A picture of tree rings in an old rubbish dump from late 2018 that I have just got around to scanning.
This abstract was made in the late afternoon in Waitpinga whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Maleko.
Whilst scanning the 35mm negatives I wondered why I persist with manual photography: 35mm film, a traditional workhorse (M4-P) rangefinder (analogue) camera and a handheld light meter at a time when digital technology is so pervasive and is increasingly technologically innovative. compared to digital film is expensive--both the cost of the film and the processing the negatives buy a film lab.
The images of the former are not equal to what is possible with computational photography of a Sony A7R111. So am I returning to the roots of handheld photography? Or I am just stubbornly hanging onto old technology cos its Leica that stands for high-precision of engineering and manufacturing at a time when analogue cameras are no longer in production? Or is it techno erotics?
We are being told that we live in a period of ever accelerating change and that the near future (if it is not already here) brings new possibilities of unimagined power. Photography is now increasingly about algorithms and technology: it is becoming ever more computational and orientated towards incorporating AI. We photographers are on the road to becoming becoming enframed as techno-erotics freaks whose practice is shaped by ever increasing technological complexity. In this digital world analogue' is associated with archaic, dinosaur and Luddite, and 'digital' with modern, progress and future. The software algorithm rules in modern visual culture.
From an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla:
Erwin Puts observes that as the photo technology has changed, so has the photo cameras, namely:
The industry assumption is that ‘less’ is the unique property of the traditional film emulsion world and that ‘more’ is the defining characteristic of the digital-computational world. I am comfortable with less.more and more electronics were introduced, making the operator of the device almost superfluous. Modern technology lived up to what the original scholars and viewers had always said: photo technology is a machine that can independently capture an image of nature.