----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Maxey" <written_by@xxxxxxx> To: "List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students" <photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 7:53 AM Subject: Re: NYTimes take on the future. : I have seen this same discussion applied to lots of stuff. I do not think digital cameras represent a huge shift. It is just another a camera and most people know what a camera is. It takes pictures and for many, the underlying technology matters little because it is cheap and prints are immediately accessible. : : Rather than darkrooms and paper, we have computers, PS and printers. It is nothing more than evolution. History shows that new technology replaces old and people do not like it. Oh I think even the most ardent defender of film still likes digital, they just don't feel that it's appropriate for everything.. I was just ranting elsewhere on the web - it seems appropriate to copy and paste here: | how many others in the industry out there feel similar.... have you | considered a career change/shift..... ? yup, I went from lecturer to senior tech as I refused to toe the party line and teach the dogma - and it left me free to have greater student interaction AND I was free to teach stuff closer to the truth, then I left that and went to retail/wholesale, then abandoned that as well (fatigue) I had the offer to start lecturing within that companies training programs but to be honest, there seemed so little basic comprehension of photography among so many of the customers and worse still - a reluctance to learn :( Photography during the film days, while complex, encompassed some simple optical physics, a little bit of math, basic chemistry and then there was the aesthetic side, which I largely feel is personal anyway - but it was all pretty coherent and the progression seemed natural. With the intro of digital we needed 70% of the former but we also needed to add teaching about computers, OS's, media, computer related technology, video technology, stuff about *complex* maths (ha!) .. plus we need to teach about the very rapidly changing lineup of programs to modify/edit/manipulate images - AND (I feel) teach students where they can keep up to date about finding new info and knowledge as it becomes available. Discussing this with another soon-to-be-former-lecturer yesterday he was telling me that the new national syllabus's for photography is SUPPOSED to cover both film AND digital in first year level courses, trained to the same depth as film tech was taught in the past - yet few if any of the lecturers comprehend much about digital (the video and film&TV lecturers have it all over the photo guys, after all, digicams are really video still cameras) and none have ever taught the foundation stuff. truth be told, most of them know so little they don't even know how much they don't know! and where's the time for this anyway? it used to be "in 1871, Richard Leach Maddox invented the gelatin dry plate silver bromide process.." now they'll need to add "in 1928, Baird invents a video disc to record television.." and "in 1942 Chester Carlson receives patent for electric photography, now lets look a little more at xerography.." and "so let's discuss the suitability of cyanine dyes for long term storage of data" and "can anyone suggest which of the following algorithms would be best used, and also which would be the poorest, to upsize image 'A' given the proliferance of both sharp edged lines and also the spherical objects exhibiting gross tonal AND colour transitions.. " bloody hell. the assumptions about students knowledge was that they knew little/nothing and so teaching photography at first year level was stuff about shutter speeds, apertures, the various effects achievable by different developing agents, sulphite content effects on silver edges etc etc. now a student walks into a digi class and day 1 it begins - "open photoshop, do this, do that, burn off your DVD and then print it on this printer via the network.." (it's not funny watching the utter computer novice saying 'net work?' .. what does 'burn mean? ) NO attempt is given to teach ANYTHING about the digital world - people are at best being trained to be simple users. I saw blank stares from lecturers when the words 'DA converter' were used by a student once ;-) continuing.. Do students need to know the underlying technology? well, it gives them a reference point and it seems downright wrong to eliminate the fundamentals, sacrificing knowledge for ease of use. one could hardly call it study - rather it seems these days more like training. "I've been trained to operate a G5, PSCS and the Canon D5N" . Hmmph. : I remember when video tape came along. They largely replaced film. The film user was faced with the same general problems the video users faced. All that was left was the technology. Tubes and electronics replaced sensitised film stock and the public perhaps did not care. All they wanted was home movies. the movie makers cared, and they found they needed to learn a whole LOT more if they were to be able to produce quality output. Just the same as when a new film stock was introduced to us film shooters - we needed to take our time to learn what it could/could not do, how it behaved and what it was best for.. we didn't just grab film willy nilly and bung it in the camera, treating it the same way as the last film we shot - that would be madness! : Now we have digital cameras. The majority of users do not know about interchangeable lenses, Dektol, and Kodabromide because these things are not required. Now it is ink cartridges, not Dektol; paper for their printer, not light sensitive darkroom papers. So I suppose some comparisons will always be made. Perhaps not much has changed after all. I *hope* not - I *hope* people still test, question and don't just respond to the "hey you, buy this!" marketing : Some of us know the way it once was and we tend to compare things. that's what kept, and continues to keep us alive! ;-) : Here is an Einstein-esque Thought Experiment to try: What comes after digital? Can anyone think of some technology that could possibly replace the digital camera? I might suggest digital paper. That is a paper that could be imaged and then erased if the results are not to the photographer's liking. ah - that would be bacterial film for it's massive tonal range and improbably huge resolution ! k
