Safety in numbers

Paul Jenkin said:

(I exclude sports photographers and photo-journalists from the above comments as they often need to rattle off dozens of shots to get the one they / their editor will use).

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I include the sports photographers and the photojournalist because they never learned to anticipate the moment. Weegee did not machine gun photograph. Neither did the sports photographers in the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's. The photographs from D-Day in Normandy were not shot in the machine gun mode either.

What is lacking in these digisnapers is skill and practice in the field of photography.

Steve

Sirius Glass said:

I include the sports photographers and the photojournalist because they never learned to anticipate the moment. Weegee did not machine gun photograph. Neither did the sports photographers in the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's. The photographs from D-Day in Normandy were not shot in the machine gun mode either.

What is lacking in these digisnapers is skill and practice in the field of photography.

Steve

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Good point. When I started shooting sports (high school football & basketball mostly), I was shooting with a Mamiya 645! It's a great handling medium format camera, but it is not a machine gun. I learned the timing and foresight needed to catch the shot, as there was only one chance. That skill served me very well when years later I began shooting dancers.

Steve,

I was exluding them because the opportunity now exists to machine-gun shots and (potentially) capture shots of situations which would, almost certainly have been missed in years gone by.

I don't doubt that there's been a lot of dumbing-down but I've met a number of sports 'togs and PJs over the years (all extremely capable photographers outside of their professional stock-in-trade) but there must have been loads of occasions when a great shot has been missed because someone was changing a roll of film or in the time it takes to wind a 120 roll-film, crank to the next frame, point, focus and shoot....!

The point I was trying to make is that using a digital camera shouldn't make a jot of difference to a landscaper or portraitist insofar as they still need skill to capture the scene. Only if a 'machine gunner' gets very lucky is he/she likely to get a good result.

Paul Jenkin said:

I don't doubt that there's been a lot of dumbing-down but I've met a number of sports 'togs and PJs over the years (all extremely capable photographers outside of their professional stock-in-trade) but there must have been loads of occasions when a great shot has been missed because someone was changing a roll of film or in the time it takes to wind a 120 roll-film, crank to the next frame, point, focus and shoot....!

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Not nearly the number of times that I have been skiing and see people having problems with their batteries because their equipment can't handle the cold. Besides, it takes much less time to change a roll of film or advance to the next frame that is spent chimpin'! Rewinding and loading a roll of 35mm film takes much less than a minute for me but YMMV. For 120 I just swap film magazines on my Hasselblad which just takes seconds.

Steve