There are lots of opinions out there and I respect them. I’m a film photographer and I shoot 35mm, medium and large format. My approach for the past 30 years has included one rule I have always followed...do not use electricity with exception to the darkroom and enlarger light. I also make it a point not to scan. I have seen countless analog photographers photoshopping the heck from their scanned image using every adjustment possible with the goal to create a perfect, flawless image. My pure enjoyment shooting analog comes from photographing, negative development and printing development, nothing more, nothing less. Thanks very much for sharing your videos. Best, James
My Parents have a Wrangler of that generation as a tow vehicle for their RV. I have used it on several occasions, including a trip to Zion back in 2011 or so. Their Wrangler has a great aftermarket suspension, which makes it formidable for off road. Just a few observations, the space on the inside is very limited. My backpack alone took up much of the cargo room. You will definitely need to be very efficient with what you pack. Secondly, I had a pretty big case of death wobble while on an elevated (probably 60 foot tall bridge) curving freeway transition ramp at 65mph. It was NOT fun, and I had to fight to keep the jeep under control on that bridge. The steering was pretty useless when the wheels shake like that. Even after it was supposedly fixed, my brother and dad also had issues with it. Make sure you do your homework and make sure that they have absolutely resolved that, because if it happens at just the wrong moment, bad things can happen. :-) One heck of a fun vehicle though.
For me personally I understand your friend’s view of analog photography. (After all your friend’s statement was true until the emergence of digital imaging!) For me art exists at the intersection of some technical skill or craft and a creative drive. This is one reason why I scoff at a lot of modern art as it often doesn’t have that element of a honed and developed skill or technique though it may be highly creative.(I often have a hard time seeing that as well!) And so this is why I approach photography using film and the darkroom. The emergence of digital photography has made photography more accessible and easier and cheaper. For me I want to be in touch with that earlier sense of craftsmanship as part of the art and for me the more you employ digital techniques the further you move away from that. I also find that I have to engage my body and mind in an activity to make it more satisfying and for me a keyboard and mouse don’t count :) I also enjoy woodworking with traditional joinery (no nails or screws) for the same reasons. That being said as a practical matter I employ a mixed analog digital workflow like you in color. And we should perhaps remember that many great film photographers relied on others to print their work so even they may not be seen as absolutely pure in these terms. In the end we should also be wary of snobbery in how we approach others. Art is after all best when it’s egalitarian as it is a deeply human and personal venture. My philosophy when approaching others work is Passion and Integrity. If one can claim this about their work then that is good enough for me. One can define these on ones own terms. Passion is usually easier, though sometimes ephemeral, and Integrity can be difficult as it requires honest introspection of ones work and motivations. Money is just one way of valuing something.
I know photographers in the fine art industry; John Sexton, Anne Larsen, Alan Ross, Charles Cramer, and I have never heard them say something that short-sighted. Mr. Cramer moved from a process the same as Burkett's into a total digital process and he loves it. John, Anne, and Alan prefer the darkroom process but by no means disregard digital as art. I don't know of whom you were discussing this with, but their view is extremely limiting. Personally, I do both processes and love them both although the darkroom process is quite a bit more tiring being on your feet for hours. Thanks and glad you have your transportation and take us viewers out with you.
Oh wow this conversation you're talking about sure sounds familiar! ;) For the record, I totally agree with everything you said in this video. The camera is just a means. Like Brooks Jenson was saying, all digital does is speed the journey up until you hit the real challenge of being an artist. Conveying your vision is no easier with a digital camera.
Great points Justin. I shoot 35mm, MF and LF. Digital with a Fuji and Canon. I print in the darkroom and I scan my negatives. The process I get the most satisfaction from is analogue. It's my personal experience with the medium and tools involved. Analogue is a zen experience for me, a time of quiet, being thoughtful and working without the use of computers. This does not mean my analogue images are better or worse composed, I put the same effort into both mediums because I am visualizing my final image, regardless if i can hold it in my hand at the end of the day or not. Our compositions are not 'fake' because the light hits a sensor and no more valid beacuse it ended up on a 4x5 or 8x10 sheet of film.The vision is always the same, the final medium may differ, Keep up the good work! Cheers, Andy
another great and insightful video always love coming back to your channel and learning from you and hearing your thoughts thanks for sharing this with us really enjoyed watching this
Another great and controversial topic. Wish we could have this talk over a couple of beers. First, the person you were talking to sounds more like an elitist than a photographer or photo enthusiast. Photography has been evolving since it's inception. To put a restriction on the new technology saying "its not photography because....." is ridiculous. Maybe they were doing that 100 years ago when they switched over from wet plating on glass to film photography. You as an artist decide on the instruments you will use to get the results that you want. That's all that matters. film, digital, 35mm or LF camera, digital print, P&P, Carbon print doesn't matter what it is. All that matters is the print itself. Is it interesting? Does it move you? Does it hold your attention? These are the questions we need to be asking not did they shoot film? Did they scan it or print it directly?
