It's getting better all the ti-i-ime –or is it?

A

AndyCapp

Guest
Recently, I have spent a lot of time looking at photographs people post on public forums (fora?).
When I was into photography the last time –having bought my first 5D– real photographers posted their shots to show us what could be achieved.
I do not see much of that any longer. The talent and the imagination have gone iPhone.
Old geezers like myself find it difficult to kick our old habits and see the world with fresh eyes. Our eyes are not fresh.
With my new Leica M9, I am achieving about the same quality as I did with TX, D-76, and Agfa Portriga...on a good day. It sucks.
It cannot be that we are living in a ready-made world today.
I'd love to see some out-of-the-box visual artists you have spotted recently.
Could you please point some of them out for me?
 
My opinion - to accompany a grain of salt...

It is not so much the change in "image capture" device that has led to an overall aesthetic decline in photography.

Rather, it is the change in image viewing device.

That is, the vast majority of photography "consumers" are now viewing images on teeny tiny screens -- viewing images at sizes much smaller than postcards.

As a consequence, for a large number of photography "producers", there is no longer the incentive to invest the effort in making superb, high-quality images, either technically or aesthetically.

Many photographers may reach the conclusion, why bother? Why take the care in composition, development, post-processing, spotting, details to the nth degree -- whether with digital or archival processes -- when most often their viewers will spend less than one second on an image, the size of a saltine cracker.

In this context, it is little wonder most people making photographs are using phone cameras. Because that is how the world will view them anyway.
 
I was at 5D thread on POTN. From second round of this thread I joined. To be honest, most interesting photos from this thread were from USA based student. Most boring were from one Bulgarian in Mexico possitioned as pro.

I was in Amsterdam from Friday till this Sunday. And I have seen plenty of young ones with Canon DSLRs. Where and if they post somewhere, I don't know...
I have a lot to see in whom I follow stream on Flickr.
 
If by that you mean young photographers there are plenty on Insta taking pictures with cameras rather than Iphones .
I`m not sure though what you are suggesting in your post ?
 
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I have bought photos (the smelly originals, not inkjet prints) from internet artists I have known for years.
Sometimes, they use paper negatives from doghouse-sized cameras, half-minute exposures, cyanotypes, and mystical chemical mixes. They spend hours in the photographic sessions and days in the darkroom completing the product to match their vision.
I appreciate this, and I can pay real money to get one.
Only recently did I find a business here that does the framing.
It does not show from my snapshots, but I am deeply in love with Photography and the Creatures of the Darkroom who are still there to give us the magic.
 
AndyCapp says "The talent and the imagination have gone iPhone." I'm not so sure that the phone, per se, is the problem; I think the issue is more with the whole social media ecosystem of which it is a part. Anything and everything (and I do mean everything) gets posted by anyone with an image-making device, and most of it is garbage. Of course, the percentage of valuable work in any medium has always been small, and it has always taken effort to find it, but the sheer glut of photographic imagery out there, and the scale of that glut, is something new. I find it exhausting to try to wade through it, and often feel defeated by the search. For a new photographer, discerning what has quality and worth must be daunting, and the take-away may well be that it doesn't matter, because even good work gets inundated in a tsunami of mediocrity.
Of course, my age is showing here. In the Post-Modern race to the bottom, talk of "quality and worth" is condemned as elitist and judgmental, the canon is a creation of the privileged, and every voice is of equal value regardless of its content.
 
A couple of years back I predicted on the POTN site (Photography-On-The-Net, run by "Pekka" from 2001 to 2023) that the cell phone will eat up compact digital cameras. It happened in a couple of years. Nobody could foresee the combined effects of social networking, fiber grid, microelectronics and software development. The boom is not over yet. His swan song is behind the purple link above.
The population involved is immense. We see new ethnicities we did not know existed. Content is coming from Africa, Asia, South America, Middle East and Middle Asia. There are a lot of gifted people among the billions of users who present their work on X, FB, YT, Instagram and Tik-Tok.
You just have to spot them in the massive heaps of garbage.
I feel our focus is more on the equipment and the material rather than on the message.
Our money, our choices.
I am curious to know iif you have found an interesting recent photographer who has touched you on the inside?
 
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A few loose thoughts.

What you and I consider to be "good" photography, are entirely different. The old adage, "different strokes..." applies here.

