Digital has made us lazy

Does anyone remember the thrill taking their first shot with a new digital camera and getting instant feedback? I do. I said screw the darkroom. That is when I got lazy.

RDKirk wrote in post #19265279
As far as I'm concerned, there is never more than one "keeper" per session: The best one, and there is always a best one to a sufficiently discerning eye.

Thank goodness I don't subscribe to that school of thought. At the bottom is a link to a series of photos taken a few weeks ago at a local park. These were shot with a Canon 5DMkIV and a Canon 100mm-400mm MkI lens, using aperture priority with the aperture at f/5.6 and ISO Auto, with a minimum shutter speed of 1/2000s. This was shot with autofocus (and I'm not going into all of the AF settings I used).

Full disclosure, I learned on a Pentax K1000, fully manual with fully manual lenses, using the split prism for focussing.

Now onto the photos...

The "keeper" is the fifth, where you see the snapper's eye. While I raised the lighting of the great egret's eye area, raising it more would have looked cartoonish. Accordingly it is a less-than-ideal photo, but it is the "keeper". That said, all of the photos together tell the story. This event played out over twenty minutes. Maybe these photos are terrible, maybe they suck. For another purpose, I reduced this set to five photos; it wasn't that hard.

Regardless, I will challenge two ideas...

One is that only one photo from a shoot is a "keeper". It may be you might only print and frame one photo from a shoot and if that's the definition of keeper, so be it, but that doesn't even necessarily mean it's the most important photo from the shoot. While 25 photos here might be excessive, it's hard to say that only one photo tells the whole story.

The other is that digital has made us lazy. I have a 676 page user manual for my 5DMkIV, and also use a 148 page AF setting guidebook for the 1DX MkII which is recommended for use with the 5DMkIV. These are my prized reference guides for my camera, and I use them constantly. When I want to try something I test thoroughly before going in the field, where I may make additional adjustments. Yes there are things we don't have to do today with digital, but there are other things we can do with digital that can take us far beyond the analog/film world.

UPDATE: Oh, and btw, I don't do continuous shooting.

The Attack

Well, it first needs to be defined how post processing is used, for corrective purposes or enhancement. For corrections, yes, digital post processing offers greater ease and latitude than what existed in the purely film days. But, as noted by others above, if it works, and it works effectively, then this is all that really matters. On one level, how you get to from point A to point B doesn’t matter if the end product is successful.

As for the enhancing qualities of post processing, this has always been important for certain types of photography, whether printed in a darkroom or manipulated on Photoshop. I think we all recognize this…as RD Kirk noted, Adams ‘got it right’ in the camera, perhaps psychotically so, but he also used a variety of post processing techniques that markedly transformed his ‘straight prints’, and not by accident.

I switched from digital to film, and both mediums afforded me instructive qualities due to their respective processes involved. However, these edifying benefits may or may not be applicable to anyone else, so I would certainly hesitate to make any universal pronouncement about which medium is most advantageous, because, as usual, it depends on the person.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #19265330
For those of us that sell photos, having multiple keepers even of the same subject but different looks and views, increase sales.

This is why a 20fps ES burst of a child running a ball to the goal can create multiple keepers. Different family members like different looks of their child or grandchild, for example. I always cull the bad ones or boring ones, but I will often have a few different looks and all interesting, so I include those and don't just select one per situation or time of action.

I do to, but that's for clients.

For my portfolio, there will only be one.

And because I sell primarily wall portraits, even for clients I will always be guiding them toward their selection of "the one" that will go biggest on the wall.

Back in my PJ days, it was different. W. Eugene Smith was my hero, and I always shot a story as for "Look" or "Life." But I don't do that kind of thing anymore, and when I've done it, people seem to have lost appreciation for the "documentary" or "photo story."

RDKirk wrote in post #19265279
As far as I'm concerned, there is never more than one "keeper" per session: The best one, and there is always a best one to a sufficiently discerning eye.

Between what you and TeamSpeed said. I get lots of keepers but only a few I consider top shelf. If I can get 10 great shots when I travel then I'm happy. A few years ago I was on Portugal for 6 weeks. Had one I really loved. I could have stopped shooting after this one. It may not be everyones cup of tea but for me it is being at the right place at the right time. That is all I need. Of course doing gigs you want an 80 to 90% keeper rate.

Photo from digital paradise's gallery.
Image hosted by forum (1027111)

digital paradise wrote in post #19265743
Between what you and TeamSpeed said. I get lots of keepers but only a few I consider top shelf. If I can get 10 great shots when I travel then I'm happy. A few years ago I was on Portugal for 6 weeks. Had one I really loved. I could have stopped shooting after this one. It may not be everyones cup of tea but for me it is being at the right place at the right time. That is all I need. Of course doing gigs you want an 80 to 90% keeper rate.

Gallery photo (hosted):
posted by digital paradise originally in forum: Canon Digital Cameras

I also got a shot of a cardinal which are rare in my area. It took me over a month to get the shot I wanted. I have hundreds of keepers but I would only post the "one".

