Photography has gone through quite a few changes in the last quarter of a century.
Back in 1992 I was teaching black and white photography at a community college. That means darkrooms, chemistry, and film for those that can't remember a time without the Internet. Back then, there were digital contraptions we laughed at because of their bulkiness, their expense, and the horrid images they produced. No way was digital even approaching what chemical photography could do. And we were right... at least in 1992. Jump five years to 1997 and there were now little digital cameras that we still laughed at because of their expense and the amateur images they produced. It would take decades before digital could be used for professional work... or so we thought. Jump just another five years to 2002. Who was laughing now? By this time, professional cameras like the Nikon D100 and the Canon EOS 1D were out and film was losing ground... and fast. These cameras were more than adequate to handle professional work, and did. By 2005... not even five years later... I saw the writing on the wall, slammed my head on that wall, and left both teaching and photography for a long time. Digital had taken over and I was not prepared for that change. For me, the magic of seeing a print appear from a blank sheet of paper was gone, turned into ones and zeros and a mess of digital gibberish. I could not see myself making students spending long hours in a darkroom when digital was obviously the future. Change for those entrenched in chemistry and film was slow, and it was time to let go. All of that said, I never hated digital imaging. It had, and still has, a lot of advantages to traditional film and chemical photography. There was no standing around bored as you processed film, no long hours in the dark printing, no chemical smell on your clothes when you got home. Slide presentations could now be created quickly and professionally with software -- gone were the days of tedious hours creating title slides for presentations that had to be shown on a screen in an unlit room. The greatest advantage to digital, at least with how I see the world, is its ability to show a visual representation of how people think, what goes through their mind, what kinds of things interest them. Because of the long hours it took to create images chemically, many images just didn't see the light of day. With the advent of the digital imaging and the vehicle of the Internet, it is now possible to see hundreds of images by the same person, and that allows us to see into that photographers mind and their view of reality. The ease of which one can create a photographic image to communicate with has great power, and this has allowed digital imaging to become one of the most interesting ways to see how a society reflects upon itself. But I also began to realize something more personal was going on. There was a shift on how I worked with my images, something that I would have never given up when I shot film, but now find somewhat redundant. But I'll get to that in the next post.
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