Digital Photography
| July 3rd, 2009The purist in me feels bad about being a digital photographer. Not that I’ve ever really used film, but it seems like that’s the way ‘real’ photographers would do it. The advantages are just too dad gum huge to switch.
1) A lot less money. I can take brazillians of photos and not worry about wasting money by wasting film. That’s a big deal.
2) It’s a lot more convenient to post process and manipulate on my laptop than in a dark room.
Now that we got that settled, let’s go get some chili dogs.
In the early years there were still film purists. But now no one even bothers to argue against the convenience. Film still exists and people still do it but now almost exclusively as a purer or higher form of art.
I do miss the hands on process of taking it from composing the shot to nuancing the print in the darkroom with your hands, dodging and burning with light and watching the ghostly image emerge as chemicals swirl.
What tore it for me was when I finally re-assembled my darkroom in a bathroom for a weekend of intense printmaking. It wasn’t as fun as I remembered and was a tremendous hassle. I still don’t enjoy photoshop anywhere near as much as I did the darkroom, but you can’t beat shooting a photo and international distribution online in under a minute.