Hard as Nails, Easy as Pie

Posted a digital capture with a note saying I couldn’t claim much credit, since digital makes things easier. Juliette slyly asked, “so a photo has to be hard to make???”

Whether or not a photo’s hard to make doesn’t affect its esthetic value (to me), but because I have this (possibly sick) meta-interest in the very deed of photography it does affect my feeling about the photographic act. After fighting or working hard to get something done I feel some (doubtless ersatz) pride that’s absent if I get the thing without effort.

What’s easy about digital that isn’t easy with film? The main ingredient is negative feedback – negative in the engineering sense, positive in the sense that it’s an immense advantage. I mean, OK, here I am with my camera, and I take my best shot. One second later I see the result, with a little histogram, yet, telling me whether it’s too dark or too light, and if any highlights are blown they’re winking at me like a turn signal. After that, working with film is like shooting ducks in the dark.

Then there’s the eased workflow. Take as many shots as you like, one or fifty. Don’t worry about finishing the roll. Pop out the memory card and put it in a card reader attached to your computer. Instantly see and evaluate every shot, complete with a gallimaufry of data telling you what lens was used at what settings and even what subject distance, not to mention on what second of which hour of what day. Like photo #X? If you shoot JPG or TIFF simply load it directly into Photoshop. If, like me, you insist on RAW images, click on "convert" and load the result. That’s all. Easy.

All the technical progress of photography has been aimed at making photography 1) possible, then 2) easy. Because the easier you make it, the more you can concentrate on the part that can’t be made easy – creating a compelling image.

And of course you get to skip some steps, notably processing and scanning, which add noise (entropy, degradation) to the image. One trivial but very worthwhile result of that is: no spotting. It was beginning to seem like I spent two-thirds of my time cloning out specks in my photos. More important than eliminating those pesky specks is the elimination of variables in processing (is the developer a degree warmer today?) and scanning (which scanner are you using? with what settings?). Making a photo with film involves too many degrees of freedom. There’s the choice of film and its quality (age, batch, ambient temperature, whatever), the camera’s mechanicals and settings, the storage and treatment of the film after exposure and before processing, the many, many variables involved in development, over which you generally have no control (which is why people make such a fuss over preferring Lab X to Lab Y), the condition of the negatives or chromes (scratched or otherwise marred, left in a hot car, licked by the dog, dropped on floor, covered with fingerprints, dusty, moldy, cloudy, etc), the many more variables of scanning (flatbed, film scanner, drum? what shadow density? what resolution? what color balance? what software? what settings?), and only then, after all those variables have nibbled you half to death, do the two paths to your final photo come back together.