Hey! COOL! Been watching your channel a ton the last couple days and was stoked to see my nebula elements used in your intro! Keep it up! Love the channel. Fixing to go down the whole large format rabbit hole - and your vids have been super helpful/interesting.
No need to add any specific credit or anything. Those elements were created for www.rocketstock.com to be used however anyone wants to use them - I was just stoked to run across them in the wild on a great channel. Keep crushing it and keep the analog magic going!
Well said. I feel that some of the greats would have grabbed the technology we have today with both hands. Regarding vehicles, the norm here in Europe is Manual Transmission (Stick Shift) for better fuel economy and performance. Hybrids which are Automatic and almost fully computerised can now do better - sorry just me being random 😂
Justin Lowery Ahh you youngsters and your fancy automatic gadgets. It isn’t real driving if you have an automatic transmission, power steering and power brakes and an electric starter... :)
Earlier this week Kelby One had a viewing of their recent photographer contest winner Ramin Kazemi. A landscape photographer from Canada. If you get a chance check out his work on line. He has a great eye for composition and has some beautiful images but I wouldn't buy anyone of them. They were to surreal for my taste. To me they looked more like illustrations than photography. On the opposite of that I have seen a lot wet prints. I can appreciate the effort and work it goes in to making one of those prints I have yet to see one that I thought was a good photograph. As I said earlier it doesn't matter how you got the print. All that matters is is it a good print? Is it something I want on my wall. thanks for a great thought provoking topic.
You know what that view point is? It's someone who wants to feel really special and keep their hobby as "Theirs". I've found most of the people who do this are the types who define every aspect of their lives by their hobbies/job. The same views are often touted in many other hobbies as well. From sports to video game collecting. People who set specific, silly rules which conveniently, they fall perfectly into. It's called Gatekeeping. With enough money literally anyone could buy analog large format, pay for it to be developed, pay for it to be printed. It's not hard to buy stuff. Surely what makes photography is the output that someone can make given the tools provided for them. The skills they can develop using those materials. This person has basically said "Photography is an art only available to people who spent over X amount of $£" regardless out output quality.
As a recent film enthusiast I can understand the point the other person was trying to make. When you do everything analog, everything matters. The photographer has to think about every step before doing them. While that doesn't exactly make one a photographer or a better photographer, it does allow for greater knowledge and understanding of what photography is. Which one could assume means an analog photographer is a real/better photographer. I've had pretty intense conversations with others discussing what is photography or what is fine art photography, and through them I've learned that you can't make those general statements because in reality they fall apart. If thats how the person you were talking with believes will persuade people they are very wrong. I love shooting film and will probably never go back to digital, but that alone doesn't make me a photographer or a better photographer. The process is important, but so is the final outcome.
Justin Lowery I agree with your views of film in terms of developing as an artist and the joy of the process. I also get the motivations in terms of the look of film vs digital. But I also sense that another reason for a shift from digital to film and large format film amongst some professional or aspiring professional photographers is to distinguish themselves in a crowded digital marketplace by leveraging the cachet that film apparently still has (and the extra effort required distances them as well). After all do you really need an 8x10 negative scanned to 6000 dpi to make large prints? No criticism implied, I love that film still has an appeal and glad that people have figured out how to make a living at their passion.
That person's definition of photography is pretty extreme. Maybe that's how he see's his work but I definitely disagree with that. Congratulations on the jeep! That looks really cool.
