What is to become of photography?

Adam, I agree with you where art photography is concerned. But if you are a pro shooting

for money, and you can set a scene in motion and shoot 10,000 frames at 60 frames per

second, to get the perfect moment then you are going to do it. It's all about the money.

And, after the first pro does it, then commercial clients are going to demand 10,000 high

res photos from every shoot, because that's the way it works in a professional photo

environment. And when that happens, pros won't be able to work with their 1DS Mk. III.

<p>In general, RED may not be a threat now because of size and weight. But in a few

years, it will be (because that's the way technology advances) in a package no larger than

a pro digital camera now.

<p>As I said, this probably won't matter to an art photographer shooting landscapes or

nudes; but it will forever change what new cameras are available.

There are some people who own Canon 1DS Mk III or whatever it is, and don't know a single thing about working the camera or taking a picture so have to ask an amateur.

Yeah, a lot of amateurs seem to have a lot of money to spend. I don't use the 1DS Mk II or III

professionally, although I could afford them, because I don't want to carry a three pound

camera with a two pound lens around my neck all day, every day. I see other PJ's with two

around their necks all the time and can't imagine how they do it.

The price of the RED camera technology is going to come down to the 1Ds MArk 3 /Nikon D3 level. Give it a couple of years. The size of the camera is going to come down to.

 

I know a couple of really big time stock and assignment photographers who are already on the list for a RED set up. They'll use it to save time shooting and get more marketable choices from the shoot. It will also help them do more stock and assignment motion work.

 

It will definitely change our lighting tool choices ; maybe make HMI prices come down (one can dream!).

 

People who figure out how to leverage the technology will definitely make it more than pay for itself.

 

The RED or other 4K (extremely high definition) vigital (video + digital = vigital , you read it here first ) cameras aren't the future of photography, just one more branching path into the future.

Ellis, it's not "vigital"....it's "digeo" :)

While I was being sarcastic, I stand by my comments.

 

There IS a "spray and pray" mentality. I was at a military reenactment of the Battle of Germantown. I shot two rolls of film, expecting to get maybe 6 decent shots. I met a photographer there who proudly pointed out that he shot 1500 photographs. That's spraying and praying. There were maybe 10 parts of the reenactment that warrented a photograph. At the end of the day, all he would have to do is choose one from every 150 shots. Padding shots to this extent is banking on luck, not skill.

 

If you are using the video camera to shoot videos, then skill with dictate the results.

 

However, using a video camera to shoot stills is not photographic skill. If this is how you shoot your stills, then LUCK will dictate your results. How much thought are you putting into each of those 10-15 frames per second?

 

It was pointed out that Weston (I highly recommend ?The Eloquent Nude? recently released and being shipped from FilmBaby, btw) would spend an hour taking one photograph. He got his photograph too. Had he been shooting 10-15fps (average 12.5fps) he would have 45000 images to sort through from that one hour to find that one ?moment in time.? Of course, we might have ended up with more photographs of Charis, which wouldn?t be bad either.

 

The comment about dinner and art was sarcasm as well. I?ll explain: It?s the same as, ?Reducing your expectations to the point where they are already met, and calling that satisfaction.?

 

There always has been safety in numbers...

You seem to have missed the point. This didn't start with digital, it started with roll film. Weston did one shot for one shot, but Avedon would do ten rolls of 120 for one shot. Araki did 6000 shots on film for a 100-shoot campaign, all in one weekend. It's not digital, it's what has happened since roll film arrived. The magnitude may be different with digital, although many people used 35mm with winders to get similar results, but it's not like this is something that started with digital. What happens in these arguments is that someone is opposed to digital and then tries to argue around things that started long before digital.

 

Maybe more relevant than a film vs digital red herring is the role that video has come to play in modern media. TV started it of course, but print is losing out to online in many, many ways. When this started happening, bandwidth and technology weren't quite there, but the combination of broadband and flash players changed everything permanently. The photos I sell used to be the top thing on the websites they were on, but on some sites, they are now competing with embedded videos. I used to cover an event and there would be one video camera, usually from ESPN, and now there are typically three or four. Even a second-rate video will be more interesting on a web site than a first-rate photo, and that's something that photographers, at least in the news/event/advertising world have to live with.

 

Also, I now compete with vidcaps, it's not that unusual for web images. It's not that hard to go through the material, as some have suggested - a video is easier to look at than five hundred photos, and the exact spot can be located by some fast forward/reverse jogging.

Very interesting ideas, I guess you guys have a point, art will still be art. I just felt that it would make action photos seem less special. Where photographers of the past had to capture just the right moment, here, you are almost sure to get it.

