the further down the rabbit hole the more the devil is in the details

im not really sure where to post this i guess here is good enough, if the MOD SQWAD decides it should be moved
sounds good to me !

as the title suggests, the further we travel down the hole the more difficult it is to be satisfied with one's results.

in the old days ( i am talking barely post KODAK/BROWNIE &c ) people were happy just to get an image
mailed back to them, to get something on their negative and print to remember things by.
as time marched on and materials became more "reliable" and cameras more "sub-pop-isticated" and people
got more of a grasp of photography, the materials+equipment their journey down the rabbit hole began.
no longer is it "good enough" to have an image to remember things by, to click the shutter of a point and shoot
( point and shoot could be a brownie, folder, box camera, strut camera, automatic one, manual one, modern or old, or even the modern versions of the same thing )
instead there is some sort of instinct to become an over achiever and nothing is really good enough.
searching for silver bullets, buying bigger and better cameras, name brands to impress oneself and friends
and family, even learning how to make POP prints in the sun so the drug store's contact printing deckled edge
paper wouldn't have their stamp the back and be too glossy, too brittle &c. taking control of
every aspect of photography( except maybe for manufacture of the materials, unless you were
bitten by the bug to do painterly work like garo showed you at the salon, or mortenson's books raged on about )...
is there a point where one says " hey, wait, i just want to make a snapshot, and i don't really
care if it was made with my "---" camera/lens using "+++" technique .. its just a snapshot.

or is every photograph a snapshot, and we just make it something else because we are almost
to the earth's core down the rabbit hole?

Better is the enemy of good - Voltaire

The issues described exist in all fields of endeavor.
Some advances are great, others provide minimal benefit at great cost.

I wouldn't consider every photograph a snapshot. To me, a snapshot is a photograph taken of something happening now, with the equipment you have with you, and generally taken from where you happen to be at the time. This is quite different from planning a shot, picking the right film, the right location, the right time of day and modifying development for each shot. The highly planned shot, however, is not of any increased innate value over the snapshot. There are snapshots I love and there are technically exquisite photographs that I find completely uninteresting.

My interest in digital photography waned when I found that I was getting caught up in the equipment arms race. Every 6-12 months, the latest and greatest cameras were replace with later and greater models. I still shoot digital in those cases where it is the right tool to use, but find I enjoy shooting film more. I also use cameras which are well below my budget as a conscious decision to avoid gear becoming more important than content. I will break down and purchase a Leica at some point (I keep my eyes open for a good deal on a M3), but don't want to find myself in a situation where I am more concerned about protecting my gear than taking the photographs I want.

I remember a 60 Minutes episode from 30-40 years ago about a popular celebrity photographer (paparazzi) who shot his photos with an instamatic. He was successful because he was polite and engaged the stars, and many would smile for him and not the others with the expensive equipment.

Morpheus (to Neo) in "The Matrix":

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

...

Back in the halcyon days of fuzzy Brownie snaps, silver halide film and halftones printed on paper, most photos were good enough for everyday remembering or reporting. For fine art work, any one of a broad range of chemical photographic and lithographic processes produced results that could satisfy even the highest levels of aesthetic and technical critique. Nobody but photo engineers, hobby enthusiasts, professionals and scientists ever peered at photographs with a microscope or worried about grain structure. Most people stashed their snapshots and newspaper clippings in albums or boxes and then went on with their lives.

These days, the Rabbit Hole of virtual perfection beckons with high-def cameras and computer screens, permitting us to climb right through our digital Looking Glasses and wander around in our private Wonderlands... just like Alice. Serious photographers, routinely inspecting their images at 100% magnification or more, are suddenly resenting those pesky and imperfect dots. Off with their pointy little heads! More resolution! More definition! Soon enough, 50mp sensors will yield to 100mp and terabytes of data storage will become petabytes. Ever deeper and deeper into the image. Petapixels anyone?

