gdanmitchell
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 p.2 #6 · Is HDR the future of photography? | |
old-gregg wrote:
@gdanmitchell@ My best work is on film. Has always been, and still is. Not just my opinion, but my family and friends, and also here on FM: my most liked images are in the film forum. I have no idea why.
And this statement covers both the light/composition and also the technical aspect, the IQ. Somehow the colors and tonality of my film photographs digitized with the Sony A7RV are better than scenes directly captured with the same camera! I cannot explain this. Somehow the last two decades of digital progress added exactly nothing to the quality of my output. My (unproven) theory is that there's a much, much deeper relationship between effort and result.
If you make X easy, X loses value. That's why photographers don't make good money anymore. They outsoruced most of the effort to stacked high-fps auto-culling ai-trained automation and turned themselves into moist self-propelled tripods. HDR is not going to improve anything for them....Show more →
For anyone who isn’t interested in these things, this will be long, so feel free to not read it if you aren’t interested.
I’ll take you at your word about the quality of your film work. I know some other folks who stick with film (John Sexton is one good example) and produce absolutely beautiful work in that medium. In his case, he has spent a lifetime developing his vision and skills with film, and why shouldn’t he stick with it? (He’s not entirely innocent of digital photography, though.)
On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of folks who built their reputations in the film era, who later transitioned to digital, and whose work using digital photographic techniques is (and is regarded as) as good or better than their film work.
the “easy” point is an interesting one. One friend of mine (he’s one of the above folks whose reputation with digital work has only grown beyond the reputation he developed with film) both love the power that digital gives him to create expressive images. (He likes o point out things that “Ansel couldn’t do.” And he worked with Ansel.) At the same time, he’ll occasionally and only half-joking say, “maybe it is just too easy now.”
I think that photographs have lost value in the current era. There are several reasons for this, I think. One is that the tools for producing photographs, specifically, have become much more readily and widely available. Today, anyone can send something off tothe print service and get back a 20” x 30” print, and at an astonishingly low cost. Powerful post-processing software lets us do things that used to be much more difficult.
But I also think there are just a lot more decent to good photographers. I made a quick comment in an earlier post about how some of the work regarded as being “great” back in the day now looks less remarkable than it did when it was first created. I think that is, in part, because there’s so much good work out there, and not all by well-known photographers.
One more thing that has contributed to the devaluing of prints: It used be that every print was a unique objects. No two were identical, and he was the result of a hands-on process. The printer (the photographer or someone else) had to execute a series of steps including dodging and burning and more that could not generally be perfectly repeated from image to image, and many photographers changed their interpretation of their prints over time. Today, I can make 50 literally identical prints of an image, with the restful that prints are no longer singular, unique objects.
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