Evolution of Photography: What to expect next?

Photography has come a long way since the hand coating days of plates that required extended exposures. Even kodak roll film, the Leica film camera have been surpassed by pocket cameras the granny and my 4 year old grandson can use in any light.

So where are we going and for what reasons?

With the dawn of the digital camera age, we were flabbergasted at the Eos D30 Camera that could use ordinary lenses and match or surpass film. Since then we've had tiny sensor camera with incredible depth of focus, touch panel for choosing focus point and even face recognition. With integration of the camera to the cell phone and instant transmission of the picture to friends, the print is no longer the medium by which the picture is generally seen. In fact, prints are likely very rare for all the pictures that are eagerly shared.

So where are we going? Is the DSLR in its last decades as perhaps film is threatened to be?

What are the new goals for camera makers and photographers: enthusiasts and specialists?

What do you seek in a new camera?

Asher

You are asking lots of questions. May I had one of my own: why do people take pictures? Because that does not change and the function follows the need. Only technology changes.

I believe it is a fallacy to suppose that photography can or will evolve. Photography is the name given to a particular process and if you don't do that process you are not actually doing photography. Just because millions of people call machine-made paintings photographs (because they look like photographs) does not make it so. You can't vote the truth. It's Aristotle's democratic fallacy all over again.

I suspect the future of the medium of photography will be continuous with and identical to its past. The things that people photograph will of course be different because they will record a changed world.

Making pictures out of light sensitive materials by arranging them to absorb samples of photons from illuminated subject matter is what it is what it is. In general media do not evolve but maintain their identity indefinitely. Marble sculpture is the same today as it was for the ancient Greeks. Oil painting is essentially the same as what the Van Eyck brothers perfected in the 15th century. Etching is still etching; and so on.

The tools of a medium tend to be bound to it. A stone mason's chisel, a painter's brush, a photographer's camera need to be the way they are to do their necessary work.

On the other hand non-photographic picture-making methods have a grand opportunity for radiative speciation. I think the use of monitor based picture displays, clever mark-making machines, shape-making machines, printers, direct brain stimulation, etc, driven by computer mediated electronic files has only just begun to flourish.

Photography is merely one rather old way of making pictures. There must be many many new ways that are not even imagined yet.

Maris Rusis said:

Making pictures out of light sensitive materials by arranging them to absorb samples of photons from illuminated subject matter is what it is what it is. In general media do not evolve but maintain their identity indefinitely. Marble sculpture is the same today as it was for the ancient Greeks. Oil painting is essentially the same as what the Van Eyck brothers perfected in the 15th century. Etching is still etching; and so on.

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Maris,

One can write on small tiles as well as a continuous blackboard. Sensels are small tiles. Drawing is only controlled by the path of the photons in each case ejecting electrons where it interacts with matter. It's the fate of these electrons that are different. In one they potentially change silver ions. In the mosaic of sensels they are measured as charge. Actually, if we put silver halide in those wells, we could get them to take those electrons for us and we could process it in the darkroom too.

The difference in writing is that one is continuous and the other discontinuous. One is not reusable and the other is. you cant't tell me that writing on one of those erasable graphite pads is not writing! Of course it is. It's merely resuseable, that's all!

Asher

Jerome Marot said:

You are asking lots of questions. May I had one of my own: why do people take pictures? Because that does not change and the function follows the need. Only technology changes.

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Jerome,

Sometimes technology opens up creative paths. That again changes use patterns. Fast ISO and AF have altered what we expect we can do and so photography itself changed.

Now we can shoot into the sun and still see in the shadows. Totally new. So the reasons why people take pictures will always expand as technology moves the boundaries of what is possible to record.

Asher

Probably I should have been more explicit.

But first, I will name digital creation of pictures as photography, as does the majority of the planet. I am not interested in discussing the word.

I asked why people take pictures. This has been surprisingly constant in spite of the technical changes. Most people take pictures to document private events (the growth of their children, their holidays, etc...) and show them to their friends. Whether they share on prints or on Facebook, the constraints of the process of taking pictures stay the same and were defined by Kodak as: "you take the picture, we do the rest". These people want it simple. That, in turn, constraints framing and the use of light (none... they take the light as it comes).

The second usage is pros working on order: make portraits of people, take pictures of items for a catalog, of buildings, scientific uses, reporters. That has also seen very little change, simply because the needs or tastes of the customers had no reason to change. Consequently, the pros just transferred their working habits to digital.

The third usage is artistic creation. This has changed all the time, but the changes are not really linked to the photography technology. Artists just often want to create something "different". They will use possibilities open by new technology (e.g. high iso if you want)... or not. I would venture to say that the ones who do so will not be successful, because making your creation dependent on technological progress is not very creative. An artist does not say "I have high iso, what can I photograph?", but "I want this kind of picture" and use whatever technique is at hand. In the case of low light photography: you say high iso is new, but Stanley Kubrick could certainly express his vision of photography under dim lights in Barry Lindon. When an artist want a result, technology follows and not the other way round.

Hi, Jerome,

Nice essay.

Jerome Marot said:

When an artist want a result, technology follows and not the other way round.

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Sadly, I think this is not wholly true. Let me give two examples.

• When personal computers came into use, the way in which characters were formed in "graphic" work made it easy to modify typefaces by altering their aspect ratio. This lead to a wave (in advertising in newspapers, little signs, etc.) of typefaces of a genre that was for all practical purposes previously never seen (since they were visually ugly, nothing an actual typeface designer would ever be inclined to produce except as a parody). The tool led (ill-advisedly) to the "art".

This practice fortunately disappeared fairly soon.

• Today we have software whose original intent is to reconstruct a faithful image of a scene whose contrast range is greater than the dynamic range of the camera used to capture the scene, or to construct an image that will give the visual impression of that high-contrast scene. But this software is widely used to create a genre of images marked by unrealistically high saturation and other unrealistic properties. This software did not emerge out of a desire by artists to do that. The wide following of the genre emerged out of the existence of the software.


Best regards,

Doug

Maybe you are actually proving my point: the people doing typefaces or HDR for the sake of it are not really artists.