A few of us instinctively draw back from this infinitely receding psycho-technological event horizon and take comfort in hand-made emulsions and papers, fussy, old-fashioned procedures or antique camera equipment. Just about everybody else whips out their cellphone to snap stills or videos, squints at the screen for a couple of seconds, flips the pictures to the Cloud, and then goes on with their life.

michael_r said:

All we know for sure is the more expensive the gear, the better the work.

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And the best gear that you can afford means that you only have yourself to blame.

There's no "rabbit hole" or "devil", the underlying premise is miscast. The vast majority of people don't want photographs now and never wanted photographs in the past. What they wanted was pictures. Photography was a confounded nuisance that had to be endured to get those pictures. Now anyone with a telephone can make innumerable pictures, screen-lookers, at no cost and with minimal effort. The challenges of general-purpose personal picture-making are completely solved.

A miniscule branch of modern picture-making involves the comsumption of light-sensitive materials and the end point is a material artefact, a photograph as such. Apart from illustrating subject matter photographs can be made to be attractive articles in their own right. The use of good cameras, fine lenses, well chosen subjects, valuable materials, high level hand skills, advanced visual imagination, all contribute to excellence in photography. And anybody seriously pursuing such excellence is surely permitted to fret about the ways and means of achieving it.

John..it's ALL GOOD... use the proper tool for the job. I know as I've gone through the rabbit hole countless times in my explorations.
due to recent feedback I'm sticking with my MF gear as it's portable; lightweight; and gives me wonderful results
I've yet to cross the digital divide but am not going to limit myself to ANY belief that contracts my photographic journey.
witness Sally Mann's most recent photo essay about her friend Cy Twombly's studio...some of the photographs were taken with a digital camera and some with film; not a wet plate camera in sight...and she used the right tool for a job well done
a camera is a box with a lens on it...or not!!
have a great day!
peter

Sirius Glass said:

And the best gear that you can afford means that you only have yourself to blame.

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unfortunately too many people believe utter BS like this, thanks.

other than the fact that some people want to believe the best gear is the most expensive gear you can afford i have never heard so much nonsense.
i have seen photography made with a biscotti-tin pinhole camera or holga or diana that has run circles around cameras/lenses that were "high end"

it is really sad that people believe this sort of thing..

Maris said:

Now anyone with a telephone can make innumerable pictures, screen-lookers, at no cost and with minimal effort.

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and i hate to say this, but a lot of the time these " anyones" and "screen-lookers" take better photographs, pictures, images &c than a lot of people
who use other means, and do their best to say their efforts are worthless and images they make are
garbage. yours is the same argument that camera snobs make about "lomographers" being sub-par,
when it is young people using these "sub par" cameras who are buying most of the film sold
while camera snobs go on on about how lame they are.

Peter Schrager said:

a camera is a box with a lens on it...or not!!

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couldn't agree with you more

its too bad there are so many artificial, self-made/society made boundaries about what is "acceptable" and what is "garbage"

it is unfortunate so many minds are closed ...

NOT BS. If you have good equipment you only have yourself to blame. Just because you do not agree does not mean the concept is wrong.

I feel that modern cameras and lenses have become so good, inexpensive and ubiquitous that I no longer need to obsess about Quality. And as a result, I feel freer to experiment with "bad" cameras and lenses. Because not all situations call for images which are evenly lit and highly resolving all the way out to the corners. Sometimes a sense of vagueness or ambiguity seems to do a better job at conveying what I want to express. Where I once owned Leicas, Hasselblads and Rolleiflexes, today I own Zenits, Lomos and a Holga! That I can get so much enjoyment from the FSU's discards amuses me no small amount.

I think that when you get started you are obviously mostly concerned with technical matters. At a certain point though you realize that you know enough to do whatever you want and that is where the real journey begins. Some people never bother to get past the technical matters and only concern themselves with that aspect of photography. I hate to say it, but that really describes most people. The reality is materials and cameras don't matter at all. If you have it you have it. You have to know what a good picture is. Buying expensive glass won't guarantee a good photograph. The famous photographers from years past never had the technologically advanced gear we do today, yet they still made it work.

