There’s no way I could’ve gotten it on film, both the exposure and the focus. Chris Klug – April Golden Light
On a couple of back-to-back posts, Chris mentioned that the photo that he took could not have been done with film. I disagree. I think that the could have pulled off either of the shots using film, perhaps not as easily, but it could have been done, I believe.
Now, this post is not to say that Chris doesn’t know what he is talking about; he certainly does. I just don’t think that he gave himself enough credit for the skills that he’s acquired.
This post is just another one of those pool ball shots that bank off of the walls of my brain. I wonder if, with the rise of digital technology, we are losing skills or, perhaps we are giving up skills that are no longer needed. Which is it?
One thing I can say: this shoot was one I could never have done with a film camera and prime lens. This shoot used digital and modern lenses all the way. Chris Klug – Last Rays Of Sun
I think back to my film days. Of course, as a young man of very limited budget, I always, if I could, purchased the equivalent of day-old bread, that is, I bought film that had expired or was about to. You could always count on a pretty good discount, 50% or more. Rarely was I without several rolls, or perhaps several dozen rolls of film. And, as I recall, I didn’t hesitate to experiment and bracket, bracket, bracket. It just didn’t ocurr to me to not bracket. It’s just the way that I did in tough lighting situations. Most times I got the shot, but there were those few that got away.
With digital cameras, we still need to experiment, so to speak, but there is no cost/frame to experiment, save for a few thousand pixels, which can easily be dumped and reused. As a dual shooter, this fact is not lost on me. I am a bit more cautious when shooting my film cameras, much less so than back in the day, or so my memory tells me, but I try not to be; however, the simple fact is film is a finite material. I carry only so many rolls with me AND, I am only willing to purchase/develop so many. 
In the end, I guess that if one is willing to experiment and take chances, the shots can be pulled off either way. That said, I know that there are lots of points of failure for film: Reciprocity failure, color balance, film speed, etc, not to mention the inherent continuing cost.
Thanks for that food for thought, Chris!
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5 Responses to “Skills lost, dormant, or no longer needed?”
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IMO a lot of photographers are losing skills.
Then again, I’m a big proponent of doing things right in the first place. I think that all entry-level programmers should be forced to program with C++ or Lisp, and if they can’t get their heads around those, should never be permitted to use easier languages. With photography, everyone who’s serious about it should spend some time with a view camera and a spot meter.
I think spell checkers aren’t helping either. Maybe that’s why so many people use the word “loose” when they actually mean “lose.” It’s not just you, it seems to be the norm these days. It’s becoming so common that it’s making me wonder whether it’s because spell checkers aren’t as good as we think they are. Maybe there’s an analogy there; spell checkers, digital cameras, and modern programming languages all have their advantages, except in the hands of people who think that they don’t need to develop any skills because their toys are easier to use than their predecessors’ toys.
LOL! Talk about skills. I do know the difference between loose and lose, to be sure; however, that extra “O” just popped in there and the spell checker was never the wiser. It’s not a grammar checker.
I changed it.
Anyway, to your point, I have similar thoughts about programming, but not quite as harsh. I remember interviewing lots of potential developers who said that they had so many years of experience doing “X”; however, they couldn’t tell much of anything. Take C++ for example, those that came out of the Microsoft camp, Visual C++ couldn’t even tell you what was a copy constructor or the difference between shallow and deep copies. Mostly, they depended solidly on the IDE (Integrated Development Environment, for your non-techies). If you took them out of that environment, they didn’t even have a clue as to how to compile their own code. I see a lot of that today using Java. So many very experienced programmers don’t even know what classpath is!
I’ve also met others who have very nice cameras, top of the line, but they have no idea what shutter speed is or aperture, nor how they work together to form exposure. They get overexposed shots and cannot figure out ‘what the camera is doing wrong’. More and more technology seems to really distance us from skills. We just want to push a button. There is nothing wrong with technology, but it can, sometimes, make learning a skill a bit difficult.
I’ve been reading your blog for long enough to think that it was your spell checker that failed, rather than you… I’ve just encountered a LOT of people who get that wrong consistently, along with “its” vs “it’s” and “your” vs “you’re” and ‘hear” vs “here” (and so on)… basic stuff that people should have had to learn in order to get INTO high school. (Unless they’re learning English as a 2nd/3rd+ language. But you can usually identify those folks by their colloquialisms and the fact that they consistently invert some English constructs to be more like their native language.)
Programming… well, you just hit on the reason that I’m being so harsh. If they can’t produce working code without a crutch, then I don’t want to work with them… because I’ll have waste too much of my time fixing their continual blunders, which describes the vast majority of my IT career over the past 16 years.
Technology doesn’t make learning a skill difficult. People do. In theory, a digital SLR should make learning how aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focal length interact easier since you can experiment and see what you get, but a digital SLR also makes it easy to ignore the man behind the curtain and then blame the camera for making mistakes. As much as I poke fun at digitoys, their primary detriment isn’t their inferior image quality compared to big film, it’s the fact that they allowed people to achieve mediocrity without effort. Most people these days are satisfied with that, because they don’t want to put in effort, and exceeding mediocrity requires effort. So rather than put in effort, they lowered their standards. The failure is not, IMO, the technology, it’s the people who think that it’s a substitute for skill and creativity.
Naturally, all of this is a long-winded way of saying that I agree with you
Your post made me think, of course, given that you were quoting me (heh). Thinking back to that moment on that day, I remember looking at the branch swaying violently in the sun, changing the focus distance, the exposure of the highlights changing every second as the bud went from in the sun to in the shade, etc. Now, if I had a 85mm FD lens on my Ftb, yeah, I’d bracket, np (hell, I’d bracket all over the place without any hesitation), and if I was shooting slide film (which is all I used to do) I’d under-expose one stop just to make sure I didn’t lose any highlights, but it was the focus issues in particular that made me make the statement. I really wanted a shallow DOF, and the AF on the camera allowed me to just fire away, frame after frame, looking for the kind of image I wanted. If I was using the old tech, I’d have stopped down more, giving me greater DOF, playing it safe, and losing the shallow nature of the shot I really wanted. I probably would have gotten the exposure right, but not the focus. Honestly, I just don’t think, given my skillset then or now, I could’ve gotten the shot without AF.
I think the shoe is on the other foot. I have just been looking at a book of Jane Bown’s photographs spanning a long career, and there are several she took in the 1950s with a medium format camera that I think any digital user would find hard to match today.
I know, I know, there is a film look and a digital look. And digital has improved tremendously in the past ten years to the point where I like it (I used to hate the digital look of the early days).
But for the detail and the tonal gradations in black and white, a 6×6 is still ahead of the pack, in my opinion.