----- Original Message ----- From: "Boris Liberman" Subject: Re: Do Smarter Cameras make Dumber Photogs?
> > I still fail to see something here, don't I? Well, yes, but not surprising. Sure we join camera clubs, or internet chat groups such as this, but all we are doing is re-enforcing what we do, and what we know. I have had experience in this that most people haven't had. I have, for the past 2 decades, been on the front lines, so to speak, of the photo processing industry. The mini lab took me from my nice factory job to actually having to deal directly with customers as part of the job. Most of the people on this list, and I am sure everywhere, communicate with people who share their interests, and generally ignore those who do not. I don't have that luxury. I get to communicate with people who know what they are doing, or want to learn on this list and at the various camera clubs and professional organizations that I take part in, but I also have to deal with a completely different group of people as part of my employment. You mentioned how easy it is to operate most other consumer devises. You mentioned cars. I submit that if you checked to see how many people per day in the world are killed or maimed by automobiles, you might change your mind about how easy they are to operate. For an easy to use product, a lot of damage is caused by operator incompetance. I think a good parallel can be drawn from the automobile to the camera. I read somewhere, a while back, I think it was Car and Driver Magazine, that every time a new safety device has been introduced to the automobile, the rate of car accidents has increased, and the rate of injuries has increased as well. This dates right back to the late 1950's and the introduction of the seat belt to independant suspension, radial tires, 5 MPH bumbers, anti lock brakes and air bags. This seems odd. The car is safer, yet it causes more harm. In cameras, I have noted much the same thing. As they add more features to make them work better, faster, easier, more bad photographs get churned out. More of the photographic equivalent of the car wreck, if you like. Technology is both a blessing and a curse, you see. While making it easier to do something by building in a knowledge base of sorts, the product doesn't require the user to know anything, or to really pay much attention to what they are doing. We see it every day, on the freeways and streets. People talking on cell phones while drinking coffee, and trying to navigate a couple of thousand pounds of steel and plastic down the road. Apparently, using a cell phone while driving causes a person to be impaired, very similar to driving while drunk. And we wonder why there are so many car accidents? I have 2 cars. One is power everything, and sits quite high off the ground. The other is a small econobox, with manual everything. Interestingly, I can use my cell phone while driving my 4x4 truck easily. I tried once while driving the Toyota Tercel, and decided quite quickly that I was begging disaster by doing so. Having to think about shifting gears, and having to keep both hands free to operate the vehicle causes me to have to pay attention to what I am doing, and forces me to be a better driver. Using an auto everthing camera doesn't force the user to think so much about what they are doing. You don't have to spend any time looking through the viewfinder setting light meter readings or focussing. You don't even have to look through the viewfinder, in fact. If you are brave, you can set the self timer, throw the camera in the air, and get a perfectly exposed and focused picture. A lot of what I process in a day looks like this is just what the user has done too. Obviously no thought has gone into the composition, exposures are all over the place, and often, the camera has automatically focused on something other than the subject. But it's my fault, the camera is automatic, and they just pushed the button, therefore someone else must have screwed up. Since it wasn't the "photographer", it must have been the lab. It doesn't occur to the bulk of them to consider that the technology they bought into and trust so thoroughly has face planted itself, and they get rather angry and defensive when it is pointed out to them that we just process the crap, they are the ones that put whatever junk images they get onto the film. Digital is even worse. We have an entire society now that trusts technology, sees newer better, faster as a good thing, and is sucking on the digital teat like greedy kittens. They are bringing files in that are too small to print, are too over compressed to print without artifacts, have imbedded profiles that my machine doesn't recognize, and have been over sharpened, over saturated and badly exposed. What do you tell a person that has 128 files on an 8mb card that he wants prints from? What do you tell a person who has saved his files as 256 colour gifs? What do you tell a person who has his camera set to high contrast, high sharpness and small file size? They set it up that way because it looks good on their 10 year old crapovision® monitor, and it fills the screen, there for it should look good on paper. It turns out, you don't even bother to try, they won't believe you, and will in many cases, get verbally abusive as well. It's not their fault, they bought this wonderful camera, and they demand that we give them good results. The root of the problem is that they haven't been forced to learn the basics, and they have no inclination to do it on their own. Interestingly, this does not apply just to average users, the "Joe Sixpack" type. A lot of the working photographers that I know have never had to do a light meter calculation, and don't have a clue about aperture or shutter settings. They literally put the camera on green mode, throw a flash onto the hot shoe, and go off calling themselves "reportage type photographers" which I have come to believe is code for "stupid incompetant idiots with cameras sucking the public into believing he knows what he is doing photographers". And, like the driver who barely knows how to operate a car, and has not even a clue about the forces that cause the vehicle to do what it does, they suffer the carnage of photographic road kill. Unlike the car driver, who sometimes gets a wake up call from the air bad in the steering column, the photographer who hasn't taken the time to learn a few of photography's fundamentals generally blames the problem on the lab and goes off to to repeat the mistakes, over and over again. I had a customer last week bring me her fifth blank film in a row. I guess she didn't learn anything from the first 4, and probably didn't learn anything from the most recent one either. It's sad, because I know she drives a car. William Robb
