Maturity in the World of Digital Photography
Johnston on PhotographyJuly 2008
I guess it's the price of fame—or near-fame, or "sorta" fame. I
run a popular web site called The Online
Photographer. I don't like the term "blog," but it's a blog. It's
been surprisingly popular—I usually tell people that it's small
for a photography web site but large for a blog. We get between 17,000
and 34,000 unique visitors a day—far less than Photo.net or
Flickr or Imaging Resource, but more than most blogs, even some very
good ones.
The price of that success is that I've picked up a few
hecklers. Often, these turn out to be people whom I've
inadvertently offended somehow. (I always tell people that if I do
something that offends them they should suspect cluelessness and
disorganization first and malevolence last, but that doesn't always do
the trick.) One fellow proposed himself for a picture feature on the
blog I call "Random Excellence," and then apparently felt grievously
wounded when I didn't use him for the feature. Ever since, he's been
going to rather extreme measures to insult what he can see of my own
photography at every opportunity. I think that's rather odd, because
the purpose of my site isn't to showcase my own work, and very little
of my work makes it on to the site. At any rate, he wants me to know
that he thinks I suck. It's very, very important to him.
Sigh.
It got me to thinking, though. It's true that I publish a lot of,
well, bad pictures. That's mainly because in many cases, I'm
interested in something else besides the picture. Most often, these
are "test shots." I'm sure most hobbyists reading this are
intimately familiar with the honorable genre of the test photo. (Some
hobbyists photograph little else, which I think is fine, as long as they're
having fun.) When testing a camera or a lens, I really do take a
lot of really bad, boring pictures—usually because they
show me something specific about the product's technical
performance. Here's an example:
This is a photograph I took with the Zeiss ZK 28mm f/2 Distagon T*, and the
reason I took it is because it places a hard line in the foreground
blur—I wanted to see if there was any doubling (ni-sen) in the
foreground bokeh. But of course an incoherent, confused photograph of my
birdfeeders is not, um, art. When I'm testing a lens, I'll take
all kinds of photos in order to look at specific imaging properties:
distortion, tonality, flare of various types, purple fringing,
definition at infinity, corner blurring, and dozens of other things. I
pretty much have it down to a routine. And almost without exception,
the test photos, as pictures, are boring and lame. They just
tell me what I want to know, is all. (In case you're wondering, my
eventual conclusion was that the 28mm f/2 Zeiss Distagon has nice,
smooth bokeh all around, and the foreground bokeh is fine. I'll
probably review the lens soon, somewhere).
When I'm testing gear, I only pay attention to the technical
properties my test photos show me, and ignore the aesthetic quality of
the pictures.
And now for my thoughts on maturity...
But here's what's interesting: the opposite is also true. When I'm
actually out photographing—that is, out and about
pursuing "real" pictures—the kind I actually want to
look at—I never pay the slightest attention to the
technical properties of the lens. Then, the goal is to forget the
equipment. What I've learned about the lens with my test photos might
inform how I use it, how I go about approaching something, but once
I've decided a lens is okay, I just photograph with it. If some slight
technical flaw shows up in a picture, I don't obsess about it.
And when you think about it, isn't that really the mark of maturity in
a photographer? He or she does the necessary research, acquires the
equipment needed to do the work, but then gets on with the work. And
forgets about the equipment. When you're photographing, technique should be
transparent.
Stepping back even further into meta-territory, I think I could
make the case that something similar has happened with the whole of
digital photography. Digital photography, which was a glimmer on the
horizon in the '80s, an emergent technology in the '90s, and
arriviste for the first half of this
decade, is mature now. Know how we know that? Because people are just
using it to do their work without further comment.
Some of you might remember that I wrote a column called 'The
Sunday Morning Photographer' that appeared on photo.net
from 2003 to 2005. 'Johnston on Photography,' which will appear
exclusively on photo.net on a monthly basis, is a revival of that
older column.
Things have changed a lot in the intervening three years,
though. It used to be that being digital was one of the main
attractions of digital. But no longer. No longer does anyone make a
big deal about a magazine feature being shot entirely in
digital. No longer is the point of a picture or an exhibition, in
effect, "look how far digital has come" or "you can't even tell
it's digital." It's no longer important to people to try to assert
that digital is as good as film—simply because, well, it
is. The speed at which digital is dominating the market is no longer a
common topic of conversation. It's already happened. All those things
are signs that digital photography has reached maturity, I think. It's
not even really "digital photography" any more. It's just
photography.
And speaking of maturity, I wish those hecklers would grow up a
bit. I'm just an unemployed single parent from the Midwest, not some
glorious poseur with a camera. If I'm the best person they can find to
be jealous of, they need to expand their horizons.
Anyway, I hope you'll come back from time to time to see some sucky
(but perhaps informative) pictures, and even the odd, occasional good
one. Next month, for instance, I'll be writing about a brand new
digital lens that I think is one of the greatest lenses I've ever
used. And that's really saying something, since I've used far more
lenses than I care to count. (Don't assume it's the Zeiss I mentioned
earlier. But don't assume it isn't.) Hope to see ya then.
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