Then and Now

The other day, while doing some pho­to­graphic housekeeping–moving files around, mak­ing sure things were backed up, orga­nized, etc.–I came across a folder I’d titled “Desk­top Pix.” Peri­od­i­cally, when I have a pho­to­graph that strikes me par­tic­u­larly from a shoot, I set it aside, resize it for my desk­top, and use it on my com­puter until it gets replaced by some­thing new that I like bet­ter. Every once in awhile I go back to these fold­ers and purge some images, and some­times go back to ones I liked a long time ago. All of the images in this post are from that folder. They span the course of my dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy his­tory, from the begin­ning with a Nikon D70 to the cur­rent day with a Canon 5D (I don’t think there are any with the 1DmkIII, but I could be wrong–I didn’t check). There are a cou­ple of points I want to make here, I promise. Stay with me.

Before I get started, though, I’m going to go ahead and tell you that I’m not telling which pho­tos were taken with what cam­eras, both because I don’t know for all of them (remem­ber, I didn’t look), and because part of the point is that it doesn’t really matter.

2012 is going to be a big year for pho­tog­ra­phy. in 2011, there was a major earth­quake in Japan that trig­gered a tsunami, which caused a par­tial core melt­down at a nuclear pow­er­plant. As if that wasn’t hell­ish enough for the Japan­ese peo­ple and the Japan­ese cam­era mak­ers, there was then mas­sive flood­ing in Thai­land, where many of our pho­to­graphic bits are assem­bled. It’s a mir­a­cle Sony and Nikon have ANYTHING avail­able, yet they do. Incred­i­ble things.

Because of all the 2011 calamity, most of the things that were sup­posed to be announced in late 2011 got pushed to 2012, and now they’re all com­ing in a flurry: the Canon 1Dx, Nikon D800, the Fuji­film X-pro 1, the Olym­pus E-M5 OM-D, just to name a small frac­tion of the very excit­ing cam­era announce­ments. This vir­tual flood of prod­ucts and new spec­i­fi­ca­tions and dig­i­tal enve­lope push­ing have caused a lot of peo­ple to geek out. Like, really geek out. Peo­ple are com­par­ing all the specs of cam­eras that no one is actu­ally using yet, they are argu­ing over which vapor­ware is bet­ter, they are simul­ta­ne­ously damn­ing and prais­ing 36mp sen­sors and retro-styling.

It’s easy to get pulled under that tsunami of infor­ma­tion, to spend hours por­ing over megapix­els, and ISOs, and bayer arrays, and GUI and UI and Louie. Pho­tog­ra­phy is part tech­nol­ogy, part artistry, and we all like to have new, fun stuff. I’ve even found myself blog­ging sev­eral times about the gear, and I’m doing it here, though in more of an anti– sort of way. And really, this blog post (and maybe a cou­ple of oth­ers) are really just to stall and buy some time while I fin­ish shoot­ing a cou­ple of rolls of film so that I can blog about that. Yeah, you read that right–I’m going to blog about film. Because my response to all of this new prod­uct noise has been to go out and shoot Tri-X with a Nikon FM2 and a Nikkor 35mm f/2.8 lens. Noth­ing more, not even a cam­era bag.

Don’t take that state­ment to mean more than it is. I’m not say­ing film is bet­ter than dig­i­tal, or new cam­eras aren’t excit­ing, or that I’m bet­ter than some­one else because I can go turn my back on it all and go shoot. I’m still shoot­ing dig­i­tal, too. But going through my Desk­top Pix folder, and look­ing at these images anew, I am NOT struck by thoughts like, “oh man, I can tell THIS one was shot with a Nikon D70 at ISO400 at 18mm. No, I am struck by the mem­o­ries, and by the themes, and by the sur­pris­ing con­sis­tency of my pho­to­graphic vision. It shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing, of course–these are MY pho­tos, com­posed by ME, selected and processed by ME. I used the cam­eras, but they didn’t make the deci­sions, didn’t guide my hand or my eye. And that’s the point, of course–that is the sig­nal in all the mar­ket­ing noise.

So, what am I going to do this year? I’m going to buy one of these new cam­eras, of course! But, only because it poten­tially allows me to have sim­i­lar capa­bil­ity that I’m used to, in a more com­pact and ulti­mately less expen­sive sys­tem. I’m going to eval­u­ate the X-pro 1 as soon as I can get my hands on it (yes, I’ve pre­ordered it, and yes I’ll blog about it), and if it lives up to my expec­ta­tions, there’s a very real pos­si­bil­ity I’m going to jet­ti­son most, if not all, of my Canon gear. And then I’ll take some of that money, set it aside, and start plan­ning my trip to Ice­land in earnest.

And, I’ll try not to worry about which camera(s) I’m going to bring with me, because in the end, it doesn’t really matter.