Agree with you. It's an interesting opinion though, if rather silly and pretentious. I think a more honest and accurate way to put it is that film photography, especially if kept entirely analog throughout, has much greater cachet (and novelty, in this era), and that does legitimately translate to greater value, but it can't be said that this is the one thing that defines value, and it's ridiculous to suggest that something as obviously subjective as value can be assessed by only one measure, weighted in only one way, by all people. To say that photography is only what results from a full analog process is to define it entirely by the process divorced from the results, which seems to miss the point. It's also much the same as the view from the art world before photography was at all accepted as an art form: painting is art, if the image is created with a camera it can't be art. I'm guessing anyone who would have such a radically specific and possessive definition of what is allowed to constitute photography would also vehemently insist that a photograph can be art, and so could not possibly agree when the painting world applies the exact same gatekeeping attitude to the photo world. So many things in life are a matter of not just hazy shades of grey but also lines in the sand, and if we realize how arbitrary our decision on line placement is it defeats the purpose of many of our definition lines: to oversimplify the world in a reductionist manner and synthesize a view of it that we can fully understand, tightly grasp, and defend against disagreements. That said, I find it interesting that the line being drawn here is the point at which a photo becomes "digital imaging" or digital art, because that's a line I apply myself, and have strong opinions about. You're being told that you're merely creating digital art as soon as your entirely analog image gets put into or passed through the digital medium. But in my opinion, this line is more about the use of digital for content-altering manipulation that creates an end result not (practically) possible by photographic means. So to me, digital photography is still photography (of course) but with the tools of our times, digital editing is still a modern interpretation of photographic process, something like combining multiple frames into a panorama is just a much more effective method of achieving something done in the film era too, but when we pull a bunch of photos into photoshop to use merely as photographic ingredients to combine into a final image that has no basis in reality and only came into being within the digital realm, that crosses over into the realm of digital imagery. You can tie wings on a horse to create Pegasus and take a photo of that and it's a photo of a non-existent creature that's still based in reality, but if you take a photo of a horse and draw wings on it, that's synthesized rather than being an interpretation of reality, and enters the realm of painting rather than respecting the qualities and strengths unique to the photographic medium. That doesn't mean that an image created that way can't have value, just that it's stepped into a different classification. To relate it to me in another way, I'm a gear snob, especially when it comes to lenses. *I* get more enjoyment using certain kinds of equipment, *I* enjoy the differences in the results I get from particular lenses, and *I* find it more satisfying to use these preferred tools. In addition to that, the equipment I use lends value to the end result in the sense that, frankly, a *lot* of my online engagement and exposure comes from people wanting to see results from the equipment I use, and not at all from the quality of my work. That's not good but it's the reality for me. But I realize the differences created by my gear fussiness are subtle and significant to few, the true quality and value of the end result is not determined by the brand names I used, and my approach is in pursuit of my own satisfaction, not a misguided attempt to crack the "good photos code" by combining the correct items. Placing such an extreme and absolute amount of emphasis on the entirely analog approach to create a photo seems like a vain attempt at cracking the code, or of putting a combination lock on the gate to where you want others to *think* they need to go. In the end, photography has always been a technology. Painting is a technology. Drawing in dirt with a stick might not be a technology, but even drawing is a technology once you sharpen that stick in order to do it more precisely. In general, drawing a line dividing which amount of technology is and isn't acceptable is difficult to pull off in a way that will be sensible across a broad group, and not just applicable to a niche within it. When a painting is done digitally, and can then be exactly reproduced in any number, that fundamentally changes painting at an identity level, just like how a print of a painting has to be considered as something different from an original painting. In photography's case, the use of technology to create an image that can be reproduced and widely distributed has always been its identity, and digital technology expands that but doesn't deviate from that identity. I guess if you wanted to get really demanding about what does and doesn't have value, you could say that only original paintings and only original negatives have value, but not prints made from either. Taking the attitude to its endpoint like that at least makes consistent sense... though at that point you're redefining the identity of photography in favor of a pointless consistency with the more traditional art world. I guess that approach could be seen as amusingly close to giving the Pictorialists what they should have been careful about wishing for. :D
One other quick note: I referred to this viewpoint as pretentious, which is something I usually avoid because it's generally used in such a heavily pejorative sense, but that wasn't really my intent. The conclusion I've come to is that, whether we realize it or not, it's nearly impossible for us to not sound at least somewhat pretentious when talking about something we're knowledgeable and passionate about, because knowledge breeds opinions and beliefs, passion lends enthusiasm, and it's often impractically challenging to share an opinion on a complicated topic so completely and even-handedly that we don't come off as a little full of ourselves. So I'm not trying to call your friend a pretentious person in a general sense, just saying that their knowledge and passion has led them into an opinion that would likely benefit from greater examination and less absolutist vehemence in its expression.
dear God...... I was left with an open mouth. That is extremely funny and ridiculous at the same time. These people need to travel every inch of the world and start experiencing all kinds of things and talk to many different people from different cultures cause otherwise they are going to die in their miserable little hole. The amount of close mindedness on some people leaves always amazed. Unbelievable. I would struggle talking seriously to them after hearing such things. Really hard not to make fun of them. I guess I’m a bad person, I hope you restrained yourself!
