I recently learned that friend’s daughter attending a local college was required to shoot only film for a photography class. Digital not allowed.
At first I was angry that a young photographer was forced to learn the craft using outdated technologies.
One of the ways you become a better photographer is by taking pictures, lots of them, often, everywhere. With the cost of silver-based film, paper and chemistry getting more expensive every day due to the economic principle of supply and demand, most college students can’t afford more than a minimal amount of supplies. Not nearly enough to shoot through the volume of mistakes necessary to become a successful student.
Instead, they need to shoot digital where they can freely explore the possibilities, where their mistakes are quickly discovered and corrected, where the process disappears behind discovery of technique and expression.
Then I began to think about how I got to where I am today and what I taught new stringers at the AP.
There are times when I miss shooting on film, the rigidity of not being able to check histograms and color balance before shooting the next frame. Of knowing there isn’t a way to check for mistakes except through understanding camera, light, film, timing, composition, all the tenets of good photography.
The scientific method of exploring photography disappeared with digital cameras. Photo stringers were taught to modify only one step at a time in any technique or process. I instructed them that if they modified two or more steps they wouldn’t be sure which of the changed effected the outcome. Change time and temperature at the same time and the outcome would be different. Was it was the time or the temperature that forced heavier grain and blocked up the highlights on the negatives?
When we stepped into the digital era and they began using digital darkrooms, I used the lessons of the darkroom to instruct them on how best to edit their digital files.
When they had finished their edit I would ask the steps they took to get to the finished result. If they could explain the step-by-step method they went from a raw image to one that was suitable for reproduction, I made them start over. The need to make a process repeatable and predictable was as necessary and important in a digital image as it was in film process or exposing and processing a print.
If they couldn’t explain how they got where they were, they were lost. Lost isn’t a place where a photographer wants to be.
Digital cameras make guessing much easier. There’s isn’t a real cost for each frame shot. Every frame can be immediately be checked for all those tenets listed above. If the frame fails in any way, delete it and shoot again. The learning process becomes more haphazard with hope replacing technique and discovery substituting for process.
So now I’m on the side of the traditional darkroom professor, with limits. I hope he is teaching his students the importance of creating rigid boundaries and foundations for their work so when they grab a digital camera the day after they’ve finished his course of instruction they will apply the same techniques to pixels as they did to silver crystals.
