I've been a photographer for a long time. Back before digital cameras were taken seriously. Back when the only way to take control of your photography was to develop your own film and print your own pictures. I've taken quite a few shots that have hung in my house, in local coffee shops, and even the occasional group exhibit. I've even been paid money for a print once or twice.
Along the way, I developed quite a camera fetish. I've owned three Nikons (digital and chemical), a Leica, a Mamiya twin lens reflex and a great old Zeiss Ikona. It's hard to avoid becoming gearhead, even if you know better. There's always the shot you missed due to poor auto-exposure or slow auto-focus. The image you can't print large because it was shot on 35mm ISO 800 film. Blaming the gear is tempting. Even when you know it isn't really the problem. It's you. After all, Bresson shot without auto-exposure, auto-focus or even a light meter for much of his career. The lenses and film available for $500 in 2001 were of a quality far surpassing anything Ansel Adams packed into the field.
Clearly, better equipment does not equal better photos. So why are Adams, Capra, Bresson, etc. so great? Many reasons, most outside the scope of this post. But in part, it's due to how relentlessly they pursued their art. The all possessed an amazing aesthetic and an even greater mastery of technique. Adams in particular wrote three books about black and white photography (The Negative, The Camera, and The Print) that were groundbreaking when published (in the 1950s) and still taught me much of what I learned about the techniques of photography 40 years later. Learning how to apply a fraction of the technique the masters developed was daunting. I poured over Adams' books to learn how to dodge and burn for local exposure control, how push and pull film to control contrast and how to use the zone system to control overall exposure. I studied every black and white photographer whose exhibit I could get to. I examined negatives to see how they were exposed, peered at prints to observe how they were made, and always asked myself why they made the choices they did. How did they use their craft to tell one story with an image and not another? Why did they decide that a particular story was even worth telling?
After four years of obsession (I probably spend 15 - 20 hours a week on this hobby), I was a pretty competent black and white photographer. I knew how to use a 35mm and medium format camera. I could shoot in almost any outdoor, natural light condition. I could envision the image I wanted before I took the photograph. I knew what manipulations I would need to make with the camera, negative and print to produce that image. But I still knew nothing about large format photography. Nor had I ever taken a worthwhile color photo. And I had no idea how to use a flash or set up studio lighting. Mastering those techniques would have taken many more years.
Why Does Learning Photography Take So Long?
The main culprit has always been time. Back in the world of film, the feedback loop was incredibly long. A roll of film shot over a weekend might linger for a week or two until you had the time to laboriously develop it by hand. Perhaps another week until you get into a darkroom. Where, in four hours, you might make 10-20 prints from 3-4 negatives. Rinse for two hours, dry, and consider what you've done. The math was brutal - perhaps 2-3 good prints and 5-10 instructive prints from a group of photos you barely remember taking a month ago. Of the 36 photos on the roll, you probably only see 4 or 5 at full size. The rest were viewed as 1.3 inch contact prints and rejected. I still worry that the best photo I've ever taken was never printed because it didn't look interesting on a contact sheet.
Digital cameras and Adobe Lightroom changed everything. For a fraction the effort, you can see the results of every photo you take. Almost instantly. Developing images and making prints became a problem best solved in software. Not with chemicals, development tanks, enlargers, or any other type of hardware.
Almost Everything Done With Camera Hardware Will Soon Be Done Better with SoftwareAt this point, most serious photographers will rightly object to this contention. Serious camera gear, like digital SLRs with full frame sensors:
- Provides much better low light noise control.
- Permits greater control of depth of field.
- Enables a much better user experience with fast performance and intuitive access to important settings.
- Allows much larger-sized prints.
- Supports interchangeable lenses, permitting both telephoto and wide-angle photos.
These five areas represent the final stand of high-end camera hardware. Don't expect them to last long. Lightroom 3 does amazing work cleaning up noisy shots... in software. Depth of field is more powerfully manipulated in Photoshop than via the aperture setting on your camera. The fast performance of dSLRs is no longer unique - my iPhone turns on just as fast. And a carefully considered software interface ought to be much faster and more intuitive than the panoply of dials, knobs, buttons and menus that festoon modern cameras. What's an easier way to change focus - twisting a dial while peering through a viewfinder, or just touching your finger on the item you want to be in focus?