 

I guess it won't really affect the art of photography other than in the arena of action photography - I can't imagine professionals with 'normal' dslrs coming out of an F1 car race with nearly as great photos as another professional with the RED would have.

 

The categories that will most likely remain unnaffected are probably..everything else. Landscapes, portraiture, etc still would require an artistic eye.

Jeff, I think everybody here understands what you're saying and may sympathize. Weston (with Avedon) is my #1.

 

That doesn't mean the opening shot of Lawrence of Arabia, a very long moment in 70mm film, isn't one hell of a photograph.

 

It's thousands of frames, it changes over its moment, but it's incredibly strong and compares well with Weston. In fact, Weston shot many SEQUENCES in his by-necessity slow way: I'm not so sure that's inherently different than careful cinematography. I'm also not sure he'd have avoided film-making, given the chance.

The Lawrence of Arabia example is great. Shooting 60fps from a poor angle isn't going to give you a great picture. The photographer/videographer still has to be in the right spot and compose the shot well. Cinematography is just as much an artform as photography is.

Jeff Spirer, my comment above was directed to Jeff Bishop, but I have a question for you...

 

Are you considering switching to video, or are you already doing some? Seems to me that someone with your evident interests (folks, check Jeff's webpages to see why I'm asking) might be able to create an interesting middle path or combo, exploring something like that Lawrence of Arabia moment for webpages...I'd sure like to see a little motion in your opening bloody hands, for example...

These are incremental changes anyway if we seriously take off from here and crystal ball.

 

I still await a viable way to shoot stereoscopic images and display them on a big LCD projection screen. I know, it may indeed be out there now in the lab. For instance James Cameron is supposed to be doing it in a large way with some new film or digital cinema releases.

 

Anything that relies on a lot of data storage,pixels that can be converted to numbers I mean, seems possible as memory cost and processing costs go down before one's eyes. Some geniuses like Mr. Dykstra,the 2001`special effects whiz, once dismissed stereoscopy as unacceptable because of viewer discomfort(unnatural disassociation of accommodation function and convergence of viewer eyeballs) and predicted the future of movies is in tripling the 24fps frame rate. Persistence of vision then gets overwhelmed and one looks at a more stunning presentation.

Again,it comes down to how much data can be stored. And gets back to the endless capability of digital storage. What was once a gimmick becomes a practical,got to have approach. As home screens increase,the cinema will seek something ever new. And it will inevitably filter down to the pro and the wedding market someday.

 

I guess my personal quarrel with the use of higher tech is that I don't want to see that guy on PBS Nightly Business Report in super high definition. Nor that Fox loudmouth (:-)you know. Nor back episodes of some domestic comedy series.

 

Content worth watching and stopping to digest will always involve the act of imagination and creation and selection. And presentation then becomes an adjunct to the art part. (Movies like L of Arabia stick with one. Same for Dr Zhivago. Movies like 12 Angry Men do too,even without the blueplate effects)

That sounds like the digital equivalent of IMAX, which is a truly stunning way of presenting a motion picture. It may be $17k now, but that's far less than the first color video tape recorders were. The price of equivalent machines will come down.

 

And it will result in more pictures ofthe kids at Christmas, birthday parties, pets, vacations, etc., just as other advances in photographic equipment have done. Auto-focus and auto-exposure hardly ended photography, but rather made it more available to more people. It has always been a rather egalatarian art form, and will only get more so.

New gadgets for making pictures have no particular consequences for photography. Photography is what it is, a particular technology among many technologies, for making (usually) realistic looking pictures. To put it dumb-simple if you change photography it's not photography any more.

 

Other ways of making realistic looking pictures include realist painting, videography (motion or still-frame), broadcast television, graphite rubbings, and silicone rubber casts. None of these are a version, an advance, or an evolution of photography.

 

I suppose, as a general principle, one could say photography is the only way to get photographs. The same applies to other media. To get marble sculpture one needs to sculpt marble. Fibre-glass won't do even if appearances can be deceiving from only a short distance away.

Maris, I wonder if you consider silver film images of gravestones, historic sites, or famous personages "photography?"

 

After all, they began 3-dimensionally...marble, flesh, rotten wood...

The history of photography is the history of technological change for producing imagery and the images that are produced. New tools have changed photography since its first appearance. This isn't going to stop, and photography isn't going to be some walking coffin of things that once were.

 

To answer the question John directed at me, I don't know yet if I will go into video. Certainly if I want to keep getting paid I will have to start making changes in equipment, I already have.

