Since I’ve started taking photography classes I’ve been sort of obsessed with it, so I thought I’d post some thoughts that have been cycling through my mind without regard for the fact that _nobody_ will be interested. However, there is a pretty picture at the end.

on chemistry and digitry:

Photography is just a huge, complicated parlor room chemistry trick. You expose some silver halide crystals on a razor thin sheet of film to light for a bajillionth of a second, process the film in about eight hundred chemicals in complete darkness, shine some light through your negatives and an enlarger onto another material with some more silver on it, dump it in a few more hazardous chemicals, then rinse and dry. All of this has made me realize that digital photography is just as legitimate as film photography. They’re both just ways to capture an image and I’d say that digital photography is even more natural with respect to the original image due to the lack of complicated error prone steps needed to get something you can look at.

With digital photography, cameras can become more portable than ever, though right now it seems manufacturers are content to just put a digital sensor in their existing camera bodies. As sensor technology improves, sensors will be able to get smaller and smaller and “normal” size sensors will become more and more powerful. The need for costly, bulky, medium format cameras could be eliminated as the final image size is determined by the sensor in the camera, not the physical size of the sensor, whereas in traditional photography the amount you can blow up a picture is directly affected by the negative size. This does create the need to upgrade that isn’t currently prevalent in the photography world, my camera that was made in 1986 isn’t all that different from a new camera while a digital camera made in 1999 is already unusable. Whichever way you like it, digital technology is here to stay and it should be interesting to see what the next 5-10 years brings us. Personally, I hope it brings an 11 mega-pixel SLR for under three hundred dollars.

cool toys

Through my Photo 1 teacher I recently discovered toycamera.com, a website devoted to crappy, old, plastic lens camera photography, the idea being to use the camera’s vices to create art. My favorite is the Holga, a piece of crap camera that costs only $16.99 (less if you buy in quantities of 6 or more), and whose natural vignetting gets me the photographic equivalent of aroused. I mean, how cool is this: