Live from Austin!

OK, I think I now realize why I’m the only one surprised that digital photography has changed things so much.

Dan wrote:

In my experience, most people can’t count on getting more than 2-3 usable prints out of a roll of 27 shots.

Wow. If I only got 2-3 usable shots out of a roll, I’d have given up photography a long time ago.

Let’s consider our recent Extreme Squirrel Feeding outing. 21 shots. 6 were duplicates, i.e. basically the same shot as another one, and I picked the best. 8 were worth uploading. So that’s about a 50% hit rate.

For the Vegas 2003 photos, if I eliminate panorama pieces there were 91 shots initially. 7 duplicates leaves 84, and I uploaded 38. So again, about 50%, as there are a few that are perfectly good photos but just weren’t relevant to the narrative so didn’t get uploaded.

If I go back to film, the hit rate is higher, as I was more careful not to waste shots. I’m trying to shoot more with digital, but old habits are hard to break.

Partly, I think it’s that I put quite a bit of thought and planning into photos. I’ll often walk around and look at something from different angles and different positions, evaluating the light and so on, before picking the place I want to take the shot from. At that point there’s not much need for multiple exposures. Other people seem to take pictures from wherever they happen to be standing when they get the idea, and then they’ll move and realize there’s a better angle and take another photo, and another, and so on.

I don’t know which approach is better. Taking lots of shots might result in unexpected great images, and might be better for learning. On the other hand, you don’t always have the luxury of multiple takes, so sometimes you need to get ready and be in the right place ready for the photo. Plus, of course, there’s still a cost even to digital photos–time taken downloading, examining, and so on. I quickly learned that you can’t judge whether a photo is any good based on how it looks on the camera’s LCD. At best, you can eliminate a few that are so bad that the defects are visible even on the LCD.

Now that I’ve been participating in Flickr for a while, I’ve realized that digital technology has fundamentally changed the nature of photography. Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places, but I don’t recall seeing any discussion of this amidst the hype about Things Digital.

On the face of it, digital cameras shouldn’t have been that big of a disruptive factor. Film cameras were so cheap they were given away as promotional items, whereas digital cameras were hundreds of dollars. (Still are, if you want a decent one.) Minilabs had brought 1 hour processing to the world, and dropped costs to around 30¢ a picture. It’s not like there was anyone who needed to think about the expense involved in taking a particular shot.

Of course, there’s an immediacy to digital; you can print your photos in a minute or two, and you can print a single photo without waiting until you finish a roll. Yet film got there first, in the shape of Polaroid, and look what happened to them. Also, printing your own digital photos is expensive—you end up eating up any cost savings you made by shifting from film. Also, if you’re lazy or forgetful like me, you let images collect on your memory card and download them once a week.

Is it the Internet that has been the catalyst of change? Again, I’m not really convinced. People had flatbed scanners long before they had digital cameras, and plenty of people still dislike viewing photographs online, in spite of the superior image possible from a computer screen.

So it seems as though digital photography doesn’t really offer anything all that radical; just a combination of minor improvements. Yet somehow, digital photography has led to radical changes.

First off, it has changed the nature of the subjects people take photographs of. As a child, I was lucky enough to be given a camera and plenty of film. I started off taking pictures of objects that I found interesting—close up pictures of toys, the grass under my feet, and so on. It didn’t last, though. I don’t remember whether it was explicitly communicated to me, but I quickly learned that the primary purpose of photography was to record pictures of people grinning while standing in front of famous places.

Now, though, everyone seems to be reconnecting with the childish glee of being able to record any small piece of the world they see, and show it to other people. With a digital camera, people somehow feel free to photograph a discarded beer can, a rusting sign or the bruise on someone’s leg.

The second big change is commentary. Partly it’s the fact that you can access the photos immediately, but I think a lot of it is that you have a natural way to associate comments with the picture, without having to start a scrapbook. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

My mother used to write on the back of prints with a pen. This was less than ideal. With a ball-point pen the smooth front surface would often get visible markings, and the ink would generally rub off all too easily.

With digital photos online, the commentary can be more of a shared, social, collaborative experience. And you don’t need to turn the photo over to see the words.

The third change is that photography has been democratized. Yes, professionals can often do a better job, turning out photos of consistently high quality; but it seems as though with persistence and lots of experimentation, all kinds of ordinary untrained folk are capturing occasionally stunning images. Maybe they don’t know how, but that can come later.

The final change is the sheer mass of images available to everyone to look at. This is really a side effect of big change #1, that people take pictures of everything now, combined with the existence of handy Internet web sites. Want to see a picture of (say) a steam train, a glass of water, a capybara, or a sock? There are hundreds on Flickr, and if you run out there you can try any of half a dozen other photo sites, or Google image search.

Sony have announced the DSC-F828 digital camera. The details to drool over:

• Carl Zeiss T* coated Vario-Sonnar lens. It’s f/2 to f/2.8 / 7.1, with a zoom range equivalent to 28-200mm (7x). The T* coating cuts lens flare and reflections.

• CompactFlash slot. Yes, finally Sony give in and support CF.

• 8 megapixel. 3,264 x 2,448. That’s better than ISO 400 35mm film.

• Four color CCD. Sony have added blue/green sensors to the CCD grid, for better resolution at the frequencies where the human eye is most sensitive—which means more accurate and natural-looking colors.

• Macro focus down to 20mm.

• Fully adjustable double lens rings. Adjust zoom and focus manually like on a conventional SLR.

• High resolution digital viewfinder.

• RAW image support so you can get the full 14 bit resolution of the CCD.

• Takes 58mm filters.

• Selectable focus point. Use a joystick to indicate exactly which part of the scene to focus on.

• True TTL flash.

Plus it has all the DSC-F717 features such as laser focus, night shot, spot/multipoint/center weighted metering, exposure lock, proper flash hotshoe, custom white balance, 100-800 ISO, shutter speeds from 30 seconds to 1/2000, 3+ hour battery life, and live histogram in the viewfinder.

It also records MPEG1 video with sound at 640×480 30fps. And it’s black.

According to someone who’s compared, the new Canon EOS 1Ds blows away 35mm film, and is good enough that he’s abandoning medium format.

I’m particularly impressed that it can take a picture of the milky way through an f/3.5 lens!

Canon are announcing a new digital SLR camera with 11 megapixel full-frame sensor.

Well, that about wraps it up for film then. Now we just need the price to come down.

Well, it’s happened. Canon have introduced a digital SLR camera which matches the resolution I can get with 35mm film and a film scanner. In fact, it probably exceeds the resolution of film, as you don’t have grain, whereas grain is visible at that resolution with regular ISO 400 film.

Now I just need to wait for the price to drop by a factor of four. So, two or three years.

I ordered 64MB of CompactFlash memory for the digital camera. After a couple of days I hadn’t heard from the vendor that it had been shipped, so I sent them an e-mail asking what had happened.

Come the weekend, I gave up and bought two 32MB cards at CompUSA instead. On Monday I called the vendor to cancel the order, and discovered that they’d shipped it the previous Thursday, but hadn’t read their e-mail for two days.

Oh well, I suppose I can take more pictures. And if I decide I really have too much memory, it looks as if there are suckers on eBay who’ll buy 32MB CF cards second hand for more than I paid new. Thank heavens for eBay…