The failure of the film paradigm
I don’t generally post opinion on this blog, but this has been running around inside my head since I read this post by Scott Bourne on the TWIPPhoto blog.
So what would be the perfect camera? For me, it’s one where the technology gets out of the way of the creative act. Lets face it, photography was invented by geeks and developed for decades to satisfy geeks. It’s all about the technology. If you don’t understand the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, film sensitivity and available light, you’re doomed. We turn our collectively superior noses up at people who just want to “point and shoot”. It has been so since the earliest days of silver plates and today, with digital, NOTHING is different. Why? The film paradigm haunts us. Photographers know how cameras are supposed to work and camera designers know how to make them work in the way photographers expect. And we love it. Explaining the nuances of focal ratios and the relationship between f-stop and depth of field makes photographers feel smart. The more fiddly bits we can adjust the happier we are. Go ahead, deny it, but in your heart you know it to be true.
Digital has the power to change this, and to let creativity be king. Why should I have to care about the sensitivity of my “film”. The perfect camera will capture all the available photons flying around and simply let me choose how light or dark I want the scene. Is there too much light to shoot “wide open” with that slow shutter speed to allow motion to blur to softness? Why should I care? Give me a dial that lets me choose how much of the scene should be in focus, and another that lets me choose how much motion I can freeze. Let me set these in ANY combination I want for the picture I “see”, and let the hardware and software be smart enough to do the rest. Give me 10 or more stops of dynamic range (another thing photo geeks like to talk about). Why not? Don’t tell me it can’t be done, I will assure you it will be not only possible but common in the future, that is if the camera designers stop thinking about converting film to digital.
This is my perfect camera. Purists will call this cheating. Photo snobs will claim that you must understand the film paradigm to have creative control. I say bunk.
Tags: photography
