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.

Full-fledged Photographic Art or Lesser Facsimile Substitute

For some time I have been locked in a -- lets not call it argument, rather lets say -- heated discussion with a good friend and fellow photographer. Derek has over the years changed his opinions and convictions as the essence of his philosophy evolves and changes. Amusingly, he still manages to land every time somewhere opposite of most of my opinions; but, this is the very bread that nourishes intellectual discourse.

At first the rift in opinions was more of a divide between commercial photography pitted against strictly artistic photography. In his words, either to be a "Merchant of Photography" or a "Photographic Artist." This stance evolved to encompass a shunning of all tools in his opinion emblematic of the contemporary commercial photographer: elaborate lighting, digital capture, all manner of digital retouching and manipulation, etc. In reality these things are not solely the domain of the working commercial photographer and can be very powerful tools for creating non-commercial work.

Of course the preeminent sin for many is working digitally. All manner or flimsy arguments have been made, from talk about perverting some imagined truth intrinsic in photographic imagery to an even more laughable argument pinning the very identity of and novel value of photography in the chemical reaction present at the time of exposure. There are other arguments as well, some prove the speaker's detachment form the current state-of-the-art by citing a lesser sharpness and overall quality in the ultimate print. My all time favorite is always the argument that without the traditional chemical reaction of silver halide suspended in a gelatin medium there is no photography. This diminishes the scope of photography and removes the photographic process it from its true arena, the photographers mind. The ultimate print or flickering image projected or transmitted on a screen has always been to me the final representation of a process that is largely unseeable and that takes place in the creator's mind.

My friend most recently seems to posit that images created digitally lack a quintessential property that prevents them from being beautiful objects, and maybe then it follows that they could not be objects of art. It is not fully clear how the distinction can be made, or for what purpose other than to place one subset of images as superior to others. The discourse continues, maybe other readers will share their ideas as comments here or post links to their opinions so that the discussion thread can be continued.

Derek's two recent posts to his own blog prompted the above, and can be seen at the links below:
Object Photography & Digital Camptures
Looking at Photographs