Many web sites feature excellent photography by dedicated photographers. Some use Iphones, others DSLRs, mirrorless, P&S, quality film cameras and definitely inferior 'snapshotters'. All of these make images. Many are fine. It's really all in the eye of the beholder.

Obviously you dislike Iphone images. I do too, altho' I'm not really sure why this is. But I accept that Iphones have cameras. My partner has a new Iphone and uses it more for photography can for calls or texts. So yes, they are cameras. And they seem to be as popular (if not more so) than cameras . This is how it is.

Like me, you may be in a rut. Mine come and go, fortunately they are temporary but I expect they will only cease when I am no longer here. I try to make the best of them by expanding my visual horizons. I look sideways at things. I visit photo web sites I long ago abandoned to look at photos. I do an exercise of trying to find at least one good thing about every photo I see. For me this is fun.

It's all In how you view photography and photographs.

I hope these few ideas will help you to work your way out of your current funk. They are merely my thoughts - and they work for me.
 
DownUnder said:
A few loose thoughts.

What you and I consider to be "good" photography, are entirely different. The old adage, "different strokes..." applies here.

Many web sites feature excellent photography by dedicated photographers. Some use Iphones, others DSLRs, mirrorless, P&S, quality film cameras and definitely inferior 'snapshotters'. All of these make images. Many are fine. It's really all in the eye of the beholder.

Obviously you dislike Iphone images. I do too, altho' I'm not really sure why this is. But I accept that Iphones have cameras. My partner has a new Iphone and uses it more for photography can for calls or texts. So yes, they are cameras. And they seem to be as popular (if not more so) than cameras . This is how it is.

Like me, you may be in a rut. Mine come and go, fortunately they are temporary but I expect they will only cease when I am no longer here. I try to make the best of them by expanding my visual horizons. I look sideways at things. I visit photo web sites I long ago abandoned to look at photos. I do an exercise of trying to find at least one good thing about every photo I see. For me this is fun.

It's all In how you view photography and photographs.

I hope these few ideas will help you to work your way out of your current funk. They are merely my thoughts - and they work for me.
Click to expand...

A bad photo is far more easy to recognize than a good one.
 
Would you like some cheese and crackers to go with your whine? :eek:

Less sarcastically, just go shoot.

That's all that matters in the end: the image. IDGAF if anyone else really likes mine or not beyond, perhaps a handful of friends and my GF. It's nice EgoBo when they do, sure. But not necessary.

Hey maybe I'll be the next Vivian Meyer? Fat chance!

But I'll have fun anyway. I'll keep shooting and posting no matter what others think.
 
AndyCapp said:
The talent and the imagination have gone iPhone.
Click to expand...

AndyCapp said:
With my new Leica M9, I am achieving about the same quality as I did with TX, D-76, and Agfa Portriga...on a good day. It sucks.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure how the above two statements relate, can you explain?

It's not all that difficult to find talent nowadays, social media, for all its flaws, has made this possible.

AndyCapp said:
A couple of years back I predicted on the POTN site (Photography-On-The-Net, run by "Pekka" from 2001 to 2023) that the cell phone will eat up compact digital cameras. It happened in a couple of years.
Click to expand...

This actually began much earlier.

If one looks at the Camera Timeline on dpreview, look at Canon, and "compact cameras."

In 2008, 16 models released.

2014, 14 models released.

2017, 3.

2019, 2.

2021, 0.

There are now hundreds of millions of quality cameras (i.e., smartphones) in the hands of people that never used a compact camera before.

This is not a bad thing.

None of this prevents you from going out and enjoying photography in your own way.
 
splitimageview said:
I'm not sure how the above two statements relate, can you explain?

It's not all that difficult to find talent nowadays, social media, for all its flaws, has made this possible.



This actually began much earlier.

If one looks at the Camera Timeline on dpreview, look at Canon, and "compact cameras."

In 2008, 16 models released.

2014, 14 models released.

2017, 3.

2019, 2.

2021, 0.

There are now hundreds of millions of quality cameras (i.e., smartphones) in the hands of people that never used a compact camera before.

This is not a bad thing.

None of this prevents you from going out and enjoying photography in your own way.
Click to expand...

AndyCapp said:
With my new Leica M9, I am achieving about the same quality as I did with TX, D-76, and Agfa Portriga...on a good day. It sucks.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure how the above two statements relate, can you explain?

