Mitch Alland Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Edward - I understand your feeling about this in emotional terms, but not in terms of logic. Of course, a photographer can take great photos regardless of medium. Before digital, people took "millions" of "meaningless photographs" with point-and-shoot cameras that were meaningful to them or their families and some of which went into their photo albums. Today, with smart phones, those "millions" have become "zillions." But this democratization of photography is merely a continuation of the trend of increasing mass picture-making since George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, coined in 1888 the advertising slogan, "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest". Today, among the zillions of smart phone images posted on Facebook and Instagram there is a lot of junk; but the amount of great photography produced in this way is also huge.
Now, the logical disconnect, for me, is saying that, So now that everyone can take a photograph and post it immediately on Facebook, in my opinion, the interest in taking photos with advanced digital gear has diminished, at least to some like myself. I do not wish to contribute to this global madness. As I see it, you neither have to contribute to the "madness" by posting on Facebook or, looking at it in reverse, you could use a smartphone and take great pictures.
Looking at your photography dispassionately, I can see why you've gone back to film at this point of time: you're generally producing better color shots with film than you're were doing with the M9 or the M240 for two reasons, I think: first, one often tends to get a bounce from the inspiration of changing to a different type of camera and, second, more importantly, your film work renders the high tones of harsh, bright tropical light much more gently and gracefully than digital does (unless one is extremely careful to underexpose and then bring up the shadows in post-processing. My prediction, though, is that, eventually, you'll go back to digital, having absorbed the lessons of how film renders bright highlights to your future digital work.
In this context, it's interesting to look at Ron Scheffler's M240 images in post p.1505 #1 and see how much they look like transparency film — I wish I had this level of digital post-processing skills, for, then, I wouldn't need to shoot slide films occasionally in order to reinforce the lesson on the colors rendition that I want to get out the M10.
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Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine
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