Ever since post pandemic I have taken more and more post production, darkroom, printing, enlarging, and colour proofing jobs and the amount of photography I did has taken a back seat in my work life. Even back then before the pandemic I have taken my Digital camera out of my camera bag and went in full analog as a working professional photographer. It was and still is a shock for most of my clients to hear that I shoot film and I have to also explain to them by film I mean negative film and not movie film like on Hollywood. I still tell them vast majority of my work that the work they saw and liked and hired me for are actually analog and they hired me for that reason and they wanted to have photos like I had in my previous work or in portfolio, but they got too comfortable with seeing things as they are shot and too comfortable with having option of 1500+ photos to chose from.
I recently got back to shooting more creative work once again and I just picked back up from where I left but I noticed that the technology went crazy in last 3 years. I am still using Pentax 67II for field, Mamiya RZ 67 ProII for set and studio and Nikon F6 for fast versatile shoots and also travel. I still have a Nikon D800 in a bag in the house for low budget and fast turnaround shoot. Meanwhile when I asked about the current cameras and photography I noticed that photographers became slave to the technology, auto focus dependancy, AI, and video has taken skill and core photography out of photographers hands and make some new hybrid technology dependent button pushers out of them.
Don't get me wrong, when it comes to sports, press, wedding photographers they will always chase the newest technology in order to get better results than the competition. But are we getting a Muhammad Ali VS Sonny Liston Photo like Neil Leifer shot? We have the technology to photograph 120 photos as a baseball players hitting a ball and breaking a bat in the moment of it happening and still it doesn't make any noise after a week of this happening but I still know Muhammad Ali knockout photo despite my disinterest in boxing and never watching a match to this day.
On November I am planning on buying two new cameras, one Nikon D850 and one Nikon Z8 and guess which will be my main digital body which will replace the D800??? ... Yes you guessed it will be D850 meanwhile Z8 will be more dedicated video and fast pace camera which I will be sharing with my partner. We are planning to do a good amount of traveling and videography and photography projects in the next two years, I hope we can get the budget and sponsors for the ideas we have but I will be writing about that in future post. You might be asking why I would be choosing D850 as my main digital? The hint is in the name: Main digital. Bulk of my work is still shot on analog and will still be shot on analog, but just of that few times I'll be shooting digital I would like to have the latest and greatest DSLR body, because Nikon made them great. That body will last me for 10~15 years easily.
One of the reason camera manufacturer started to push mirrorless was that if you paid attention to their sales, they were no longer going up in the direction they wanted and being a camera company that makes money as they sell camera, they had hard time when their products were so great that few of the professionals upgraded religiously every new upgrade. I mean look at Nikon F3, F5, F6 they are so great that so many analog photographers are still using them hunting the market for best condition or unused bodies, and Just like those SLR the DSLR like 5D mkIV and D850 are so well build that they will also pass the test of time be sought after in 20+ years.
We can see some photography YouTubers are shooting with 15~12 years old Digital SLR cameras and making out to be some classic cameras. I giggle when I see some YouTuber using Nikon D800 in 2023-2024 is praising it to be a great camera, meanwhile I am still using it and getting paid with it. The Camera still works and I can get good prints from it if I want to.
It makes me sad when I hear marketing people and some photographers who don't even understand exposure calling these DSLRs old and obsolete. I get it that you can now focus on the iris of the model and have the models one eye in focus where the rest of the model is out of focus, but did you really wanted to do that? have the model in focus show the set the scenery tell the story and don't be slave to numbers. There is more to photography than f numbers, pixel peeping and mirrorless. After my graduation when I became working professional I remember using the newest technology, tethering my camera to my MacBook Pro and using Phase One Capture One and setting a wireless network to tether iPads and iPhones to the capture one so clients can preview, but after I started to shoot analog I ditched the tether shooting because I got used to not looking at the camera or the screen and having everyone gather around the computer giving me their backseat photograph input without even knowing the ratio of print or understanding that those are unedited photos in the MacBook Pros non wide gamut god knows what brightens screen was annoying me and slowing me down to stop working and give them an explanation.
I believe in future Analog photography might be obsolete, and not for the reasons you think such as no one is using it and it is not profitable etc.. but more about regulations and environmental reasons. The film chemistry is not the best thing for the environment and leftover silver content in the fixer might not be a good thing to pour down the drain and not everyone is discarding their darkroom chemistry in special waste dispose centres, I am just lucky that I live close to a place that accepts these things but not everyone even knows this.
But until that day comes where analog will be a thing of the past I'll be using Analog and DSLRs and when analog becomes obsolete I'll probably be hunting DSLRs of the past on internet and be using medium format digital backs from 2010~2020s on my Mamiya.
No comments:
Post a Comment