Is the photography industry analogous to the music industry?

[stavrosk]

film = real instruments
digital = keyboards

You can create images (sounds) with digital photography (keyboards) but it will never be real music (film photography).

 

[tomalophicon]

I think you're living too much in the mainstream EricO

 

[Steve Smith]

digital = keyboards.

I hope you're limiting that to electronic keyboard instruments and excluding Hammond organs!


Steve.

 

[Steve Smith]

Possibly a better analogy would be the storage and viewing/listening methods of film and digital when applied to music.

I think a JPG file is similar to an MP3 file. i.e. Compressed to make it fit in a smaller file space and susequently loses some of its definition/quality.


Steve.

 

[stavrosk]

I hope you're limiting that to electronic keyboard

Yes of course. I did not remember that keyboard is a real instrument as well.

 

[Ole]

There have always been bad musicians, and (the last century and a half, at least) bad photographers.

What's changed is that you get exposed to so much more of it, with youtube, Flickr, local radio, podcasts, and the modern equivalent of unending slide shows of aunt Edna on holiday.

The real breakthrough for bad musicians getting a world-wide audience came in the 80's - AKA the "Bad Hair Decade" - when MTV exposed "musicians" whose talent was in exposure and not music.

So what? There are still musicians who not only play their instruments, but also read music, write music, and have real talent and originality. Not all of them play classical music either. Although these guys do that, too.

Like many others, I consider the 80's to be the absolute bottom of the barrel where music is concerned. In the entire decade I think I bought less than five albums, and two of them were 70's Heavy Metal, two were Baroque..

 

[stavrosk]

I don't think the debate is about the artist but about the medium. A bad photographer will create bad photographs using either film or digital and vise versa and the same goes for a good musician who will create good music using either electronic keyboard or real instruments.
What we are saying, at least what I am saying, is that a good musician will create even better music with real instruments, or maybe that a "real" music piece should be created with real instruments.

However one needn't be an absolute purist. I am sure that there are music pieces that must be created digitally and the same goes for photography. I am sure that digital has its place.

The real issue is personal. If one wants to create images using digital technology or film. Some might say I want to immediately see what I get to make me better and others might say I want to have film which is scarce and makes me think more before I shoot.

 

[benjiboy]

The similarity IMO is that these days everyone and his brother expects to excel in both disciplines without actually doing any work, study or having any formal training, all they know is that they want to be rich and famous ( watch American Idol or The X Factor ) or they buy an entry level DSLR and as soon as they can take recognizable pictures of people flowers and artefacts see it as an opportunity to make money and call themselves photographers and take on commercial work that in most cases is beyond their ability and knowledge and make an unholy mess of it.

 

[Bill Burk]

I've got a high-school buddy whose been a lifetime musician, and he has a theory applied to musicians that I think could be applied to photographers as well.

He describes a continuum, (artistscontinuum) like a timeline, that goes from beginner to amazing. Every musician falls somewhere on the continuum, and it is lifetime dedication to learning and improvement that takes you from one end to the other.

Some may start out great and get better, some may work hard their whole life and make steady progress yet still not become amazing, others may start and stay relatively in the middle somewhere.

 

[komla]

Maybe the music is bad and photographers is even worse these days, at least the horses are higher

 

[vpwphoto]

@CGW
The NPR program on remote controlled avionics was credible, and I was simply offering another example of how the digital infrastructure is reaching for the careers of folks that we might not have found threatened (pilots).

Your constant somewhat personal attacks and smarty pants comebacks are tiresome and too predictable.

 

[CGW]

@CGW
The NPR program on remote controlled avionics was credible, and I was simply offering another example of how the digital infrastructure is reaching for the careers of folks that we might not have found threatened (pilots).

Your constant somewhat personal attacks and smarty pants comebacks are tiresome and too predictable.

<<gasp!>>

 

[benjiboy]

Talent is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.

 

[JohnMeadows]

HDR metaphor

At a recent panel discussion, one of the speakers said HDR was the "Autotune" of photography...

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

If you're referring to it from a vinyl record and film type of situation, then it might be similar from a viewpoint of a consumer, but from a viewpoint of producer, it's vastly different.

Making good sounding vinyl records isn't that difficult. Sure you need the equipment, but you don't need a gigantic warehouse with absolutely precise temp and humidity control, and sophisticated lighting control. You press records based on a fairly simple process, while making film is a hundred times more difficult (if you want really good quality film).

 

[Steve Smith]

You press records based on a fairly simple process, while making film is a hundred times more difficult (if you want really good quality film).

I bet film makers would be just as lost trying to make vinyl records as record makers would be trying to make film.

Everything is easy if you know how to do it.

But yes, relatively, I think film making needs tighter controls, etc.


Steve.

 

[ntenny]

On the role of technique, I'm pretty sure the same discussion has been had forever, in all the arts. ("Og think kids these days not use charcoal right! Cave painting going to hell!") And one person's technical incompetent is another person's visionary: consider Mo Tucker as a musician, or Nan Goldin as a photographer.