This is just another expression of our current internet-minded society... where the misconception is that every voice/opinion is equal and valid... even the most ridiculous, extreme viewpoints such as the one you started this with. That person is a fool, and their position is to be ridiculed. The moment a person starts emphasizing specific gear or techniques as canonical, I stop listening and write off that viewpoint. Its meaningless drivel. I've shot everything from fully manual twin lens and single lens reflex cameras to pinhole cameras, view cameras, cell phones and now DSLR's and mirrorless.... And you could never tell what camera I used in any of my photos or even if its film or digital... and that's because the gear is meaningless beyond its basic ability to record light. Its a tool... but without the artist, the tool is a useless lump of matter. Someone who focuses on gear is not an artist, they are a consumer.
Is photography art?? NO!! according to the purists of the past!! What is full frame?.... Do your research and decide for yourself!! Why does a piece of art need critique??? IT DOESN'T!!! Everybody has an opinion! BUT not everybody's opinion is right! especially for the next artist or the artist whom has created said piece! These are age old opinions...... None are right or wrong... They are just opinions! Some purists are a bit too purist.... But so were those purists whom denounced photography as art all those years ago when it was in its infancy!! My opinion is.....She's way too stuck up her own ar*e hole to have a valid opinion! (And I love shooting film) Regards A Better Angle xxx
There are lots of opinions out there and I respect them. I’m a film photographer and I shoot 35mm, medium and large format. My approach for the past 30 years has included one rule I have always followed...do not use electricity with exception to the darkroom and enlarger light. I also make it a point not to scan. I have seen countless analog photographers photoshopping the heck from their scanned image using every adjustment possible with the goal to create a perfect, flawless image. My pure enjoyment shooting analog comes from photographing, negative development and printing development, nothing more, nothing less. Thanks very much for sharing your videos. Best, James
Can't wait to see where you go and what you get with the new vehicle!
My Parents have a Wrangler of that generation as a tow vehicle for their RV. I have used it on several occasions, including a trip to Zion back in 2011 or so. Their Wrangler has a great aftermarket suspension, which makes it formidable for off road. Just a few observations, the space on the inside is very limited. My backpack alone took up much of the cargo room. You will definitely need to be very efficient with what you pack. Secondly, I had a pretty big case of death wobble while on an elevated (probably 60 foot tall bridge) curving freeway transition ramp at 65mph. It was NOT fun, and I had to fight to keep the jeep under control on that bridge. The steering was pretty useless when the wheels shake like that. Even after it was supposedly fixed, my brother and dad also had issues with it. Make sure you do your homework and make sure that they have absolutely resolved that, because if it happens at just the wrong moment, bad things can happen. :-) One heck of a fun vehicle though.
For me personally I understand your friend’s view of analog photography. (After all your friend’s statement was true until the emergence of digital imaging!) For me art exists at the intersection of some technical skill or craft and a creative drive. This is one reason why I scoff at a lot of modern art as it often doesn’t have that element of a honed and developed skill or technique though it may be highly creative.(I often have a hard time seeing that as well!) And so this is why I approach photography using film and the darkroom. The emergence of digital photography has made photography more accessible and easier and cheaper.
For me I want to be in touch with that earlier sense of craftsmanship as part of the art and for me the more you employ digital techniques the further you move away from that. I also find that I have to engage my body and mind in an activity to make it more satisfying and for me a keyboard and mouse don’t count :) I also enjoy woodworking with traditional joinery (no nails or screws) for the same reasons.
That being said as a practical matter I employ a mixed analog digital workflow like you in color. And we should perhaps remember that many great film photographers relied on others to print their work so even they may not be seen as absolutely pure in these terms.
