Adios Cameras?

[cgw]

Variation on a recurrent recent theme:

Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker

 

[limr]

"But it seems clear that in a couple of years, with an iPhone 6S in our pockets, it will be nearly impossible to justify taking a dedicated camera on trips like the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage."

Sorry but... :roll:

A gearhead who wrote at length about cameras and barely anything about pictures, who very typically believes that everyone else will think and behave as he will.

 

[robbins.photo]

Variation on a recurrent recent theme:

Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker

Thanks CGW - got my watch reset. Regular as clockwork really.

 

[JerryLove]

I'm not having much luck attaching the 300mm lens to my iPhone. Maybe I need to wait for the 6.

That said: Phones are certainly eating into the low end market. Their quality is often comparable and the convenience (and processing power) generally higher.

 

[Derrel]

Variation on a recurrent recent theme:

Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker

Yeah..I skimmed through it. His arc is pretty representative...lust for the Leica M3, buying a Hassy 500C, getting his first d-slr with the HUGE influx of digital converts that jumped into d-slr dom with the Canon Rebel and the Nikon D70, the first sub-$1,000 d-slrs offered for sale by CaNikon...a fairly typical photo arc...

Stories like his always remind me about the "entirely paper-less office of the future" that we saw sooooo often in the mid-1990's.

Cough,cough.

 

[robbins.photo]

Variation on a recurrent recent theme:

Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker

Yeah..I skimmed through it. His arc is pretty representative...lost for the Leica M3, buying a Hassy 500C, getting his first d-slr with the HUGE influx that jumped into d-slr dom with the Canon Rebel and the Nikon D70, the first sub-$1,000 d-slrs was offered for sale by CaNikon...a fairly typical photo arc...

Stories like his always remind me about the "entirely paper-less office of the future" that we saw sooooo often in the mid-1990's.

Cough,cough.

Funny thing, at my office we actually have more crap we have to file now that we've gone "paperless" than we ever did before. Lol. Honestly I didn't even bother reading the linked article, I'm pretty much done giving the doom and gloomer crowd free hits and it's not like it will be anything new, same warmed over silliness as before.

 

[limr]

Variation on a recurrent recent theme:

Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker

Yeah..I skimmed through it. His arc is pretty representative...lost for the Leica M3, buying a Hassy 500C, getting his first d-slr with the HUGE influx that jumped into d-slr dom with the Canon Rebel and the Nikon D70, the first sub-$1,000 d-slrs was offered for sale by CaNikon...a fairly typical photo arc...

Stories like his always remind me about the "entirely paper-less office of the future" that we saw sooooo often in the mid-1990's.

Cough,cough.

Funny thing, at my office we actually have more crap we have to file now that we've gone "paperless" than we ever did before. Lol. Honestly I didn't even bother reading the linked article, I'm pretty much done giving the doom and gloomer crowd free hits and it's not like it will be anything new, same warmed over silliness as before.

You really didn't miss anything. He talks about how fantastic it was to shoot the Hasselblad 500C because of the 'thunk' of the shutter release, he lusts over the Leica M3 - a rangefinder of course - and then discusses the 'revelation' of having a mirrorless digital camera as if mirrorless was a modern invention, and he's getting a woodie over "emerging self-metrics" that will supposedly revolutionize how we view photography.

It's all about the gear, the technology, the potential (oh, the all important potential!) and the only time he ever really mentions the actual photograph was to say that he shot mostly Fuji Velvia because he liked the saturated colors.

 

[Derrel]

Yeah, Lenny...I did just skim it (I skimmed the chit out of it!)...but I did see the "Velvia-worship" bit, and it was then that I knew what kind of shooter he was...he loved the clown-like color of Velvia...me being a confirmed Kodachrome 64 Professional addict at the time of Velvia, with a penchant for dalliances with sexy boxes and bulk rolls of Ektachrome 64 and later Ektachrome 100 Professional films, I contemptuously recalled the Velvia-furor and my dismissive attitude toward it then...but I digress (often).

I find myself using the iPhone's camera a lot. My expensive, image-stabilized $400 Panasonic super-zoom P&S has conked out, and I go between a big, black Nikon d-slr and the iPhone these days...I no longer own a reliable digital P&S or bridge camera, so by default my carry camera is the iPhone 4, and while I do like it, the one thing the iPhone is weak at is telephoto imagery; the damned thing has a semi-wide lens on it, and my actual preference is TELE...

Yes, if all we want are quick snaps to INSTANTLY upload to social media, YES, the cellphone camera is a good tool for spontaneous, easy, cheap images that can be "sent" electronically wherever one has "bars". And a valid phone service provider. No disputing that. And I have made some NICE images on iPhone, both in native aspect ratio, talls and wides, but also some lovely Instagram "squares"...I have even made a few photos I am VERY proud of, using my iPhone. I did a series of Modern Urban Landscape images (my concept) using the iPhone in 2012. But for the most part, for me the cellphone camera's Achilles heel is....wait for it, wait for it...the SINGLE lens focal length.

Oh well, WTF...I made some homemade French fries for lunch today...I shot this using Instagram in-camera, you know the purist's way to Instagram... ;-)



If this ^^^ kind of stuff is what a person aspires to, then the smartphone camera is a handy tool.

 

[terri]

I love you, Derrel. This from Lenny:

....he's getting a woodie over "emerging self-metrics"...

