Nothing photo-equipment-related is going anywhere.
How do I know this?
Simple.
Digital is a social medium.
Analog can be, but also can be a private medium.
Depends on "social" and which society we're talking about.


Point in question:

During a recent visit to Hong Kong (yes, last year during the riots for democracy there), I noticed two things that people here in the US don't.

1) there were many (and I mean hundreds) of film processing and printing one-hour outfits still doing business, and also many (and I mean tens per neighborhood) of camera stores still open and doing business;

2) there are many (I mean tens in the area) camera service and repair stores, still doing business. All of them had analog cameras in their display windows. I'm talking Arcas, Contaxes, as well as Canons, Nikons;

3) I visited my old go-to camera store, last visited in the 90's, and not only was it still open, with over a thousand cameras up and for sale, used and new, but

but

there was EXACTLY ONE Leica Digilux 2 digital camera among all the tens of Leicas, Canons, Nikons, Alpas, Contaxes Rolleis, etc for sale.

There were NO OTHER DIGITAL CAMERAS either on display or for sale from that store.

I was completely stunned.

BTW the sales team in the store was the exact same sales team from 30 plus years ago who not only recognized me be asked me how life was in Los Angeles, from where I now hail.

Anyway, enough preamble. Here's the reason why.


The Chinese Government keeps track and regulates everything digital in China.
That specifically relates to all things that have pictures.

There are some among us (humans, even in communist China) who don't like that.

So they still do what we have always done. They shoot film, make one-hour prints, and give them, as the precious and sometimes private gifts that they were here and continue to be over there, to each other. (You know, photo albums and such. Quaint, I know.)

Hence all the analog cameras, and all the one-hour and custom labs and print shops.

Huge, huge business from mainland China. For those of you who don't know, there are more people over there than there ever was over here.

So.

Yes, digital is great, fine, super, etc.
But only in certain societies.

In the biggest population on this planet of ours, analog seems to not only have NOT gone away, it is well, and flourishing.

DSLRs? Well they were long considered the pinnacle of 35mm film camera designs. But there are mirrorless 35mm cameras, like the Leicas, that still rule the roost as well. And apparently those strange but wonderful devices such as the persnickety but perfectly serviceable Leica Visoflexes that can move one single type of camera firmly into the reflex field, so that M users can have reflex system capability as well.

But who needs them? Film is dead and DSLRs are dead, right?

Sure. Sell them all, and let the dinosaurs like me and the new photo stores in Hong Kong and other societies keep on snapping them up at bargain-basement clearance prices while our kids all go for their iPhone 25's or Android Super Duper XXXs, and then "graduate" to the latest plastic digital equipment with every more petapixels that most will never ever need or use. Not on social media, anyway.

Please. A well-built analog camera lasts for a very long time, mirror or not.

My IIIf still works well enough to shoot a "modern lifestyle" assignment last month. What year was that made in?

If it's a dinosaur, it seems to me to be in great health, for a bag-o-bones. And I still have fully functional, and sometimes in service, Nikon F3HP, F4S, F2A, F plus Leica film SL and SL2 bodies.

Compared to the longest-lasting digital dinosaur? Probably, according to the Leica forum's longest single thread in existence, the 5MP Digilux-2's March 28, 2007-originated one, still very much alive today, that would be, what, some 13 years?

The IIIf was for sale, brand new, in 1950, 17 years after the original Leica III came out. Mine still works some 70 years later. And there are still people, yes, even here in the USA, who know how to service them properly.

Plus it's still a commercially viable image acquisition tool: my local (Hong Konger owner run) film lab, print store and scanner service still functions here in Los Angeles, and is reasonably busy still even through this pandemic. So film is still available, the lab still runs, prints and digital copies are still possible.

What can I say? The 70-year-old dinosaur may be long dead and gone - but nobody sent it the memo so it just keeps on tickin'...

Quel horreur! Digital sacrilege!

Will new camera companies keep on trying to sell new cameras to kids?

Surely. Apple foremost.

And hey, I own one of those too. Nothing wrong with it.
And yes, it replaced a whole slew of analog cameras, and yes, specifically, the comparable ones, made of plastic, some even with plastic lenses, or built around a roll of film that one just sent to the lab to be broken open for the film roll to be taken out and processed... well yes. Digital will replace shoddily made plasticky snapshot cameras from the Kodak Brownie on down.

But.

There are no. None. Zero. Plasticky made SLRs on the planet. It takes real engineering knowhow to make one of those work. D or no D.

Nikon F. Pentax Spotmatic. Alpa Swiss. Even my very first SLR as a spotty teenager, the 1952 Zenit M39. All pretty much built like tanks. My SL and SL2s still work like clockwork, maybe because their progenitors were indeed drawn up by folk who used to be Swiss watchmakers. Listen to their mechanical shutters go off at 1/4 or 1/2 second and you will know exactly what I mean.