In the end we should also be wary of snobbery in how we approach others. Art is after all best when it’s egalitarian as it is a deeply human and personal venture. My philosophy when approaching others work is Passion and Integrity. If one can claim this about their work then that is good enough for me. One can define these on ones own terms. Passion is usually easier, though sometimes ephemeral, and Integrity can be difficult as it requires honest introspection of ones work and motivations.
Money is just one way of valuing something.
I know photographers in the fine art industry; John Sexton, Anne Larsen, Alan Ross, Charles Cramer, and I have never heard them say something that short-sighted. Mr. Cramer moved from a process the same as Burkett's into a total digital process and he loves it. John, Anne, and Alan prefer the darkroom process but by no means disregard digital as art. I don't know of whom you were discussing this with, but their view is extremely limiting. Personally, I do both processes and love them both although the darkroom process is quite a bit more tiring being on your feet for hours. Thanks and glad you have your transportation and take us viewers out with you.
Oh wow this conversation you're talking about sure sounds familiar! ;) For the record, I totally agree with everything you said in this video. The camera is just a means. Like Brooks Jenson was saying, all digital does is speed the journey up until you hit the real challenge of being an artist. Conveying your vision is no easier with a digital camera.
Great points Justin. I shoot 35mm, MF and LF. Digital with a Fuji and Canon. I print in the darkroom and I scan my negatives. The process I get the most satisfaction from is analogue. It's my personal experience with the medium and tools involved. Analogue is a zen experience for me, a time of quiet, being thoughtful and working without the use of computers. This does not mean my analogue images are better or worse composed, I put the same effort into both mediums because I am visualizing my final image, regardless if i can hold it in my hand at the end of the day or not. Our compositions are not 'fake' because the light hits a sensor and no more valid beacuse it ended up on a 4x5 or 8x10 sheet of film.The vision is always the same, the final medium may differ, Keep up the good work! Cheers, Andy
Wonderful and interesting video...I couldn’t agree with you more!
See you out on the trail Justin.
Couldn’t agree more !!
another great and insightful video
always love coming back to your channel and learning from you and hearing your thoughts
thanks for sharing this with us
really enjoyed watching this
Another great and controversial topic. Wish we could have this talk over a couple of beers. First, the person you were talking to sounds more like an elitist than a photographer or photo enthusiast. Photography has been evolving since it's inception. To put a restriction on the new technology saying "its not photography because....." is ridiculous. Maybe they were doing that 100 years ago when they switched over from wet plating on glass to film photography. You as an artist decide on the instruments you will use to get the results that you want. That's all that matters. film, digital, 35mm or LF camera, digital print, P&P, Carbon print doesn't matter what it is. All that matters is the print itself. Is it interesting? Does it move you? Does it hold your attention? These are the questions we need to be asking not did they shoot film? Did they scan it or print it directly?
Jeep looks great brother! Love the red too :)
@@justinlowery6017 Very cool man!
Hey! COOL! Been watching your channel a ton the last couple days and was stoked to see my nebula elements used in your intro! Keep it up! Love the channel. Fixing to go down the whole large format rabbit hole - and your vids have been super helpful/interesting.
No need to add any specific credit or anything. Those elements were created for www.rocketstock.com to be used however anyone wants to use them - I was just stoked to run across them in the wild on a great channel. Keep crushing it and keep the analog magic going!
Well said. I feel that some of the greats would have grabbed the technology we have today with both hands.
Regarding vehicles, the norm here in Europe is Manual Transmission (Stick Shift) for better fuel economy and performance.
Hybrids which are Automatic and almost fully computerised can now do better - sorry just me being random 😂
Justin Lowery Ahh you youngsters and your fancy automatic gadgets. It isn’t real driving if you have an automatic transmission, power steering and power brakes and an electric starter... :)
Earlier this week Kelby One had a viewing of their recent photographer contest winner Ramin Kazemi. A landscape photographer from Canada. If you get a chance check out his work on line. He has a great eye for composition and has some beautiful images but I wouldn't buy anyone of them. They were to surreal for my taste. To me they looked more like illustrations than photography. On the opposite of that I have seen a lot wet prints. I can appreciate the effort and work it goes in to making one of those prints I have yet to see one that I thought was a good photograph. As I said earlier it doesn't matter how you got the print. All that matters is is it a good print? Is it something I want on my wall. thanks for a great thought provoking topic.
