down at the camera and see the basics, f stop, shutter speed, distance, ISO. I know that in the last years of film some manufacturers moving from mechanic to electronic would make their cameras a bit more complicated but realising this mistake they would head back to more “retro” looking cameras trying their best to mimic the straightforward aspects of older cameras.
Now not only can I not find the simple information. I have to turn the camera on, then constantly tap some button for this some lenses don’t even have distance scales. I also have to worry about the file size, will it flash at inopportune moments, which algorhythm the dial has been bumped to etc.
Rant Three and a Half – or digitally Rant:3.5
When trying to part customers from their money working in camera shops we would always recommend a skylight or UV filter.
-a filter costs $10 your lens…? It is cheap insurance.
So here is this digital camera with glass not only for the lens - I am guessing that there is glass in the lens - but this great hulking window on the back. How durable it is? Sony wanted to sell me an extended warranty.
-it will pay for the cost of the screen. Leica make a point of saying that the sapphire glass is more durable than diamonds. I expect that the rest are about as durable and as thick as the glass used for microscope slides.
Yes I have buyer’s remorse. I shall take the digital on the Navagatio as it does replace the point shoot and do want to see if it will work for the people of Clarke’s Beach but am already longingly looking at the leiquinhas and fondling film.
5 comments:
not that you need validation but i concur with your rants re: digital media.
perhaps though your camera will develop a quirk.. like in that movie wall-e... little robot suddenly developed a personality.. or might malfunction... but then we'd want our money back. i don't know.
yeah i thought about the digital version of a diana but that would be pure affectation.
but am torn still think for pure unedited boringly good snaps that are almost risk free - cannot say pure documents as i am scarred by the wgas - they would be good for a trip say, to costa rica. make sure you take the right ac adapter. you can follow the progress during the navagatio here.
A question for hyperactive ranters: are you really worried that the window on the back is going to break? I tossed (no, not just dropped) my SLR across a parking lot at Kroger and it still seems fine. Funny, cause I was always worried about how I was going to keep it clean.
Maybe your camera is better than mine, but I would have to say that mine does have quirks, I am not sure they are the kind one wants, but they seem to exist in the same manner that my Holga has predictable light problems, and (your) Gameboy (that I loved) had scale issues.
Rant 2 seems reflected (or proven) in Flickr type images, even if you print them out and hold them they don't seem tangible--this must have to do with surface. Perhaps I just like this rant because it deals with the issues I have with all photographic images, thus my obsession with surface.
Rant 3 is admittedly (and annoyingly) true, but I do wonder if you are reacting in general to "the new", or "the different", I won't say the unknown because you know digital far better than I ever will, but you know what I mean--I am not speaking literally, really. Asking simply because someone ought to give you a hard time.
answer to fibroided fotographers. not worried about the glass but curious that now two parts of a camera are fragile. when i were a lad there were cameras called hockey pucks and the best urban legend was the answer ben fernandes now benedict j fernandes gave to someone when they asked why he used a leica - he could beat the shit out of an attacker with it and keep taking pictures.
my camera doesn't have quirks it has annoyances - there is no image fall of at the edge. there is no variation in sharpness out from the centre that anyone this side of those loser with scientific machinery could measure. there isn't even the diana type veiling of the image pushing it away and a bit into the past. the quirks - let's say ticks come from the masonic like rituals one has to go through to prepare the camera for those boringly clean snaps.
anti rant two.
i think a hard copy of the moth was sent your way so you can determine whether it is true or not. i share your superficiality - that means love of surface right? - and like the options that inkjet prints allow paper wise but they could come with the quirks of and the decisions one has to make when using film. i think the reason i don't like inkjet prints from digital cameras are again the images are too clean - read sterile i do think that you are correct as more and more people are not making prints but leaving their snaps all over the web from google earth through magazines like jpg to flickr which is a pity.
anti-rant 3
a part of it has to do with what i know but it has to do with the fact that i can put a leiquinha in one of the thousand pockets of my cargo trousers and not leave a bulge that i prefer to store negatives than digital files. that a dslr seems to be the same as carrying a laptop to make notes. a lot has to do with the romance of film. something called memory and the anticipation of whether the image turned out. i know that photograph don't look like real life but digital photographs are so close to what we think photographs should be to real life that there isn't that
surprise on what used to happen in the translation.
My dad dropped his Sony into the toilet, better not to ask why, how, or when, and when he fished it out he thought it was broken. When he came home with a new one the old one decided to work again. I don't tend to think about fending off attackers with my camera, but I get the general idea.
Clean images, I wonder, it seems that the images I left looking the most like they really did professors were the most suspicious of. They did not question the textile images or the blown out house prints, but the set of images that really were still photographic, those, everyone always pointed out, were false, hyper-real, photo-shopped, even when they weren't. No one seems to believe that colors are bright, ground is textured, and so on. But I think it has to do with what you are saying, digital (though not always I think) images have become so clear, clean, boring or sterile, they seem unreal. Snaps look so much like photos they don't seem like fotos, or something like that.
I guess another thing I think is interesting is that the extreme of this--ie the Flickr aesthetic-- don't seem like they belong in a tangible form, I am not sure it is a pity people don't print them out because they don't look like they should be real. I used to make photo albums with my fun (family) pics, it was a pastime I enjoyed, and the albums stop about half way through our Chicago years, when my in laws bought us our first digital camera. I tried for a while to keep up, printing out the images as I took them, but eventually I got too far behind and just stopped. It always felt wrong, like I was asking them to be something they weren't. I just got used to having digital albums so to speak, everything is ordered and filed on my external the way it would be in an album. It seemed like I had to make a choice to either shoot with my old camera and still have real albums or to not, and meeting in the middle seemed like a fight from both ends.
If there is anything that I miss about the darkroom and film, it is what you said, the process and the translation from the camera to the printing. There is a process with digital I just hate it the way I hate taking notes with a loptop. I know it would be "better" for me, as my notes are a total mess (never learned how it do it right and I can only imagine what yours must look like) but I like to go back through. At my dad's last month I found an old notebook that had a gameboy image of my shoe on the front and lots of Clarkeism's on the inside. Not real useful but funny. Better be nice or I might start quoting them.
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