<p>Jeez, why the hell is everyone talking about video this, video that?</p>

 

<p>I'm all for technology, and I think video will become more important, but I also think

that technology will allows us to clearly differentiate when we want video, and when we

want still image.</p>

 

<p>I suppose many wedding and sports' assignments will demand more video, or even

exclusively video when technology allows it.</p>

 

<p>However, it is quite pointless (and a waste of time) to watch a video of moon Io

passing in front of Jupiter. For some applications, still photography is a much more

elegant and time-saving solution than moving image.</p>

Eugene, I see your point. They are two different media, and take a different approach,but there is,in the works as Sellarole brought to our attention, an interesting convergence. Fascinating. Imagine getting one of these suckers and having it with you and the family on a cruise through Patagonia strait of Magellan or down the Danube. You take the hard drive to a film guy like maybe someone in the ranks here, and he or she edits it down to a nifty half hour show and tell for the family back home. And you and the editor select a bunch of choice frames to show on the HDTV screen that substitutes for a mural size wall hanging...

Having lugged a Betacam, this red sucker doesn't sound all that much of a chore. And the price,for those that can buy vacation homes and take cruises is going to be attractive. Or,one could rent them for the trip.

 

Now someone will be quick to recall that amateurs will still make boring movies just as they make boring "drugstore" shots now. But I am not so sure that this will always be so. For documentation vs fine art maybe this will really change things in a big way.

 

If it gets more egalitarian- as CJ worded it,-then we have to think up something to set our product apart. Fortunately,most people will not develop the passion that drives many. And it will still be "work."

Today is my day for bons mots:

 

Le plus ça change, plus c'est le meme chose.

<p><i>Imagine getting one of these suckers and having it with you and the family on a

cruise through Patagonia strait of Magellan or down the Danube.</i></p>

 

<p>Video and film have been with us for ages. But for some reason I watch film mostly for

entertainment, and generally spend more time looking at photographs. Of course, other

people spend much more time in front of TV -- I'm not very representative of the many.</

p>

 

<p>In art market, video has been present since the 60s. Turner prize nominee <a

href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacita_Dean">Tacita Dean</a> is a great example of

an artist who works with both photography and film. But even today most people involved

in art think

of moving image as a "fragile" medium that is difficult to exhibit because it requires

special rooms, constant attention from the viewer, and, not-in-the-least, it does not

produce a high-value <i>collectable objects</i> such as prints.</p>

<i>

However, it is quite pointless (and a waste of time) to watch a video of moon Io passing in front of Jupiter. For some applications, still photography is a much more elegant and time-saving solution than moving image.</i><p>

Wow, I completely disagree. I've seen some NASA videos (animations of still frames) of Jupiter's moons orbiting the planet and casting shadows on Jupiter. I thought it was beautiful especially because of the cloud patterns swirling about on Jupiter.

<p>I can't find the video but here's a still of Io and it's shadow on Jupiter.

<p>

http://www.floridastars.org/icons/ioshadowc_hst.600.jpg

<p>

Cinematography is an artform just like photography. If you don't like it that's fine but I find some things more enjoyable as a video. Do you enjoy watching movies and television or just looking at still photos? I have a great deal of respect for the artists who create them.

Sorry Eugene, I didn't see your next post about watching film mostly for entertainment. I suggest finding the list of movies that won Oscars for cinematography. Some of them have incredible compositions, the use of focus pulling (changing focus with shallow depth of field) from one character to another can be chilling at times.

 

One of my favorite movies is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The way Leone has close up shots of eyes is amazing. The way he keeps the angle of view narrow so you don't know who is waiting to shoot just out of view off the side of the screen. I know people who love the movie and never notice any of that. I guess as a photographer I've picked up on it.

"I can't imagine professionals with 'normal' dslrs coming out of an F1 car race with nearly as great photos as another professional with the RED would have."

 

Maybe not as many but they are still just as likely to have the great shots if they are great photographers using either tool.

<p><i>'ve seen some NASA videos (animations of still frames) of Jupiter's moons orbiting

the planet and casting shadows on Jupiter.</i></p>

 

<p>That was not my point. Animation is not real-time video -- in the example you

mentioned the animation was composed of a number of still photographs. In real time, the

process would take days... nobody would watch that.</p>

 

<p>The reason I brought up the Jupiter + moon example was that everybody gets the

idea that a moon rotates around Jupiter -- there are no cinematic surprises to be

uncovered -- no plot. Nobody expects the moon to plunge all of a sudden into Jupiter --

and it won't. So all in all such a video (even in a fast motion) would still be quite boring.</

p>

<p><i>I find some things more enjoyable as a video</i></p>

 

<p>That's exactly right. Some things are more enjoyable as a video, some things are more

enjoyable as stills. The prognoses of the death of still photography are very premature.</p>