Beautiful !

BTW, is a cardinal more or less rare than a bishop ? I forget

TustinMike wrote in post #19265745
Beautiful !

BTW, is a cardinal more or less rare than a bishop ? I forget

Me too and I was raised as a catholic. thanks

Has digital made us lazy? I vote no. As technologies change, we shed old skills and acquire new ones. The old ones took effort to learn well, as will the new ones.

RDKirk wrote in post #19265279
As far as I'm concerned, there is never more than one "keeper" per session: The best one, and there is always a best one to a sufficiently discerning eye.

This? I vote yes. As a matter of fact, I'm on the campaign committee. You were there when the shot was made. Pick the one that best describes why you made it.

Electric starters on cars and motorcycles have made us lazy. Calculators have made us lazy. Many more things have made us lazy.

All digital photography has done is make us more creative and I'm all for it.

Steve

I miss the days I had to walk to the front of the car in the cold and wind up that starter by hand until the car would turn over and run!

Also miss the days I had to push my motorcycle to the top of the hill, pull the clutch, start my descent and once I had speed, release the clutch, ah the great times I had.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #19268667
I miss the days I had to walk to the front of the car in the cold and wind up that starter by hand until the car would turn over and run!

Also miss the days I had to push my motorcycle to the top of the hill, pull the clutch, start my descent and once I had speed, release the clutch, ah the great times I had.

I miss my Edsel’s AM radio.

I wonder where's the starter of this thread .... I hope he's not too lazy to participate in conversation

I started out in the film days. I welcomed digital for a number of reasons. (1) My EOS Elan broke. (2) It reduced the reliance on toxic chemicals. (3) It was less expensive. More importantly, (4) I could improve the quality of my images with post processing. And it gave me at least one capability that was, to my knowledge, impossible with film: focus stacking. Perhaps the thread title should have been titled: Digital has made some of us lazy.

This image was a stacked composition of several shots with a 100mm macro lens, which, as anyone who uses one knows, has a very narrow depth of field.

I certainly wouldn’t want to hand crank a car to get it going; cars are already a hassle enough, which is why I don’t own one…like having to mow the lawn or raise children; which is why I don’t have a yard or kids I reckon. Suburbs, yikes! I’m actually all for slack as much as possible, seriously.

Even so, I nevertheless prefer the ‘anachronistic’ process of using a film camera. Even when I used a Canon 350D, I had it set to manual exposure and coupled with a manual focus-only lens. This should not really sound odd, as I can assume people still walkabout who prefer to use their hands to mold pottery instead of using a 3D printer; who use a piano or guitar instead of using GarageBand or similar software; or who use a paint brush instead of Photoshop Illustrator. The worth of artistic mediums and instruments are not solely tied to the convenience or ‘technical modernity’ that they may or may not possess.

Anyway, at this rate, technology will allow people to increasingly “convenience” themselves out of the photographic process altogether. It’s not hard to imagine releasing a drone that has AI to snap compositionally pleasing photos (keepers) without any human input at the time of the shutter release. You could program it, for example, to target birds in flight, flowers, or church steeples. Lazy, sure, but equally effective in the end. I guess releasing and retrieving the drone, perhaps from a smartphone while lounging on a couch, will prove gratifying for some folks. This said, I’ll continue to use my rangefinder should such a future eventuate in my lifetime.

As for digital facilitating greater creativity for us; yeah, haven’t had this one proven to me yet. Digital has broadened the field as to what is possible, just as strobe photography dramatically offered something that a pinhole could never achieve. Yet, if you prefer pinhole photography, advances beyond are of little relevance, and that’s fine; there’s no loss to creative potential.

That is, developmental expansions don’t necessarily concern themselves with creativity as much as they do with options, whereby creativity comes from within---irrespective of the instrument used---and the value it outwardly expresses will much depend on the subjective preferences and desires of the creator and the viewer.

when i was in high school, i palmed a key to the virtually unused darkroom and would go to school hours early to have access to the darkroom, all to myself... i wouldnt say what i did was necessarily good in terms of quality...

when i went to college, i was the photo editor of the newspaper by the beginning of my second semester (first semester where i changed majors to journalism from electronics) which gave me unlimited access to the newspaper's darkroom (separate from the photography class darkroom) and i worked for Gannett (Publisher of USAToday) local newspaper which also gave me unlimited access to the darkroom...

i enlisted in the Air Force and played around with photography before getting "drafted" by the photo shop (I was a graphic artist) to fill an empty billet, so i had unlimited access to the darkroom...

that said, ive gotten lazy in that i no longer have to soup film and print stuff. i also no longer have a darkroom to use but my full film kit (a pair of Canon F1n bodies and 5 primes, a speedlite and quantum battery) weighed about 1/2-5/8 as much as a pair 5D (III and IV) and two f2.8 zooms. schlepping THAT around surely makes up for any laziness i have from the processing side of the game...