A great many people have scratched their heads upon witnessing my rather prolific picture-taking practices. On this page, I will attempt to explain my rationale with regard to photography.
Not surprisingly, the best place to start is at the beginning. In the " bad old days " of photography, it was necessary to go to a store, buy film, wrestle the roll into your camera, take a pitiful number of pictures, pop the roll out of the camera and then hand it in for processing. Over the next two weeks, you would cross your fingers in hopes they all turned out well. You would then have to painstakingly scan all the ones you liked in order to facilitate e-mail distribution to family and friends.
With the advent of the digital camera, we were thankfully delivered from this ridiculous, time-consuming and expensive way of doing things. Shockingly, there are people out there who continue to hold onto film photography for fear of working with computers which is a necessary part of digital photography. Cyberphobia is a sad thing but never more so when put into the context of photography. I got my first digital camera in 1999 and have not looked back since.
Now we reach the matter at hand. Perhaps the biggest thing people have trouble wrapping their heads around is the sheer quantity of pictures I take. When it comes to weddings and other special events, it is not unheard of for me to take several hundred pictures during the course of a day! The reasoning behind this is simple.
When you look through a newspaper and see a fantastic shot of a goalie making a spectacular save, it is not because of any special precognition on the part of the photographer. He or she will rifle off about a dozen shots for every attempt on goal in hopes of capturing that one special moment. At the end of the game, he might discard hundreds of pictures in favor of the one which will make it to the newspaper.
This is precisely why I am constantly snapping pictures. For example, for my youngest sister's wedding I took about 300 pictures. However, I did not keep all 300. I deleted the ones which were too dark, featured too many backs of heads, were redundant (i.e. a better shot of the same subject was taken later on), etc. The result was around 250 rather exceptional memories.
The biggest mistake people make when going through the transition from film to digital is holding on to the film photography mindset. They continue to take pictures in a piecemeal fashion waiting for that special moment worthy of being captured. The reason they do this is because every camera click costs a dollar or two with respect to film and processing. With digital photography, this is no longer true. You can take hundreds of pictures and it will not cost you anything so why be so stingy? With digital photography, you should never ask the question " Should I take a picture now? ". The answer to this question is always yes. If you don't like it, you can always delete it later but chances are the moment will never occur again.
I will now close with a series of questions and answers which are included in an ongoing family album project. Some of these rehash topics which I have touched upon above:
"The Americans
have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger
boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office,
1876
Question: If I purchased a color printer, would it not be possible to print some of the pictures?
Answer: Yes, this is technically possible and I have seen some good results from doing so. However, you would be effectively defeating the purpose of the whole digital medium. The idea is to forsake paper entirely in favor of viewing on computers exclusively.
Color printing is almost as (if not more) expensive than taking the files into a service as described in the preceding section. The reason color printers and specialized digital picture printers are on the market is due to simple commerce. The companies in question just want to sell more products to gullible consumers.
Getting hard copies of photographs using either method is of dubious value. For example, let us assume you do not have the time and/or interest to learn how to drive. It is also technically possible to buy a car, shift it into neutral and then hook your horse up to the front bumper. You would then be able to sit on the roof of the car and have the horse pull you about the place. This will work and you will get to where you are going ... eventually.
Obviously, people who pursue this ridiculous course of action are missing the point. It would be much simpler and more efficient to invest some time and effort in learning how to drive. By the exact same token, I suggest you learn how to use computers effectively for this and other tasks. It beats clinging on to outdated/soon-to-be-obsolete technology while spending money needlessly. The time to embrace new technology is in its early stages. Besides, these pictures look much nicer on a computer screen!
Question: I am happy with my film-based camera. Digital photography sounds very complicated. Digital cameras are also very expensive and I hear the quality is not as good as film. Why should I make the switch to digital?
Answer: To make this question easier to answer, let us assume we have two photographers who have spent equal amounts of money on their cameras. It is further assumed that both cameras are equally adjustable with respect to features and picture quality. Here is what Mr. Film has to go through:
1. Go out to a store to buy film (possibly on a snowy, stormy evening).
2. Load film into the camera. If Mr. Film discovers he has the wrong type or he accidentally exposes the film while loading, he has to go back to the store and buy more.
3. Spend time and film (i.e. $$$) experimenting with the camera’s various settings. If this is not done before critical pictures need to be taken, the cost could be both financial and sentimental.
4. Unload film from camera. The same exposure risk from step 2 must be observed.
5. Go to developing service and submit for conversion to prints.
6. Wait for days on end for Step 5 to complete. He can get it done in one hour but that will cost him extra.
7. Go back to the store to pick up the prints.
8. Mr. Film swears and curses because he has taken pictures that are too dark. Others feature his thumb and nothing else. This is too bad because the precious event in question has passed into history.