You know what that view point is? It's someone who wants to feel really special and keep their hobby as "Theirs". I've found most of the people who do this are the types who define every aspect of their lives by their hobbies/job.
The same views are often touted in many other hobbies as well. From sports to video game collecting. People who set specific, silly rules which conveniently, they fall perfectly into.
It's called Gatekeeping. With enough money literally anyone could buy analog large format, pay for it to be developed, pay for it to be printed. It's not hard to buy stuff. Surely what makes photography is the output that someone can make given the tools provided for them. The skills they can develop using those materials.
This person has basically said "Photography is an art only available to people who spent over X amount of $£" regardless out output quality.
As a recent film enthusiast I can understand the point the other person was trying to make. When you do everything analog, everything matters. The photographer has to think about every step before doing them. While that doesn't exactly make one a photographer or a better photographer, it does allow for greater knowledge and understanding of what photography is. Which one could assume means an analog photographer is a real/better photographer.
I've had pretty intense conversations with others discussing what is photography or what is fine art photography, and through them I've learned that you can't make those general statements because in reality they fall apart. If thats how the person you were talking with believes will persuade people they are very wrong.
I love shooting film and will probably never go back to digital, but that alone doesn't make me a photographer or a better photographer. The process is important, but so is the final outcome.
Justin Lowery I agree with your views of film in terms of developing as an artist and the joy of the process. I also get the motivations in terms of the look of film vs digital. But I also sense that another reason for a shift from digital to film and large format film amongst some professional or aspiring professional photographers is to distinguish themselves in a crowded digital marketplace by leveraging the cachet that film apparently still has (and the extra effort required distances them as well). After all do you really need an 8x10 negative scanned to 6000 dpi to make large prints? No criticism implied, I love that film still has an appeal and glad that people have figured out how to make a living at their passion.
That person's definition of photography is pretty extreme. Maybe that's how he see's his work but I definitely disagree with that. Congratulations on the jeep! That looks really cool.
Agree with you. It's an interesting opinion though, if rather silly and pretentious. I think a more honest and accurate way to put it is that film photography, especially if kept entirely analog throughout, has much greater cachet (and novelty, in this era), and that does legitimately translate to greater value, but it can't be said that this is the one thing that defines value, and it's ridiculous to suggest that something as obviously subjective as value can be assessed by only one measure, weighted in only one way, by all people. To say that photography is only what results from a full analog process is to define it entirely by the process divorced from the results, which seems to miss the point. It's also much the same as the view from the art world before photography was at all accepted as an art form: painting is art, if the image is created with a camera it can't be art. I'm guessing anyone who would have such a radically specific and possessive definition of what is allowed to constitute photography would also vehemently insist that a photograph can be art, and so could not possibly agree when the painting world applies the exact same gatekeeping attitude to the photo world. So many things in life are a matter of not just hazy shades of grey but also lines in the sand, and if we realize how arbitrary our decision on line placement is it defeats the purpose of many of our definition lines: to oversimplify the world in a reductionist manner and synthesize a view of it that we can fully understand, tightly grasp, and defend against disagreements.
That said, I find it interesting that the line being drawn here is the point at which a photo becomes "digital imaging" or digital art, because that's a line I apply myself, and have strong opinions about. You're being told that you're merely creating digital art as soon as your entirely analog image gets put into or passed through the digital medium. But in my opinion, this line is more about the use of digital for content-altering manipulation that creates an end result not (practically) possible by photographic means. So to me, digital photography is still photography (of course) but with the tools of our times, digital editing is still a modern interpretation of photographic process, something like combining multiple frames into a panorama is just a much more effective method of achieving something done in the film era too, but when we pull a bunch of photos into photoshop to use merely as photographic ingredients to combine into a final image that has no basis in reality and only came into being within the digital realm, that crosses over into the realm of digital imagery. You can tie wings on a horse to create Pegasus and take a photo of that and it's a photo of a non-existent creature that's still based in reality, but if you take a photo of a horse and draw wings on it, that's synthesized rather than being an interpretation of reality, and enters the realm of painting rather than respecting the qualities and strengths unique to the photographic medium. That doesn't mean that an image created that way can't have value, just that it's stepped into a different classification.