As far as "what are we doing" is concerned, it doesn't really matter. If you haven't already been ordained, you probably never will be no matter how much work you put into it. That means no one will really care after you are gone since the world is awash with photographs. If you like what you do then getting anyone else to like it too is just icing on the cake. Ultimately you do it because it brings you some kind of joy.

Patrick Robert James said:

...Some people never bother to get past the technical matters and only concern themselves with that aspect of photography.
...

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The "measurebator":

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7.htm

I don't think that rabbit-hole is related to photography in particular at all.

Comedian Louis CK observed this best:

"Look at us today, we got all this technology and wonders and it's amazing. We can sit in a chair, in the sky, going across the continent in 800 mhp, eating a bird, ironically. We can do all this, and we can surf he Internet while we do it. It's friggin awesome and amazing. Well, unless the internet is slow, then all we can utter is 'Come on, what the heck is
this sh*t!?!?' What a sh*tty experience that flight was, the Internet was horrible!"

"People that did the same trip 200 years ago, spent years to get to the destination, people even died during those trips, heck, the trip took so long that the people reaching the actual destination was a whole other generation!"

Humans always want more, go faster, higher with less effort, I think we are hard-wired to think that way and possibly some survival-trait.

Then again, once you make a really good photograph or a painting, or a song, most people seem to be able to praise it for what it is for some reason.

Sirius Glass said:

NOT BS. If you have good equipment you only have yourself to blame. Just because you do not agree does not mean the concept is wrong.

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after a good night sleep i am glad people believe this.
equipment has everything to do with it now i can't imagine why anyone would not blame their equipment for
their own lack of expertise, experience or ability? i blamed my wifi connection last night for my dinner being cold.

Probably his point is that if someone believes gear is the answer, and buys the "best"/most expensive, but still finds they take awful photos, then they can't blame the gear but only themselves.

Of course, in that case, what'll probably happen is that they'll search for some other magic bullet, unwilling to accept it's their own lack of ability.

This also works as a political metaphor I notice. Oops

I think what the OP has described is a certain personality type which is found in all walks of live, not just photography. Does such type of photographer inherently produce images that are worse (however you care to define that) than other types of photographers? The real question is what motivated the OP to write about this type of photographer. Is he trying to draw a distinction between himself and such type of photographer and why?

my motivation is i wished i could go back in a time machine
and be in around 1900 and take photographs for a little while
and see how it was really done without all the gizmos and high tech wizardry
that we have today. so i am able to take a step back and say " its just a snapshot "
and actually take a snapshot and not worry about anything more than pushing the "I" button on my box camera.
i'd also like to ride a high wheel bike but that's another thread

Before the introduction of the first Kodak camera in 1888, I don't think there was such a thing as a snapshot. The process was too involved. Photography wasn't just press the button and we do the rest. The photographer actually had to do the rest. I suspect that it was rather more like working with a view camera today, where the only technical wizardry is a light meter, should you choose to use one. For more than a century, until the introduction of digital, most people took photographs, dropped the film off, and got prints back. Why not do the same? Use a fixed lens film point and shoot, and send the film off for processing and prints. When it comes back, put the prints in albums. No scanning and messing about. Better yet, how about an Fuji Instax (or Leica Sofort). That should give you a pretty good idea of what it was like to take snapshots. Or you could just use your imagination.

Whether you use "gizmos and high tech wizardry" in your photography is entirely up to you. Use them or not. Obsess about them or not. Obsess about not using them or not. These are all individual choices we make.

I'm rather firmly in the "Camera gear are tools, purchased and used for specific tasks at hand." group.

If you're trying to do fast paced sports photography with a short news-cycle turn around, then a pinhole camera with paper negatives is 'probably not your best choice' for gear. If you're photographing wild lions during a regional famine, then a <20mm lens is also probably not the best idea you've had that year. Look at what you're trying to do, think about what the gear itself needs to do to achieve your goals, and then purchase gear suitable to the task.