The latter two advantages are sustainable. There's no way to truly manipulate magnification and viewing angle other than swapping out your lens. And bigger sensors on expensive cameras will take images that look great when enlarged to poster size. Just try
that with you iPhone 4. But are either of those really important to most people? For the majority of photographs that are taken, you can zoom simply walking closer to your subject. And with Flicker and Facebook, laptops and iPads, very few people print any photos these days. Let alone poster-sized images.
Photos Like Ansel Adams? There's an App for That.Depth of field, resolution, sharpness, noise, ease of use, speed - these are things that sell high end cameras today. But they are just means to a particular end - taking a great photograph. And very indirect means to that end. Once you've mastered the controls a camera provides over these factors, you're still a long way away from knowing how to produce a nice photo. Or you were. These days, you're just an app away.
The following photograph shows an original image taken on an iPhone 3gs, and the result of loading that image and clicking one button in an iOS app called
Plastic Bullet.
The difference is amazing. Plastic Bullet adjusted contrast, saturation, color balance and brightness. It manipulated levels just like I would in Lightroom. It burned in the edges of the photograph while leaving the center untouched. It made subtle and localized manipulations of sharpness and softness. And it combined them all together to produce the image you're seeing. Now, everything you see here could be done in Lightroom or Photoshop. And it's true that the images produced by Plastic Bullet are a bit of a pastiche - they slavishly and sometimes comically attempt to reproduce the look and feel of well-known and sometimes clichéd photo aesthetics. But that's also what's so amazing. Plastic Bullet will generate hundreds of variations on a single image - exploring almost every meaningful permutation of the various settings found in professional desktop software. And it will do it in seconds. On your iPhone. And let you post it to Facebook to boot.
That's what people want. Better-looking photos, fast. Hardware gives you better noise control, sharper pictures and more megapixels. And skilled photographers can use that to make great images. But software can directly represent the rules and heuristics developed by Ansel Adams over a career and apply those rules to any photo. Taken by anybody, from a fine arts major to your Aunt Donna. Snap a photo. View it. Iterate 10 times through various combinations of settings. Try the Thomas Struth filter. Add a William Eggleston layer. It will be easy.
Pocket-Sized Snapshot Cameras Will Be the First To GoSmart phones already sport high quality fixed lenses, a touch screen interface, and the ability to chose from dozens of apps like Plastic Bullet. Compare that to one of Canon's Powershot series. Once the carrier subsidy is factored in, an iPhone even boasts a competitive initial price. All the compact has going for it is a cheap zoom lens - something that smartphones are in the
early stages of
adding.
But it won't stop with the low end. Cameras are basically the same - the difference between a high end Nikon and Canon are infinitesimal. But the difference between
Hipstamatic and Plastic Bullet are tremendous. And these are just single developer, "indie" apps running on the very first generation of smartphone hardware. Soon, we'll be choosing between Nikon and Canon software platforms, each of which take different approaches to processing and improving your snapshots. This sort of transformation from hardware-based to software-based competition is fraught with danger for the incumbents. Most corporations blow it - ask Motorola, Sony, or Nokia how easy it is to produce high quality consumer software. Forget about who has marginally better engineering. If you want to know who wins the next round, take a look at the camera import software produced by each of the major camera companies. Whoever makes the best program now should probably be considered the favorite for the future.
If they can stave off Apple, that is. Apple is one of a handful of companies that can build leading-edge software/hardware platforms. Between Android, RIM, iOS and Microsoft, it's hard to imagine how Nikon or Canon hang on to the high-volume, low-price digicam market. And the threat might not end there. I can easily imagine a future iPad with a lens mount. Or better yet - and far more likely - a dumb camera and sensor that plugs into an iPhone to provide the processing and camera controls via a multitude of apps. Seem far fetched? The
Ricoh GXR is most of the way there already. Just replace the Ricoh back with an iPhone mount and you're almost done. And with
small, micro 4/3rds cameras challenging dSLRs for the enthusiast market, will the high end be far behind?
After all, it's not the quality of the gear that matters. It's the quality of a true artist's eye. As reproduced by software.
For the curious, following is a gallery of photos taken in Banff and Jasper National Parks while researching this post. All photos were shot on a an iPhone 3gs and processed entirely in Plastic Bullet, Camera Bag or both. Some images were resized in Photoshop, but no other manipulation was performed in that software.
