Simon's Blog

This morning over my breakfast cereals I read an interesting piece about the decline in innovation in new cameras.  In short the article argued that camera manufacturers weren’t giving the consumer reasons to replace their equipment on a regular basis.   This was seen as ‘The Death of Digital Photography’.  Now I understand that catchy titles are need to attract views to a web page – it worked for me – but the whole thrust of the article I felt somewhat missed the point of photography.

Photography isn’t about the camera gear, the number of pixels or grain size.   Photography is about the photograph and nothing more.  Yes to create certain images you do need certain kit but in the end no amount of kit is going to make a great photograph – after all any camera, whether digital or film/plate/paper/metal is only a method of capturing the reflected light off of an object.   Technology can make things easier but in the end the photographic image, as with all other images, is created in the human brain where we apply our own tastes and prejudice and no amount of technology is going to get away from that.

All of these images have been made with a different variety of cameras and are either captured on film or digitally.   Whether  you consider that they are  an interesting images is formed within your brain.  This is the basis of all images made by man going back many millennia.  I suspect this has always been the curse of photography as most people can only judge whether a photographer is ‘serious’ or not by the amount of kit he can display at the time of capturing the image as we rarely get to see the finished photograph.  It is a pointless exercise but we’ve all done it from time to time.

One final point. The passage of time can to an interest you might have in an image or series of images  as these two images prove – they were both taken at roughly the same spot but 20 plus years apart.