Here: 37 seven years have passed since my first AE-1. On a good day, after the bin full of test stripes and failed exposures I might have had a reasonable hot or even two. I had a good Canon 5D3 set but decided to turn Sony and I started getting some seriously nice pictures.
My madness of Leicaphilia has taken my picture quality back thirty years. This is temporary, I am figuring out things one by one.
Being as low on the learning curve as I am now in the Leica world, sucks.
 
AndyCapp said:
I'm not sure how the above two statements relate, can you explain?

Here: 37 seven years have passed since my first AE-1. On a good day, after the bin full of test stripes and failed exposures I might have had a reasonable hot or even two. I had a good Canon 5D3 set but decided to turn Sony and I started getting some seriously nice pictures.
My madness of Leicaphilia has taken my picture quality back thirty years. This is temporary, I am figuring out things one by one.
Being as low on the learning curve as I am now in the Leica world, sucks.
Click to expand...
I thought your post was about your perception of photography in general rather than perceived difficulties in using a Leica ?
On the first point I think its more interesting and varied than it ever has been in its history .
As regards using a Leica , I don`t see how they are especially problematic .
I assume that you are talking about the rangefinders .
If you are finding them so it may help if you could be more specific "taken my picture quality back thirty years" .
In what way has it ?
 
splitimageview said:
The ratio of snapshots vs quality imagery is likely very similar today as it was back in the days of 126 Instamatics. There is just a larger total amount and the total is easier to share. :)
Click to expand...

Well .... I think there is a fundamental difference. Even with the Instamatic snapshot cameras (and their ilk) there was a barrier of processing & printing that both delayed gratification and incurred some cost. This barrier is absent with cellphoneography and thus encourages indiscriminate scattershot type image production with very little thought given to composition, perspective, lighting, etc.

This is only getting worse with post capture "cleanup" being done with AIs. We are very near the point where an AI will give us what it thinks we wanted not what we actually captured.
 
AndyCapp said:
I'm not sure how the above two statements relate, can you explain?

Here: 37 seven years have passed since my first AE-1. On a good day, after the bin full of test stripes and failed exposures I might have had a reasonable hot or even two. I had a good Canon 5D3 set but decided to turn Sony and I started getting some seriously nice pictures.
My madness of Leicaphilia has taken my picture quality back thirty years. This is temporary, I am figuring out things one by one.
Being as low on the learning curve as I am now in the Leica world, sucks.
Click to expand...

I had much the same experience when I first tried serious digital photography after 40+ years of silver monochrome (which I still far prefer by many miles). Here's what I learned about digital (assuming a decent sensor and capture system):

  1. You have to expose like you're shooting transparancies. That is to say, you have to protect the highlights.
  2. A highlight weighted metering option is helpful in this regard.
  3. Some/most of the high end sensors will give you a slightly blurred image in an effort to manage noise. Unsharp masking is your friend.
  4. Most things require a very gentle post processing touch. I've seen many a fine digital image abused by excessive saturation and HDR fiddling.
  5. Digital is a more-or-less straight line HD response. It's never natively going to look or feel like film. You have to bend that curve into film-like shapes to make it so and even then ... it ain't film.
 
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splitimageview said:
Yes, I'm not following.

There is a great amount of talent, and it doesn't really matter what device is used to create the art.
Click to expand...

I rather think that Sturgeon's Law still applies and always will: Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Excellence - in anything - is hard to achieve. The only thing different today is that standards for greatness are considerably eroded because: A) Taste in the arts of all kinds of fallen precipitously in the past hundred years and B) Everyone wants to think they are "great" so the bar just gets lowered (see "The Fountainhead" for a great novel about this very behavior).

As just one example - from the late 19th Century through today, music has been getting progressively simpler and simpler. I'm not talking about what we might like, whether it's Beethoven or Elvis. I am talking about the observable reduction in complexity and sophistication (on average) as we move from Beethoven, to Dixieland, to Big Band, to Beebop, to Fusion, to the Beatles, to hiphop, and end up at rap. Today's music (on average) lacks complexity, sophistication, nuance, or dynamics - it's overwhelmingly a study in droning percussion and lousy poetry (because the written word has also been afflicted with severe brain damage).

There have been some fine photographers in the past 100 years, but a lot of what gets waved around as great work is either political propaganda or stuff the East Coast arts elites pimped as being great when it really wasn't all that.


So, if the audience can't tell the difference between great work and dreck, then everything is ... oh, how shall I say it ... "Awesome!"
 
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