Since posting the original article 12 Reasons Photographers Choose to Shoot Film over Digital an intense amount of vitriol has been directed towards it, which is not surprising considering how divisive the dichotomy can be.
It’s mostly been by people who can’t read properly and are therefore already at a disadvantage, however to be completely fair we’re going to flip things on their head and take a look at reasons why a photographer would choose to shoot digital instead of film.
Sit back and relax as we prepare to take a journey from the surface of the Sun and through our Solar system at the speed of light. You may want to pop the kettle on though because it’s going to take quite a long time. The Speed of light isn’t all that fast.
As every school child knows, the speed of light is finite, and although in practical situations it appears instantaneous we are really experiencing everything we see in the past. At just under a 300,000 km per second (that’s about 1.3 seconds to the Moon) the speed photons and other massless particles travel at is intensely slow on a cosmological scale. The incredibly talented Alphonse Swinehart had the wonderful idea of creating an animation showing the actual speed a photon of light travels at after it has left the surface of the Sun. Continue reading
This year will mark forty years since the invention of the first functioning digital camera, and despite it being a measly 0.01 Mp it heralded a new age of digital photography and with it came a death cry for film.
Prompted by this incredibly dull article published recently by the BBC I decided to ask some fellow photographers what reasons they had for still shooting the so-called outdated technology. Here’s the list…
Those of us lucky enough to have photo albums from the ’90s and before tucked away in our parents’ homes will undoubtedly take great joy in flicking through the tattered card pages, looking through the embarrassing portraits, day trips to the zoo, the beach, birthday parties and that time our trousers fell down in the park. The point I’m making is these vernacular photo albums were perfect and they were all shot on film.
Fast forward to today and we’re not only making fewer albums, we’re taking more photographs to get that perfect shot. Even our smartphones are littered with countless portraits of our children, nieces and nephews, because the photo before could have been just a little bit better. Back in the day of film photography we didn’t worry about that and those photo albums that we look back on are still as perfect today as when our parents first stuck them down.
This morning I stumbled on to the wonderfully engineered Word.Camera website via a PetaPixel blog post. The premise is simple: Convert a jpeg into somewhat meaningful English language.
To test it out I uploaded this small jpeg of my son on top of an abandoned building, silhouetted by the Sun.
It took the algorithm a few minutes to process an answer. Finally I was presented with several paragraphs of text giving a better than vague description of the image it received:
Of course, a barbed wire, a men, and an energy. Thus, the barbed wire remains unknown. The men evokes typing, and the energy is made from an enterprising or ambitious drive. Probably, the barbed wire remains unknown.
…Yet, a silhouette and a sunset: the silhouette evokes outlining, and the sunset is not the time in the evening at which the sun beginning to fall below the horizon.
Ok, it’s a little jumbled, but understandable English for anyone who has at least a slim grasp on the language. The prose has a familiar air of poetry about it and perhaps with a little human refinement could even be passed off as professional.
I spoke to David Phillips, who operated a poem a day blog in 2014 to ask his thoughts on how the computer algorithm could shake up the industry. Continue reading
Folks, we’ve officially come full circle. The gigantic advancements in technology that have been made since Daguerre first fixed an image, Fox-Talbot invented the reproducible image and Kirsch invented the pixel still has photographers like us grasping for our roots. “The Camera Obscura is Back.”
And like anything in this post-post-modern world, it needs a tacky sales schpiel to sell it (we’ll get to that later.)
Before there were photographs, we painted to make a record of people, places and ideas. Many of these artists would use a camera obscura to aid them in this process as they provided a still frame from which to copy from, trace over or interpret more easily than their own sight. Damn peripheral vision!
David Hockney pointed out that many masterpieces had to have been created using this ‘old camera technology’ much to the horror of many art historians.
Then came along 1800s and something called ‘fixing the image’. Scientists, chemists and hobbyists (there were no photographers back then obviously) started experimenting with different materials that would take the light exposed onto the back of the camera obscura and fix it in place. Niépce was the first to successfully do this in 1827, although modern photography is often attributed to Daguerre and Fox-Talbot over a decade later.
Excited? Well get ready to have your visions of grandeur dashed by an awful ’90s style infomercial that not only teaches you how to suck eggs, but at the same time devalues the premise of the idea it’s created. Continue reading
When Karen Davis ticked off one of the items on her bucket list, she never expected the story it created would land her in trouble with the law. But now, over two months later the infamous stunt has been noticed by SA police who are charging her with ‘disorderly conduct’
Although not sexually motivated, the harmless prank is being treated like any other public display of nudity would be. Davis admits that she felt liberated after the Google car has passed. She told the Adelaide advertiser:
“I used to be ashamed of my bust size and now I’ve accepted it and I embrace it.
“It’s a set of boobs and they show them on TV, you know what I mean?”
Phogotraphy 