To relate it to me in another way, I'm a gear snob, especially when it comes to lenses. *I* get more enjoyment using certain kinds of equipment, *I* enjoy the differences in the results I get from particular lenses, and *I* find it more satisfying to use these preferred tools. In addition to that, the equipment I use lends value to the end result in the sense that, frankly, a *lot* of my online engagement and exposure comes from people wanting to see results from the equipment I use, and not at all from the quality of my work. That's not good but it's the reality for me. But I realize the differences created by my gear fussiness are subtle and significant to few, the true quality and value of the end result is not determined by the brand names I used, and my approach is in pursuit of my own satisfaction, not a misguided attempt to crack the "good photos code" by combining the correct items. Placing such an extreme and absolute amount of emphasis on the entirely analog approach to create a photo seems like a vain attempt at cracking the code, or of putting a combination lock on the gate to where you want others to *think* they need to go.
In the end, photography has always been a technology. Painting is a technology. Drawing in dirt with a stick might not be a technology, but even drawing is a technology once you sharpen that stick in order to do it more precisely. In general, drawing a line dividing which amount of technology is and isn't acceptable is difficult to pull off in a way that will be sensible across a broad group, and not just applicable to a niche within it. When a painting is done digitally, and can then be exactly reproduced in any number, that fundamentally changes painting at an identity level, just like how a print of a painting has to be considered as something different from an original painting. In photography's case, the use of technology to create an image that can be reproduced and widely distributed has always been its identity, and digital technology expands that but doesn't deviate from that identity. I guess if you wanted to get really demanding about what does and doesn't have value, you could say that only original paintings and only original negatives have value, but not prints made from either. Taking the attitude to its endpoint like that at least makes consistent sense... though at that point you're redefining the identity of photography in favor of a pointless consistency with the more traditional art world. I guess that approach could be seen as amusingly close to giving the Pictorialists what they should have been careful about wishing for. :D
One other quick note: I referred to this viewpoint as pretentious, which is something I usually avoid because it's generally used in such a heavily pejorative sense, but that wasn't really my intent. The conclusion I've come to is that, whether we realize it or not, it's nearly impossible for us to not sound at least somewhat pretentious when talking about something we're knowledgeable and passionate about, because knowledge breeds opinions and beliefs, passion lends enthusiasm, and it's often impractically challenging to share an opinion on a complicated topic so completely and even-handedly that we don't come off as a little full of ourselves. So I'm not trying to call your friend a pretentious person in a general sense, just saying that their knowledge and passion has led them into an opinion that would likely benefit from greater examination and less absolutist vehemence in its expression.
dear God...... I was left with an open mouth. That is extremely funny and ridiculous at the same time. These people need to travel every inch of the world and start experiencing all kinds of things and talk to many different people from different cultures cause otherwise they are going to die in their miserable little hole. The amount of close mindedness on some people leaves always amazed. Unbelievable. I would struggle talking seriously to them after hearing such things. Really hard not to make fun of them. I guess I’m a bad person, I hope you restrained yourself!
They are wrong. .
This is just another expression of our current internet-minded society... where the misconception is that every voice/opinion is equal and valid... even the most ridiculous, extreme viewpoints such as the one you started this with. That person is a fool, and their position is to be ridiculed.
The moment a person starts emphasizing specific gear or techniques as canonical, I stop listening and write off that viewpoint. Its meaningless drivel. I've shot everything from fully manual twin lens and single lens reflex cameras to pinhole cameras, view cameras, cell phones and now DSLR's and mirrorless.... And you could never tell what camera I used in any of my photos or even if its film or digital... and that's because the gear is meaningless beyond its basic ability to record light. Its a tool... but without the artist, the tool is a useless lump of matter.
Someone who focuses on gear is not an artist, they are a consumer.
Is photography art?? NO!! according to the purists of the past!!
What is full frame?.... Do your research and decide for yourself!!
Why does a piece of art need critique??? IT DOESN'T!!! Everybody has an opinion! BUT not everybody's opinion is right! especially for the next artist or the artist whom has created said piece!
These are age old opinions...... None are right or wrong... They are just opinions!
Some purists are a bit too purist.... But so were those purists whom denounced photography as art all those years ago when it was in its infancy!!
My opinion is.....She's way too stuck up her own ar*e hole to have a valid opinion! (And I love shooting film)
Regards
A Better Angle xxx
Justin Lowery Agreed. Always a pleasure Justin 😊
Happy shooting too