Random iris of the day:

And why? Oh, c'mon. Three guesses and the first two don't count unless they have the word snow in them somewhere.

Yeah, more snow tonight. Nothing like what Atlantic Canada's supposed to get, but still. To quote the great M. Python, bloody weather.

----------

And now, digital. I have a digital question... or, rather, a question about digital. You audiophiles out there will agree, I'm sure, that digital compression more or less flattens music, right? I'm a bad one to ask since even bad recordings can be supplemented in my brain by my imagination (yeah, I can hallucinate good music. It's a talent), but I will agree that I love old vacuum-tube speakers and things like that. Not that I own them, really, but I do have an old radio of my grandmother's that sounds twice as rich as anything that you'll find now. Add that to the tinniness of modern digital recording and I can understand that someone who loves his or her old vinyl on a turntable just cringes at the thought of MP3s played on a smartphone.

But what about digital photography? Is today's pixellated, manipulated photography a loss from the days when you had to carefully frame your shots and then go through the worries of development before you could see what you got? I do mean worries, by the way, even if you weren't the one in the dark room. A friend of mine took a big trip to South America towards what I guess we'd have to call the end of the film age and came back with several rolls of film that the photo developer at the store she took them to didn't read properly. All of her slide film was developed as negatives instead. So much for those pictures. If she'd had a digital camera she'd have known exactly what photos she had and would have been able to print out whatever she wanted herself, but would the pictures (assuming that they'd been developed the right way, of course) have been of better quality with film? Would they have been richer like analogue recordings are?

Are we losing quality in our photography in return for quantity of photographs?

Do we really need so many duckface selfies in the world?





I don't have an answer for this, by the way. I mean, I love photography. I have no illusions that I'm any kind of photographer, but I have fun with my photographs. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with having fun with photographs. There's also no question that events are being captured now that never would have been seen by so many people back in the days of film and specialists. When almost everyone has a camera on them at all times in public (hey, old people like me. Remember how stupid we thought it sounded when we heard that the Japanese were putting cameras on their cell phones? Yeah. Ha ha ha), it stands to reason that we see and learn things that we never would have imagined back when news had to be shot by professionals.

But what about the artists out there? The real photographers. Have they lost something in not having to take their time? In being able to take hundreds of shots whenever they want to? In having the temptation of quick and easy photomanipulation?

Looked at another way, have modern painters lost something by not having to mix their own pigments?

I dunno. I tend to think that it's different, not worse. And not better, for that matter. Just different.



Aaand I really need to get back to work. Feel free to comment or drop me an e-mail if you have thoughts of your own. Personally, this is the most thinking I've done on this blog in weeks, and my fingers are getting tired.