Digital Sucks
Digital Sucks. That’s the name of a website dedicated to photography taken with Holga and other toy cameras. They have some pretty nice photos, and I would be curious to know if they would be offended by my digital pinhole camera. Although the site is on “life support,” and hasn’t been updated in a while, the sermon on the site is an interesting read:
“With digital the geeks have turned the photographic process into a video game. The artform is being corrupted and buried under a mountain of technology. And not only the artform is suffering – the art itself is evaporating.”
Over-the-top, yes, but it is somewhat understandable that a group of low-tech camera enthusiasts would be repulsed by the digital explosion recently. To be honest, I don’t understand why the average consumer has embraced digital photography the way they have. Without a hefty investment in a camera, computer, software, and printer, the quality of digital still can’t compete with even the most inexpensive film cameras. That’s not to mention the huge learning curve and the organization headaches. There is no doubt that we are in the middle of a digital reformation with technology changing many aspects of our life. I don’t think that necessarily means doom for the low-techies. As technology continues to increase, so will the backlash. As more and more people look for low-tech alternatives, I think anti-digital groups like Digital Sucks will also increase in popularity. Maybe pinhole cameras will see an increase in popularity, too.
February 18th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
I sent a couple of my digital pinhole photos to Bill Grimshaw from DigitalSucks. At least he didn’t say that my photos sucked. Here was his response:
Thanks for the photos
I knew sooner or later I’d see some pinhole digitals
Unfortunately you’re too late – Digital Sucks is dead
bg
February 21st, 2005 at 1:13 am
Obviously I like the old low-tech way of doing things with my letterpress, but I think you aren’t seeing many of the benefits that many consumers get from a digital camera.
*”hefty investment”*
Many people already own a computer. There are some great free programs that you can use, and they are constantly getting easier to use. A good printer can cost a good bunch of money, but you will actually save money if you just take your memory card in and pay $.18 per print or about $.12 online. All that and you don’t have to pay for film and prints that you don’t want.
*”the quality of digital still canÂíú compete with even the most inexpensive film camera”*
I totally disagree with this. If you get a decent digital camera it will compete with the average and above average point and shoot cameras. Granted it will cost more money, but think of all of the film that you won’t waste in the next few years. 5MP point and shoot cameras are getting more and more reasonable all of the time.
Digital can also free people to shoot as many photos as they want and not worry about wasting film. This will help in “capturing the moment”, which is the essence of the point and shoot camera. Digital is also a great way to share photos with family and friends.
I don’t think digital is for everyone, but it isn’t just for those of us that have taken a photography class and know Photoshop. I don’t think you are giving many consumers the credit they deserve in learning new programs and technology. For many people it is reinvigorating their interest in photography and that can’t be bad. Long live digital and long live analog.
February 21st, 2005 at 1:56 pm
*”For many people it is reinvigorating their interest in photography”*
No doubt the digital camera has reinvigorated the photography industry, but I don’t know if it is has increased an interest in photography as much as an interest in new gadgets. The role of photography today is much different that pre-digital/pre-one-hour photo processing. I love looking at old photos from the days when photography was an *event.* Looking at snapshots from 50 years ago, you can see the respect and awe the average person had for a photograph. That is lost today mainly because you can take a picture with your cell phone. I am not saying that you need an expensive film camera to take a good photo. I think the Holga crowd shows that more important than your equipment is your understanding and respect for photography. That more than anything is what I think has been lost in the digital revolution.
February 24th, 2005 at 10:03 am
I wrote my college dissertation on precisely this subject, but will try and keep my comments a bit more succinct here!
There are some pretty obvious category errors that can be made when comparing digital images to film images. First of all, the biggest difference between digital and film images is the means of storage and distribution. – regardless of image resolution, relative lens lengths given sensor size and whatever else people might like to debate; the most fundamental paradigm shift in consumer photography occured when a photograph stopped being a physical thing, and became a sequence of abstract data that could be viewed, infinitely duplicated, sent all around the world, and of course permanently deleted at the touch of a button. This sounds like fun, but with the fact that there is no longer any wastage involved in taking a photo, comes a more cavalier attitude to subject matter and technique. Flickr is full of blurry, badly cropped series of photos of things like peoples cats, for example. – not only are they artlessly captured, they are of no interest to anyone but the cat’s owner. At least, with film, because of the time and cost involved, more effort would be put into the craft of photography and photographs would be taken of things which were more suitable to being shared or recorded. However, the film geeks aren’t entirely guiltless, the whole Lomo philosophy is tantamount to the same appropach as the most compulsively snap-happy digital photographer. For more evidence of the conenction between the two, look at the recent sony print ad with a picture of their latest incredible pocket-sized vanity machine, made out of solid osmium or something, with the opening lines from the lomo manifest;’don’t think, shoot’ emblazoned next to it. 6 months and 10000 words it took me to make that point, and they brought out an ad that did it all for me a week later. bummer.
March 1st, 2005 at 7:25 pm
This is perhaps beside the point, but how digital-haters got together (via email, no doubt) and put up a website of all things to voice their dislike of new technology is quite possibly one of the most idiotic things I have ever heard.
March 2nd, 2005 at 8:30 pm
The funny thing about digital is that it’s untimately just an approximation of a curve.
The difference between a digital image or sound and a state-of-the art analog version is easily apparent to anyone that knows the difference. To call analog low-tech is non-sense. If you want to hear nuances in music you haven’t heard from your ipod/mpg3s/cds or your solid state amplifiers go to a high-end stereo store and sample their vacuum tube offerings–you’ll be so amazed you’ll want to relisten to all your music… even mpgs sound better when amplified with a simple triode vacuum tube circut. With digital cable, give me analog any old day — check out what happens to scenes that are in heavy shadow, your cable just can’t transmit enough material because its far more dense than 24 bit color digital technology… and 48 won’t be much better. Film records at imagery at the molecular level… how many levels of gray is that? Records (remember those?)can theoretically contain all the musical information of a performance, not the reduced set of information you hear from a CD or worse yet an mpeg. Fine typography… the difference between lead type or maybe even non-digital film is easily discernable when you start enlarging or viewing through magnification.
Try blowing up an image you took with your digital camera… there’s a limit to the the amount of information it can gather and store. Whereas film contains so much more information–though only to the molecular level–that if you’re image is in focus you can blow it up dozens of times. Did I mention that the color gamut is larger with film? Well it is and that means that you can gather more color information as well.
Digital is far superior for doing just what we’re doing here, or expediting the printing process or making simulations of an original or just dealing with the mountains of data that we see every day, but we also need to recognize and accept that analog–for many types of recordation and duplication is the state of the art.
Mark Duran
October 13th, 2005 at 8:34 am
Cute how digitalsucks (got)gets it’s message out and shares it’s artsy images digitally. Or is that ironic? Time marches on, paradigms shift, wastage happens. Technology is in its pleistocene era and slowly, but certainly, surely it will cover the earth and everthing on it. I love a beautiful gold toned silver print as much as the next person but after 4 days in 2 darkrooms you couldn’t (hell, I couldn’t) tell the difference between it and output from my Epson 4000 that takes 40 minutes. and is totally repeatable. The craft of photography is alive and well and digital.