Dear All,
In my opinion digital cameras and digital image processing is not about fool-proof photography that avoids "mis-aligned or blurred facsimiles of what you wanted" . Digital photography is just another creative means to allow the photographer to express his or her vision, emotions, or ideas. It is a complex tool box that allows the photographer to run the full gamut from correcting for red-eye, removing lint from a dark wool coat, removing electrical lines in architectural shots, sharpening a blurred image, changing contrast and hue, to complete manipulation and transformation of an captured image into something totally different by using filters and overlays. A digital camera and Photoshop allows you to do pretty much everything except the alternative wet plate and gum processes developed in the 1800s.
Don't look down on digital photography. When photography was born in the 1850's, painters looked down on photographers for the "lack of talent exhibited in just snapping an image and capturing it by a chemical process". We are in a period of transition where traditional film photographers who can look at a scene and calculate the correct f stop and shutter without reference to a light meter, who have developed a fine eye for composition, who put a lot of forethought into what it is they want to "say" before clicking the shutter, and who have mastered wet darkroom techniques tend to look down on the digital photographer who indiscriminately shoots, discards, and manipulates the image after the fact. Good digital photographers have to have the same awareness of light, composition, and "inner vision" as the traditional film based photographer. The fewer corrections you do in Photoshop the less risk of excessive pixilation and "noise" you have in representational photographs. In digital photography, the "cleaner the capture" the bigger the final print you can make and the better the resolution assuming you have a 5 or 6 megapixel camera at a minimum to capture the raw input. If you are doing abstract work, then the above dictums do not apply. Sometimes you may want to capture blurred and out of focus images on purpose and you want lots of "noise" to add texture.
So in conclusion, do not confuse the casual snapshot photographer for whom digital photography is a great boon (less money spent on blurry or ill composed photos that you do not learn about until photoprocessing which happens days after the picture taking event) with the serious digital photographer who has to follow the same time honored rules and spend a lot of time mastering the craft just as a serious film based photographer has done.
Sincerely yours,
Mark Wenner
Northern Virginia, USA
