I've been thinking a lot about digital imaging these days and how it compares with the chemistry days of photography. Anyone who has read my journal posts (is anyone reading them?) know I lost heart for a long time when digital took over the photography world. That experience changed me in a lot of ways, not always for the better. But with the passage of time, and a lot of soul searching, I have found digital imaging to be a wonderful way to communicate my vision and thoughts photographically.
It may not appear so, but the way we work with digital images has a lot in common with how we used to work with film. There are the technical aspects of course, shutter speeds and apertures still control the amount of light and the effect one gets in an image... it's just on an electronic sensor instead of a silver film base. We still use light-tight boxes (cameras) and optical focus devices (lenses) to capture the scene, and we still need to somehow develop these images to view them. Of course, we don't need to stand in a darkened room smelling chemicals and getting stained clothes as we process film or create prints, but we are still "developing" when we color balance or edit our images with computer software. There is one great difference I have found that is beneficial to the photographic process, at least for me. Without the burden of spending countless hours processing film and printing in the darkroom, I find myself more focused on the thinking behind capturing and creating an image at the actual time of creation... in the field. This may seem counter intuitive to those that believe the image is created in the darkroom or on the computer as it seems reasonable to believe the more time spent editing, the more you are interpreting an image. Although I agree that does happen, I don't believe ALL creation comes from this post processing phase. Regardless of how long you take or your expertise in the editing process, the foundations of what you have to work with are set when you capture the image on film or with sensor, and the more you have to work with, the greater the result can be. Photography is not about being digital... or about being chemical... or about one being better or more traditional or more real or whatever other inane argument you may see online. I can appreciate film and chemistry for what it is without feeling like I've sold out or abandoned "real" photography. If we want to get down to it, photography started out with daguerreotypes -- positive images on metal. So film negatives aren't real by that standard at all! If anything, photography is about communication and about interpreting. It's about feeling, about emotion, about understanding, not chemistry and sensors.
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