Was that subconsciously on your mind when you swirled that glob of ketchup up there?!? :shock:

 

[robbins.photo]

Yeah, Lenny...I did just skim it (I skimmed the chit out of it!)...but I did see the "Velvia-worship" bit, and it was then that I knew what kind of shooter he was...he loved the clown-like color of Velvia...me being a confirmed Kodachrome 64 Professional addict at the time of Velvia, with a penchant for dalliances with sexy boxes and bulk rolls of Ektachrome 64 and later Ektachrome 100 Professional films, I contemptuously recalled the Velvia-furor and my dismissive attitude toward it then...but I digress (often).

I find myself using the iPhone's camera a lot. My expensive, image-stabilized $400 Panasonic super-zoom P&S has conked out, and I go between a big, black Nikon d-slr and the iPhone these days...I no longer own a reliable digital P&S or bridge camera, so by default my carry camera is the iPhone 4, and while I do like it, the one thing the iPhone is weak at is telephoto imagery; the damned thing has a semi-wide lens on it, and my actual preference is TELE...

Yes, if all we want are quick snaps to INSTANTLY upload to social media, YES, the cellphone camera is a good tool for spontaneous, easy, cheap images that can be "sent" electronically wherever one has "bars". And a valid phone service provider. No disputing that. And I have made some NICE images on iPhone, both in native aspect ratio, talls and wides, but also some lovely Instagram "squares"...I have even made a few photos I am VERY proud of, using my iPhone. I did a series of Modern Urban Landscape images (my concept) using the iPhone in 2012. But for the most part, for me the cellphone camera's Achilles heel is....wait for it, wait for it...the SINGLE lens focal length.

Oh well, WTF...I made some homemade French fries for lunch today...I shot this using Instagram in-camera, you know the purist's way to Instagram... ;-)

If this ^^^ kind of stuff is what a person aspires to, then the smartphone camera is a handy tool.

Ok, so all you need is an Iphone app that makes a loud "Thunk" sound every time you take a picture and then oversaturates the colors and bam! Nirvana!

 

[cgw]

I read it as a glib bit of fluff that vacationing editors would have otherwise cut or bounced back for revision. Funny it didn't appear in the "Photo Booth" section of the New Yorker where quality images and writing about them usually appear. His views were odd given his Japan location. Friends there who shoot anything with a lens always comment on how traditional visual culture is helping to defend "camera" photography against Instagram aesthetics. Seems to be a huge dose of irony in the quirky Sony QX cameras that reduce an iPhone and its Retina display to a viewfinder.

These days, I tend to view the technological milestones in the photography we all love just as off-ramps to personal satisfaction.

 

[amolitor]

The thing to remember is that much of what appears in the New Yorker is the same article over and over. The content of that article is that the author is extremely erudite and interesting. All the apparent content, cameras, the movie we're reviewing, whatever, is just a vehicle to carry the important information: I am very smart and interesting and I know a ton of stuff

This bit is not only one of those, but lazy as hell. I'm really surprised by it. The lazy, irrelevant, and wrong-headed citation of Sontag at the end clinches it. Sontag wrote a bunch of essays of that stripe, that were mostly about how smart Sontag was, secondarily about how awesome New York is, but at a sort of subliminal level, tucked into the nooks and crannies, were some pretty insightful remarks about photography as it existed in 1975 or so (and for the 100 years preceding and about the next 30 years). There's some pretty interesting stuff to be said about Now starting from Sontag, but this guy dropped the ball here.

Read this piece instead: The Visual Village

 

[amolitor]

He DOES, I gotta say, have an interesting idea at the end there.

There is this idea that a picture plus metadata is more interesting than just a picture. My instinct is that he's wrong, and that this is just fanboy golly-gee I can tag a picture with a bunch of stuff like map co-ordinates, radiation levels, blah blah blah. There might be something there, but I don't think it's as cool as he thinks it is. Definitely worth thinking about, though.

We already know perfectly well that a picture plus a title is quite a different thing from just a picture. A picture plus an artist's statement is yet a different thing. A picture plus a feature article is a fourth thing. A picture plus metadata is definitely another thing, and a new thing at that. The question is really how interesting that thing is, and I don't have the answer.

This is the kind of data-**** that Wired would print, though.

 

[cgw]

The thing to remember is that much of what appears in the New Yorker is the same article over and over. The content of that article is that the author is extremely erudite and interesting. All the apparent content, cameras, the movie we're reviewing, whatever, is just a vehicle to carry the important information: I am very smart and interesting and I know a ton of stuff

This bit is not only one of those, but lazy as hell. I'm really surprised by it. The lazy, irrelevant, and wrong-headed citation of Sontag at the end clinches it. Sontag wrote a bunch of essays of that stripe, that were mostly about how smart Sontag was, secondarily about how awesome New York is, but at a sort of subliminal level, tucked into the nooks and crannies, were some pretty insightful remarks about photography as it existed in 1975 or so (and for the 100 years preceding and about the next 30 years). There's some pretty interesting stuff to be said about Now starting from Sontag, but this guy dropped the ball here.

Read this piece instead: The Visual Village

But he writes for the New Yorker and you don't. Enjoy the chew toy.


"The thing to remember is that much of what appears in the New Yorker is the same article over and over."

That one pegged the Laff-o-Meter.

 

[manaheim]

That "article" was... indulgent.