Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“The Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”— Mark Twain
Mark Twain reportedly made the above statement in 1897; He passed away in 1910. In 1839 artist Paul Delaroche, upon seeing a Daguerreotype said, “from today, painting is dead!” Please don’t tell all of today’s painters along with the galleries and museums that are exhibiting their work about that one.
We are at a point in photography’s history where some on-line pundits are now saying, “photography is dead.” You see, paradigm shifts are hard for some people to deal with so they make up stuff like this. Factoid: While the invention of the automobile would seem to have contributed to the demise of the horse, there are more horses alive today then there were at the time of the civil war.
The Japan-based Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) analysis of trends stated, “Cameras are for older people.” They claim that the people who are still interested in photography are “typically around the ages of 40-60 or more” and that their children and grandchildren are “far less interested in cameras and prefer to use their smartphones.” But based on my own observations of what must be purely empirical data I would like to refute some of that.
How I Made this Photograph: I photographed this hot rod at Cars & Coffee at The Vehicle Vault’s monthly rain-or-shine events using my RAW+JPEG regimen. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix G5 that had been converted to infrared capture by Life Pixel using their Standard IR (720nm) filter. The lens was the Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 at 12mm. (For more than you probably wanted to know about this lens’s performance, read this post when you have time. For information on why this image looks so sharp read the text box at the bottom of this post.) The exposure was 2/50 sec at f/11. The RAW file was processed in Silver Efex to convert it to monochrome. I’m sorry I don’t remember the preset but my guess is that it was the Neutral preset with lots of tweaking via the sliders in the interface.
As Groucho Max once observed “what are you gong to be believe? What I tell you or your own eyes.” I see many young people at cars show using mirrorless cameras and DSLRs, more often than not Canons, while they enthusiastically make photographs of the vehicles on display. Then there is the one trend I’ve written about over the past few years and that’s the popular trend of people with film cameras. While this trend might have been initiated by hipsters who didn’t want to shoot the same digital cameras as their parents, this trend seems to be growing with new black and white films, Ektachrome slide film brought back from the dead by Kodak and even a new color negative film from Ilford that I plan on testing in the future.
Photography is clearly not dead but it is certainly changing as any paradigm does over time and I personally don’t think the dust has settled yet. What’s coming? I don’t know, my Magic 8 Ball says, “Reply hazy try again.”
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