Manufacturing Beauty

[A-1 (imported)]

Other "tricks" from digital involve the latitude of exposure that the media enjoys. Provided that you remember to take your lens cap off, you can take pictures using exposure times or exposure that just won't work with a film camera.

This allows camera engineers the opportunity to optimize camera shutter speeds, focal points and so forth to make the camera more versatile and dummy-proof.

Of course, if you are an artist, this makes little difference because you know what you are doing, anyway. I DO want to do on the record stating that film photography will never go away. Just as the camera succeeded painting, so too do electronic image receivers seem to have replaced film. However, it only seems that way. Film will always have it's place in the the photographer's range of skills used to ply the trade. It will never go away completely.

Never fear, photography artists. Quantity will NEVER REPLACE QUALITY. You know what you are doing. Chance cannot replace what knowledge, skill and talent yields...

[C&TL2745 (imported)]

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film photography will never go away. Just as the camera succeeded painting, so too do electronic image receivers seem to have replaced film. However, it only seems that way. Film will always have it's place in the the photographer's range of skills used to ply the trade. It will never go away completely.....

However, film (and cameras that use it) are increasingly hard to find. One fact of life in a capitalist economy seems to be the rule that if everybody doesn't want it, nobody can have it. At some point, you may have to make your own film or revert to hand-made photographic plates.

While it's true that digital cameras in every iPhone make everybody think he's a photographer, even though their artistic talent and the quality of their cameras are lacking, the same was true of the single-copy Polaroid instant-print and of Kodak Brownie cameras with fixed-focus plastic lenses. I wouldn't call the pictures in my grandfather's black-and-white photo album "art," but they did capture a side of his life that no one else was around to capture. And would anyone argue that his amateur Super-8 films are superior to an MPEG shot with an iPhone? Probably not, but at least I could view them if I could find a Super-8 projector with a working projection lamp.

Great art can make use of a variety of media, and I believe digital photography is one of those. For better or for worse, however, it appears to be here to stay, and the quality is getting better every year. Forty megapixels in a cell-phone camera? Yes, I've seen that advertised lately, and that'll blow up to 11x17 inches at over 400 pixels per inch. My hubby swears that picture quality with anything over 8 megapixels depends on the lens, not the number of pixels, and if that's so, we've already passed the point of diminishing returns. In that case, it's not a matter of digital vs. film but rather how good your lens is.

For the average iPhone user, perhaps the secret of good photography with digital cameras boils down to taking lots of pictures but never showing off 99.9% of what you take. Pick only your best 0.1% to show, and people will think you're a real photographer (maybe).

For me, though, the saddest part of digital photography is the ephemeral nature of the photos, the formats, and the media on which they reside. I can view my grandfather's photos, and if I had kids, they could, too, but one disk crash can wipe out an entire collection of digital photos in one fell swoop, and if your safety net is copies on CD-ROM and DVD, be aware that without proper storage, the data on these media can fade and become unreadable in as little as a few years. And when JPEG is replaced by some new, superior format, how long will it be before you'll look high and low to find software to view JPEGs? Even now, TIFF, bitmap, GIF, and several camera-unique "raw" formats are becoming rarer, and support for them probably won't last forever. The same can be said for machines to read whatever media the photos are recorded on. When's the last time you saw a computer that accepts 8-inch floppy disks? Even 5-1/4-inch floppies? 3-1/2-inch anyone? Who has time to copy ten years worth of photos to new media (and new formats?) periodically? And who thinks of doing it until it's too late?

Sandi

[fhunter]

Great art can make use of a variety of media, and I believe digital photography is one of those. For better or for worse, however, it appears to be here to stay, and the quality is getting better every year. Forty megapixels in a cell-phone camera? Yes, I've seen that advertised lately, and that'll blow up to 11x17 inches at over 400 pixels per inch. My hubby swears that picture quality with anything over 8 megapixels depends on the lens, not the number of pixels, and if that's so, we've already passed the point of diminishing returns. In that case, it's not a matter of digital vs. film but rather how good your lens is.

For the average iPhone user, perhaps the secret of good photography with digital cameras boils down to taking lots of pictures but never showing off 99.9% of what you take. Pick only your best 0.1% to show, and people will think you're a real photographer (maybe).

For me, though, the saddest part of digital photography is the ephemeral nature of the photos, the formats, and the media on which they reside. I can view my grandfather's photos, and if I had kids, they could, too, but one disk crash can wipe out an entire collection of digital photos in one fell swoop, and if your safety net is copies on CD-ROM and DVD, be aware that without proper storage, the data on these media can fade and become unreadable in as little as a few years. And when JPEG is replaced by some new, superior format, how long will it be before you'll look high and low to find software to view JPEGs? Even now, TIFF, bitmap, GIF, and several camera-unique "raw" formats are becoming rarer, and support for them probably won't last forever. The same can be said for machines to read whatever media the photos are recorded on. When's the last time you saw a computer that accepts 8-inch floppy disks? Even 5-1/4-inch floppies? 3-1/2-inch anyone? Who has time to copy ten years worth of photos to new media (and new formats?) periodically? And who thinks of doing it until it's too late?

SandiYour husband is right. I would put the plank even lower - at about 5 megapixels.

I have seen differences on 3 cameras, all were 5MP, one proper, two phones. Smaller details are blurred (+ other distortions) on phone cameras. The much bigger issue is sensor noise. The smaller the sensor is, the noisier it gets. And as the pixels on the sensor get smaller, they become less sensitive to light.

Proper digital camera, not a phone, works much better in a low light.

In theory, one can try to compensate this using extra resolution and speed, but... more megapixels is only a marketing here.

Re: the ephemeral nature. Formats are no problem as long as documentation survives. Thanks to open source software. It is the "raw" camera formats that are a problem, as they are usually undocumented. If I was to store photos or something - I would have made few copies and do an offline backup - take an external hard drive, drop data on it, turn it off put on the shelf. Repeat the process, say, monthly. Backup procedure copies files and checks that backup is still okay. There are also solutions (like bittorrent sync), that can do a copy of the photos as they appear on the hard drive.

And the time required to do a backup... average desktop hard drive can do 50Mb/s or even more. If your collection of photos is 100Gb, copying would take an hour or so. If you do a backup once a month, I do not think that 1 hour is unreasonable time...

[curious_guy (imported)]

For me, though, the saddest part of digital photography is the ephemeral nature of the photos, the formats, and the media on which they reside. I can view my grandfather's photos, and if I had kids, they could, too, but one disk crash can wipe out an entire collection of digital photos in one fell swoop, and if your safety net is copies on CD-ROM and DVD, be aware that without proper storage, the data on these media can fade and become unreadable in as little as a few years.

Sandi

M-DISC media is supposed to last 1,000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[C&TL2745 (imported)]

M-DISC media is supposed to last 1,000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

Thanks for the tip. I'm not sure how they know it'll last 1,000 years, as I'm sure they haven't stored one that long, but it's good to know somebody is working on the problem.

Sandi

[A-1 (imported)]

M-DISC media is supposed to last 1,000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

ah... didn't somebody in Germany say that about something round-about 1938?

[Riverwind (imported)]

Its just the latest and greatest thing until the next greatest thing comes along. Miller's law comes into effect here in that technology will double its self every 18 months or something like that, if so this product will have about a 10 year life which in the electronic business is like a thousand years.

One disk, it holds everything its small wont scratch put it in your pocket. That would be good for OH, maybe 20 years or so and will be cheep enough for anybody to have unless of course its made by Apple then it will be twice as expensive so buy the same thing from other dealers, I mean really who wants an Apple with a bit out of it?

River