More interesting, I think, is the way that computers have lowered the barriers to entry in both technologies. Back at university I saved for YEARS to scrape together the money for a cassette 4-track recorder---now anyone with a computer can do hard-disk recording, with vastly superior fidelity and scads of tracks and fancy editing capabilities---for free-to-cheap. Of course this means everyone and their dog is making recordings, and most of them are bad, because most of *everything* is bad; but you can hear them all, if you want to, because there's an internet.

The analogy to photography is pretty clear, IMHO. And as others have said in the past, the widespread adoption of digital pretty much follows a trend that covers the whole history of photography: convenience trumps quality, and whatever the new "convenience over quality" medium is---dry plates, sheet film, rollfilm, 35mm, digital---there are going to be people who make compelling images with it. (My great-grandfather, a die-hard LF guy, bought a Leica once and almost immediately got rid of it; he couldn't see what anyone would want with those crummy little negatives. Obviously there have been some people who have defied the odds to get good pictures out of a Leica, though!)

But in both worlds, I think the conflation of "skills" with medium is a serious mistake. Does anybody really doubt that HCB would have taken brilliant photos with a digital camera, or that the zillions of mediocre digital photographers are rendered mediocre not by their cameras but by their eyes?

But when you lower the *technical* barriers to entry---by putting a digital camera in everyone's phone, or by promulgating cheap recording software---of course people show up in the relevant art who have less experience, less commitment, and less developed technical skill than in previous generations. On the whole I think this is a good thing; democratizing art tends to open the door to a diversity of ideas. I don't see that Nan Goldin would ever have happened in a wet-plate world, or Mo Tucker in a Renaissance-aristocratic-music world.

-NT

 

[Aristophanes]

On the role of technique, I'm pretty sure the same discussion has been had forever, in all the arts. ("Og think kids these days not use charcoal right! Cave painting going to hell!") And one person's technical incompetent is another person's visionary: consider Mo Tucker as a musician, or Nan Goldin as a photographer.

Or banksy:

 

[c6h6o3]

I’m still listening to and preferring music from the 80’s

Me, too. The 1780s and the 1880s produced some of the best music ever created. The 1980s? You can't be serious.

 

[2F/2F]

Me, too. The 1780s and the 1880s produced some of the best music ever created. The 1980s? You can't be serious.

Hear! Hear!

 

[tomalophicon]

Haters don't know good music.

 

[ntenny]

Me, too. The 1780s and the 1880s produced some of the best music ever created. The 1980s? You can't be serious.

Pshaw. Depends on your taste, of course, but Tom Waits did some of his best work in the 1980s, for instance. Industrial and experimental electronica got really interesting (Einstuerzende Neubauten, Clock DVA, Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV). Detroit techno, Belgian techno, all that stuff on Wax Trax. The pre-grunge Seattle/Portland scene, from Green River through the commercial success of Soundgarden. A certain amount of good stuff buried in among the college-radio ephemera, before R.E.M. made it big and the genre got commercialized as "alternative".

I'll grant you that the mainstream stank, but the mainstream of popular music usually stinks. Whoever compared it to stock photography was spot on, I think; occasionally it does something good, mostly by accident, but mostly it's just more oversaturated pictures of sunsets.

-NT

 

[2F/2F]

Very refreshing to hear Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle mentioned here on APUG (though TG was solidly a '70's group, even though they did last a little while into the '80's)!

I agree that there were some good things to come out of the 1980's. But the OP's line, after that sort-of diatribe, was hilarious to me.

It is, of course a matter of opinion...but his opinion is way different than my own...and I don't think many people would argue that the '80's are the recent decade that most embodies what he describes as real music. I would have to say that the '50's and '60's are "it" for me, more than any other decades. Early rock and roll and R&B, blues, country, soul, garage, '60's rock and roll, free jazz, country-rock, folk-rock, psychedelic rock, concept albums before they got so serious. It's simply the best stuff ever to me. All that, and even the pop music was largely stomachable, with all sorts of gems.

Listening to Sirius radio '50's on 5, I keep the station where it is 90 percent of the time that a new song comes on. That is nowhere close to any other radio station I've ever listened to. If a stinker comes on, I go to '60's on 6 (which is way worse than '50's on 5, IMO). If that doesn't work out, I go to Elvis radio, which is usually playing some of the lamest possible Elvis songs. Unfortunately, most "oldies" stations on FM are now completely unlistenable to me, and AM is pretty much now entirely talk. The early rock and roll and doo wop is completely gone, as are anything but the most popular of songs by major artists, and they play a bunch of freaking disco crap from the '70's.

 

[mr.datsun]

Recent work in the brain sciences seems to show that musical tastes are formed in a person's teens. Read This Is Your Brain on Music. I don't know whether there is any similar work on an individual's sense of visual aesthetics.

 

[Steve Smith]

Studies seem to show that musical tastes are formed in a person's teens. Read This Is Your Brain on Music. I don't know whether there is any similar work on an individual's sense of visual aesthetics.

My favourite music comes from at least ten years before I was born!


Steve.