Re: [vcf-midatlantic] OT: film photography
On 12/1/18 3:27 PM, Laura S. Reinhard via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
True. I just can’t afford to work the way I love most. Working digitally was great at first and still has many advantages especially for making photomontage. But I miss the level of control and patience that film took. I can’t even print my own color prints from negs anymore. The machine simply does not exist. (At least not operating). C’est les vis.
I think this is pretty much universally the case when technological advances enable the general public to do something that was formerly the exclusive domain of either the highly trained, the highly talented, or the rich. It becomes commoditized. Not just the equipment, but the activity itself. I watched this happen with photography. I grew up in the 1970s; my mother was (and is, among other things) a journalist and a photographer. I grew up watching the incredible work she did, both at photo shoots and in the darkroom. It is art of the very highest order. Now everyone has digital camera. Everyone has a crappy one in their phone, and lots of people have good real ones. A lot has been gained; we can all take half decent pictures now, but a great deal has lost...almost nobody can take truly great pictures now. The general public now thinks of photography as "taking pictures"; and they don't understand the effort and talent that used to comprise nearly all of photography. It has been diluted almost beyond recognition by the advent of cheap digital cameras and the subsequent commoditization of the field. But when people see the work of, say, Ansel Adams, they say "WOW!" and sometimes wonder how he did that using such "primitive" tools. "No Photoshop, OMG!" Like other fields, the truly artistic side of it will be kept alive by people like you and my mother. Even just talking about occasionally, like here in this thread, it raises awareness and keeps it in the public consciousness. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On 12/2/18 7:55 AM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 12/1/18 3:27 PM, Laura S. Reinhard via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
True. I just can’t afford to work the way I love most. Working digitally was great at first and still has many advantages especially for making photomontage. But I miss the level of control and patience that film took. I can’t even print my own color prints from negs anymore. The machine simply does not exist. (At least not operating). C’est les vis. <snip>
The general public now thinks of photography as "taking pictures"; and they don't understand the effort and talent that used to comprise nearly all of photography. It has been diluted almost beyond recognition by the advent of cheap digital cameras and the subsequent commoditization of the field. But when people see the work of, say, Ansel Adams, they say "WOW!" and sometimes wonder how he did that using such "primitive" tools. "No Photoshop, OMG!"
Like other fields, the truly artistic side of it will be kept alive by people like you and my mother. Even just talking about occasionally, like here in this thread, it raises awareness and keeps it in the public consciousness.
-Dave
Agree with both of you. I currently have a hybrid workflow. Shoot on film, develop at home, scan with a dedicated film scanner then do some minimal processing in DarkTable. I'm kinda working my back, backwards into the wet process as time and dollars allow. The fun thing is to pickup up old books on advanced darkroom techniques and see the multi-step processes with inter-positives and all the rest, and realize that 3 hour process is now a click of a button in $editingProgram (I never got advanced back in the day). Even more fun, is explaining that process to the young 'uns. When putting one of my images out there on the Soc' Nets for consumption, I use the phrase, "I made this photograph". It's a turn of phrase Ansel Adams uses in his books, which I instantly latched on to. I like to think it's just off-beat enough to make people stop and think for a second. Hopefully it indicates that there was intent behind the recording and presentation of the image and not just a random snapshot that happens to look nice. --Jason
participants (2)
-
Dave McGuire -
Jason Howe