You can make amazing images with nearly any gear if you really set your mind to it, but often some gear will make doing so a far more reliable experience. And of course different gear allows a photographer to achieve a different look at feel.

Paying more for gear can get you more features that allow you to do the task easier, but rarely is the gear alone making it better in and of itself. Paying more can get you more options, more controls, more refined functions and aids, but none of them really help if you don't learn how to use them, and they don't serve any purpose at all if you don't even try to use them. (Had a chat awhile back with a photographer I bumped into one afternoon who was also sporting a film camera, some 35mm SLR that I don't remember. Dude spent most of the chat trying to convince me that I should get one too because of how awesome and powerful it was, with a really cool AF system and lots of metering options... He also said he always shot manual focus/settings and used sunny-16, because that was 'the true way to do photography'...)

Lots of people seem to get into trouble when buying gear because they don't take the time to understand what the equipment is doing, and what kind of functionality they're actually going to be using. This issue is highlighted so much more clearly if you look at digital gear simply because there is so much more going on with those devices than what was really possible with previous cameras. They're complex computer systems with an absolutely insane number of functions crammed into a tiny little box, and marketing waves big flashy numbers in front of people trying to convince them that they totally need that feature/thing/gizmo.

It is easy for people to get caught up in sales pitches and not pay attention to what is actually important for their needs. Is the core problem the user is facing that they are missing focus at a kid's sports games all the time? Well a camera that is advertised because it has "Way more megapixels!" probably isn't going to help that user nearly as much as addressing the body/lens autofocus interaction.


Further compounding the issue, and applying to gear going all the way back to when people thought to try selling it to the masses, is the trap of a gear-crutch, rather than gear-as-tools. "Just buy this and things will be better!" has long been an overly tempting solution to many rather than stopping to take the time and learn why it made things better.

jnanian said:

" its just a snapshot

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I think snapshots are terribly undervalued.

This is why I shoot mostly Brownie cameras and simple rangefinders.

No, not every photograph is a snapshot (unless we speak metaphorically like Minor White who said every photograph is a self-portrait).

There seem to be two extremes and then a continuum in between.

One extreme is the large exhibition print commissioned at great expense to make a statement. Perhaps an Adams landscape might fit this category, human skill and judgment was needed at every stage of the process.
The other extreme is the photo-booth passport picture, made for a very modest purpose at very low cost with no human skill involved beyond the ingenuity to make and service the machine.

When the purpose is to communicate a grand idea such as "The United States of America is a magnificent place" the Adams print is just the thing. When the purpose is to carry a reminder in a pocket book of the beauty of one's sweetheart then the snapshot may be just the thing.

Then there is the urge to make things, the creative urge, it runs very strong in some people and the exhibition print is a fine example, these lie somewhere in between the two extremes.

As we learn about things and get experience doing things we become more and more educated and fine tuned in what exactly it is we want.

jnanian said:

my motivation is i wished i could go back in a time machine
and be in around 1900 and take photographs for a little while
and see how it was really done without all the gizmos and high tech wizardry
that we have today. so i am able to take a step back and say " its just a snapshot "
and actually take a snapshot and not worry about anything more than pushing the "I" button on my box camera.

Click to expand...

Better go back a few decades earlier: By 1900, I imagine that George Eastman's box camera and famous "You press the button, we do the rest" slogan would have been all the rage, must've attracted hoards of well-to-do dilettantes.

pdeeh said:

I think snapshots are terribly undervalued.

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You haven't seen my shoe box of snapshots.

jnanian said:

after a good night sleep i am glad people believe this.
equipment has everything to do with it now i can't imagine why anyone would not blame their equipment for
their own lack of expertise, experience or ability? i blamed my wifi connection last night for my dinner being cold.

Click to expand...

Some people will blame everyone and everything but themselves when things go wrong. More so today. People do not want to take responsibility for their own actions. Hence when one buys the "best" equipment of any kind and things go wrong then the only logic thing it to blame oneself.

Now are we finally on the same page?