Quicker/Easier/Cheaper? Not so.

I really am not intending to continue to single out my friend Derek but seeing that no one else has entered the discussion I am going to continue to use him as an excuse to set down my thoughts here.

What is the goal of, and motivation for, working digitally as a photographer?

The whole point of the new techniques is to deviate from the old ways. Wanting to make the process quicker, easier and cheaper (in all respects) is the desire of the new digital techniques.
Derek. From the discussion that follows this blog entry.

To be completely fair these points are valid -- well, some of them.

Without the need to process film, possibly the most powerful quality of digital capture is that it is immediately to see results and know if you have the shot. This property does not just allow for quicker satisfaction, but also it makes it possible to immediately judge exposure and in a lot of cases adjust and reshoot. So it follows that with digital one can go from shooting to proofing and editing immediately where this is not possible with film. Also, checking exposure is more accurate and expedient than pulling polaroids and/or using a light meter.

The point of expense is sort of arbitrary. Shooting digitally has a lot of upfront costs (cameras, lenses, batteries, memory cards, computers, software, etc) and hard to measure ongoing costs (any of the time spent in front of a screen to produce the final image is not free, even if there is no concrete measure like lab fees). In comparison film, film processing, lab prints are all very good at producing a paper trail of ongoing costs. I suspect that shooting digitally may actually be more expensive in the long term -- cameras obsolesce in about two years, upgrading to the latest software can typically only be postponed until a new camera is purchased or risk not being able to work with said camera, new software requires newer more powerful hardware, etc.

Ultimately this can all be boiled down to the following question:

If there is no film to process, is going from exposure to final image easier?

Well, I think it depends. It depends on the intent, of course.

For the interest of the present argument I am not going to discuss family snapshots, or other photographs that are not made with the intent and purpose of creating an artistic statement, to fulfill the needs of a paying client, or are made contemplatively in any way. Lets call these made, rather than taken, photographs. Taken photographs can also easily be produced with film thanks to the ubiquitous 1HR photolab, with the help of a digital camera and a decent inkjet printer this process is easier and cheaper but the discussion is not enriched by pointing out the obvious.

Made photographs can be created easier with digital capture. If that is your intent. Working digitally gives the photographer control over almost every aspect of the image and invariably this raises the bar for quality. Anyone that labors over their images will strive to fix every missed nuance in a print, work around every weakness of their equipment, get closer to the image they pre-visualized. The opposite is true, the bare minimum (or nothing) can be done in the transition from camera to print. This attitude is not promoted by the tools, it is possibly to be just as lazy with film.

The following I think is true: the new digital tools make the non-creative aspects of image-making quicker and easier. The purely mechanical parts of the process, going from exposure to proofing and editing, are streamlined and made quicker. The photographer is freed to spend more of his valuable and finite time in pre-visualizing and editing, and ultimately has boundless control over his images in a way that could not be possible otherwise. The presumption that this part of the process is easy and effortless is frankly offensive, and minimizes the unseen part of the photographic process.