tinplater wrote:
Really appreciate your post, very informative. However I find your last sentence surprising. Why does it matter to you what experience and preferences others have? The point is to enjoy what you do and the way that you do it, not what a critic thinks of how you accomplished it.
Thanks for the kind feedback.
It's true people can go off and do their own thing--but only if they can get the
equipment and supplies they need. No company is going to make a camera
because you or I want it. It will get made only if millions of people want it.
This is a big change. I remember a UHH post from a woman who had a "4 x 5"
camera made for her -- including a photo of the (very beautiful) camera.
But most of today's digital cameas use big custom chips (ASICs): Canon calls
its DIGIC, Sony has BIONZ, and Nikon has EXPEED. The captial investment
required to create a new ASIC is tens of millions of dollars. Nobody's going
to make one unless they can sell thousands and thousands of cameras.
I own many cameras for which I can no longer buy film (either roll or sheet).
I cannot make film stock or film: it requiers large, specialized equipment with
very close tolearances. Fortunately, sales of B&W film are booming (though
you wouldn't knwo it from UHH).
But other then film and lenses, if necessary, it is possible to make everything else
one needs for traditional photography: camera, developer, stop, fixer, enlarger, and
paper. Moreover, mechanical and electro-mechanical cameras can be maintained
and repaired fairly easily.
Photography is inherently optical, but it's only eletrical, electronic or chemical if
you want it to be.
The price of using digital technology is total depencence on camera manufactuers,
printer manufactuers, computer manufacturers, and their supply chains. But another
part of the price is extreme complexity: believe me, firmware for an embedded system
is complex, and ASICs are microprocessors are unbelievably complex.
Currently, only three types of photographic (e.g, non-industrial, non-security) digital
cameras are being produced:
* DSLRs
* mirroless with a screen on the back
* mirrorless with a screen inside (EVF)
That's not a lot of choices. If people continue to be lead around by the nose by marketing,
the DSLR may go away. The only camearas with opical viewfinders anymore are DLSRs.
So if they go away, so do optical viewfinders.
We live in a time of reduced choices and diminishing expectations. This is covered up by
golly-gee-whiz computer gadgetry and half-baked automation and a paid cheering section.
If someone claimed to have a portrait-painting machine, people would laugh.
But an automatic portrait-taking camera seems possible to the some people:
AF, AE, AISO..... Yeah, you can take drivers license photos that way.
A photographer is an essential ingredient in photography. The more closely the photographer
controls the process, the better the result can be.
But what Joe Consumer wants is easy and convenient. And his Uncle Bob just
likes fancy gadgets. So that's the direction the industry is going.
Nobody now alive knows how to cast bronze as well as the Shang Dynasty did.
And in not too many years, nobody alive will know how to take a good fine
art photograph. And life will go...just as it would without good artists or good
musicians. But the US no longer leads the world in photography, as it
did in the 1920s though 1970s.
Americans think they are individualists...but they are now corporatists. They drink
Coke, eat Whoppers, smoke Camels...and think that it's all their idea. And now
the ads and paid influencers are telling them to shoot mirrorless...