9. Spend more money on albums to put the photos in.
10. Spend time inserting the photos into said albums. If he doesn't have time, he just throws them into shoeboxes.
11. When it comes time to blow the dust off the (likely unlabelled) albums and shoeboxes, Mr. Film gets a hernia lugging them out of the closet.
12. He spends hours or days sifting through all of them to find the ones he wants to look at.
13. Relatives or friends see shots they want copies of. Mr. Film must now find the corresponding negatives. Of course, these have not been labeled either so he squints at strip after strip for hours in equally unlabelled packages to find the right ones.
14. Spend more money (ka-ching, ka-ching) and more time (yaaaawn) having copies made. The quality of these copies will be dependent on how badly the negatives have been ravaged by age and dust.
15. Spend more money (on postage) and more time (in transit) mailing out to recipients.
There, now wasn't that easy? ;o) Here is something else to consider with regard to album storage. Let us assume you were to place every photograph on the first CD into albums holding one hundred photographs each. Let us further assume each album is two inches thick and and weighs two pounds. The resulting stack would consist of 40 albums almost 7 feet high weighing over 80 pounds! The thickness and weight of this CD? Less than one centimeter and a few grams, respectively!
Meanwhile, let us examine the trials of Mr. Digital Camera:
1. Take pictures and (if necessary) delete/re-take the ones which don't turn out properly.
2. Upload to his computer. Mr. Digital can easily organize and name them as I have done on these discs. The quality will remain brilliant regardless of how much time has elapsed since the original pictures were taken.
3. OPTIONAL: He effortlessly e-mails copies of equal quality to as many family and friends as desired.
That’s it. Finished. Over. Done. Total cash outlay? Zero dollars. Given this principle, even if digital models cost twice as much as the equivalent film model (which they don’t) it wouldn't matter. You would be saving so much money in development and printing costs that you would recoup your investment in no time at all. In less than three years since purchasing it, my Sanyo camera paid for itself. It will be useful for many years to come and will not be subject to typical mechanical failure for the simple reason that it has no moving parts.
As for quality, if you can tell the difference between a film photograph and a digital photograph that has been transferred to paper, you have better eyes than I. By the way, I have 20/15 vision! For those of you still wishing to toil and fiddle with film cameras, be my guest! LOL
Question: All of that sounds great but didn't you forget to mention the fact that Mr. Digital needs a degree in Computer Science to operate his camera?
Answer: No. This is kind of like saying cars can only be driven by professional Formula One and Indy race drivers. All kinds of people from all walks of life buy and drive cars regardless of their level of mechanical expertise.
If digital cameras required intimate knowledge of computers and the technology involved, the companies that make them would go bankrupt very, very quickly. Today's models are extremely easy for even a rank novice to operate. Once again, the key point to remember is that it will not cost you anything to experiment with the digital variety.
Question: I still think you are exaggerating. Digital photography is still in its infancy. Everyone still has film cameras and relatively few have digital ones. What makes you think this conversion is going to happen anytime soon?
Answer: First of all, this is no longer true. Digital photography is overtaking film at a breakneck pace. Refer to the article(s) in this folder for proof.
This is the same question asked by people in the late 1800’s who were content in writing letters for purposes of long-distance communication. They scoffed at a strange new talking box invented by some crackpot named Bell. They were happy with the Postal and Telegraph Services of the time and saw no reason to abandon their habits. When Alexander Graham’s invention quickened the pace of business, the stragglers had no choice but to adopt it or be left behind.
My point is that the writing has been on the wall for some time now. These days, if you look at the electronics fliers advertising cameras, you will see that digital models generally account for more than half of the total advertised units. With respect to the adoption rate within our own family, consider the following list compiled as of this writing:
Uncle Larry
Michael
Audrey
Brendon
Jeff
Neale
David W.
Matteo
Jaime (Jeff’s brother-in-law)
This list will only increase as the years pass. Sooner than you think, you will be having difficulty finding film-developing services because they will have gone out of business.
Question: That is ridiculous! Film photography will never die. Why do you think film photography’s days are numbered?
Answer: I don't think film photography will die. It will just fade away (pun intended). To use my example from the last answer, it is true that people still write letters. They just do it very infrequently when compared with their ancestors before the advent of the telephone.
To state my point a little more bluntly, nobody is really offering you a choice in the matter. To give another example, users of Beta VCRs swore up and down that the format was superior and will stand the test of time. Nowadays, good luck finding any non-VHS models for sale! Beta users were never consulted if the change to VHS would be OK with them. The video industry made its standardization choice and we all had to follow suit.
As explained in the first answer of this section, legions of consumers are realizing the tremendous advantages of digital photography. It won't be long before it is adopted as the exclusive standard and film goes the way of vinyl record albums, 8-track tapes, typewriters and other displaced technologies that would “never die”.