When I look through Ray-Jones’s photos that make me wonder why the smart digital cameras which special functions can’t increase the number of quality photographers. The digital cameras are very easy to use; for example, you can shoot in one click without the manual process of calculating the shutter speed and F-stops; in contrast, the film cameras have to manual calculation the lighting before shooting, so the film photographers must have the knowledge of lighting that is very importance skill. When I was a freshman at university, I studied how to shoot with film camera. I found that it was very hard to shoot the good one because the understanding of lighting needs more and more practice. Furthermore, digital technology allows us to delete and edit photos a million times; for this reason, people become familiar with the less careful behavior.
Moreover, when everybody can produce unlimited photos, it was hard to stand out. DRM Digital Marketing Ramblings reports the interesting stats of instragram (the photo application) that they have 150 million users and 16 billion photos were shared. I am the one of that, and I follow a few of great photographers. I click like for some of their photos and that it. I roll down to find another one and already forget about it. I think it is the sad thing that you can create the numerous of amazing photos but none of them is remarkable.
Sometime, I doubt about the technology that makes life too easy can really create the better people.
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References
Phill Coomes. (2013, September 20).Tony Ray-Jones in colour. BBC News in picture. Retrieved September 20, 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-24142421
Craig Smith. (2013,September 8). By the numbers: 12 interesting instragram state. DRM Digital Marketing Ramblings. Retrieved September 20, 2013 from http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/important-instagram-stats/
Some people like taking photos because of their own reason. Some love it because they want to share their life experiences. Some just want to express their different perspectives of things. So, it doesn't matter how much skill they have, as long as taking photos can make people satisfy, it is no need to be remarkable for someone else.
ReplyDeleteI think the technological advances make it easier for people to accurately record a scene, and that's probably all most people want - a snap or a hundred of their babies first birthday, snaps of themselves on holiday, and so on. Most of these don't have much value as art, but that's not why people want them.
ReplyDeleteBut I think a lot of people to care about the artistic merits of their photos. I used to use film, and I think that a higher proportion of my photographs then were better composed and exposed than the ones snap on digital cameras. But I also have a DSLR camera, and that can do everything that film can, only a lot better, and a lot more easily.
I suspect that a lot of people like myself do care about how good their photographs are, but mainly for themselves - I don't print many, but the ones I do print are the ones I want to look at daily on my walls.
But I'm not sure that this is true only of photography: there is a lot more painting being done today than ever before, and most of that is of dubious quality, but the people doing it do worry about whether it's good or not, and I guess only show their best to friends and relatives. I only show my good drawings, and threw away most of them as rubbish.
The same with writing: there are more books being written than ever by more people. And amongst all that, it's very hard to stand out. And just as a top line DSLR camera can help an artist, so too can a computer running a sophisticated word processor, but if the person using MS Word or whatever isn't a good writer, the writing won't be great any more than someone who knows nothing of colour, composition, exposure and the like is going to produce great photographs on even the best camera in the world.
And being a good photographer typically takes practise, as does being a good writer, or a good reader for that matter, which is why we want to blog every day - it's a more relaxed way to practise our writing skills, and to make mistakes that we learn from, so that we can produce something good when we need it - like a TOEFL exam, or an essay to present ideas we think matter.
Wow. Thank you Noina for prompting such a long response comment. It wasn't what I had planned when I started writing. But one idea led to another, and that to the next, and then there was this.
I read your respond while I was waiting to test the speaking section in IELTS exam. Thank you for your long respond because it make me calm down a little bit.
DeleteThe main reason that I choose this article is that sometimes technology that make life to easy is make my brain too lazy. For example, in Microsoft Word, if you type the vocabulary incorrectly, it has the automatic check spelling. After one click it turns to be correct words but it is not memorize in my brain, so I usually have troubles when I am writing with pencil.
And I wonder about the many smart functions of gadgets, we use the technology only a little bit of its total ability, so why we need more advance innovation while we can't truly understand and use the best potential from our current materials.
I'm glad you mentioned MS Word and similar programs. I think it's a good idea to use the spell check, but you can't rely on it. Last week there were a few mistakes that passed MS Word's check because the misspelling is also an English word, but not the word the writer meant. And that is a problem.
DeleteBut these sort of mistakes are easy to make, and provided they are not serious, are no problem. Even the august New York Times and other high quality publications have such small grammar or spelling mistakes in most articles. In fact, The New York Times has a special weekly column, blog After Deadline, where they analyse the language mistakes they've made over the previous week or so. For example, on September 10, they discussed errors that their writers had made with subject - verb agreement, something I'm sure we are all familiar with. "Ugly Disagreements" is at http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/ugly-disagreements/
Would you have made the same mistakes?
Do you like the explanation for each grammar mistake?
And I hope your exam went well.
DeleteIn this era, there are a lot of cameras which have various purposes to use them. Sometimes, I wonder why? I have a very high resolution camera but I can't make a great picture like photographers, so I think it has many factors relate with how to produce a one fantastic picture which is can not be produced by normal people like me. For this reason, I love digital camera that I can delete photos that I hate and retouch photos that I like a share it. To summarize, I think better camera do matter if it is used for appropriate reasons like medical,geographical or astronomical purposes.
ReplyDeleteit's easy to good at using camera, but quite hard to be a great photograher who can create remarkable picture.
ReplyDelete