Will today's manufacturers still continue to make (Sacrilege!) mechanical cameras with mirrors in them? Well I know of at least one who will continue, probably because the others won't.

Does that mean the old cameras will turn into dust?

Well, that depends. Even as recently as the 90's (and that's a whole 30 years ago, BTW, for those who don't want to count up that far), people were actually making equipment that lasted beyond the current 3-year warranty cycles. And they didn't go for planned obsolescence, where said equipment is designed to fall apart to dust exactly a day after said warranty expires, or their designers get fired).

Especially not the analog photo dinosaurs. They built stuff to last. And last they have.

And pretty soon, who knows? Our societies here in the first world might get really tired of our imagery being thought of as disposable digital toilet paper. And being plundered and exploited by the very social media corporations that could be as venal to our self-interest as the Government of the People's Republic of China is to their own population's rights to privacy.

And so, well, we might well think about keeping all of our analog cameras, darkroom equipment, and the like, just cos.

As a pro, I've dumped a lot of that gear over the past 30-40 years.

But as a pro, I've since bought a lot of it back again, when one day, one job just needed a real tilt-shift f/32 job by somebody who still knows who or what Scheimpflug is -- or a real TLR job (yes, there are such things still), or something we used to have, but replaced it for "better".

"Newer" is not necessarily "better".

There.

Now you know everything.

Sorry for the rant, HTH, Jm2c, YMMV etc.

Thanks, DirtFarmer, good to know.

FWIW I've done a ton of sky and other background replacement on my own shots - usually only as a background though, when circumstances have led to a shoot with great interior conditions, for instance, and less-than-acceptable sky conditions. I think that's where most of the sky-replacement situations would arise. For instance, in shooting real estate or architectural jobs where there's a set date and time to shoot, and the weather's not the best. Mostly I'd try to come back another time, but sometimes I don't have that luxury, so take the shots knowing that I'd be replacing the skies later on.

I can remember more than one shoot where the day was overcast or patchy, so I took additional sky shots from the street outside the property afterwards, specifically for sky replacement purposes, when the sky cleared up. Saved the matching of time/sun and sky direction/season/latitude in post, and the avoidance of other/library shots that might or might not match up.

Since a lot of those kinds of shots require exposure bracketing and Photoshop layer combination anyway, changing out a sky can be as easy as substituting a Photoshop layer.


However, for me, when I'm actually shooting a photo of the sky, or of a skyscape more than a landscape, then it's usually the sky (or cloud formation or weather feature) itself that draws my attention to shoot it in the first place - so in that instance, sky replacement for me hasn't seemed to make much sense.

In that enough people have used the feature, or wanted the feature to be in, that a program such as Photoshop now includes it as a feature...
well, that must mean it's popular.
However, the definitions of "good" and "popular" have always been somewhat at odds, and as such up for debate.
[edit: not forgetting the definition of "profitable" :-) too! ]

People edit photos because:

1) they need to add something they want;
2) they need to remove something they don't want, or
3) because they can.

Or 4) because someone else did it. Which amounts to the same thing, egos aside.

Usually it starts because of 1 or 2. Then they show their work to others and usually it's those other people who then think of 3), or 4).


Also
Photos are

A)taken (subtractive, starting from the entire universe and then framing out what is not required as the subject(s), or

B)made (additive, starting from a white studio background paper, for instance, and adding in the required subject(s).

In other media, we have the same kind of distinction - there is the documentary film (starting from the world) or the fiction film (starting from the script), the fiction or non-fiction book, the representative or impressionist painting, etc.

Both forms are valid.

Note those are also the base types of intellectual/technical ("neck-up") as well as the more artistic/emotional/visceral ("neck-down") forms of communication.


Most pros need to show competence in all four forms and types in order to get hired.


Also,
"Creativity" is usually arrived at by the fresh and thus unusual combination of two or more known aspects of form, content, etc.

So little wonder that the ideas of the "made" photo (additive composition and compositing) get mixed in with the "taken" photo (i.e. the "purist" subject-only concept) and get called "creative" and thus desirable, innovative, etc.

But these are, well, just facets of the same diamond. Always changing, depending on how you look at it.

Which facet is right? Better? More correct? Too much? Too little?
Ah, there's much food for thought indeed!

I say that we, all of us, all need to be at least familiar with all of these approaches, to a greater or lesser degree.

Then it's up to our own personal taste (or the taste of our client), to determine which approach, or blend, to use, for what kind of work we are going to make.

Happy 2020 all!
Such the archetypically interesting topic!
I think the key is in the OP's original question and the one word in it: "better".
What's better? Doesn't that depend on the beholder, OP?
What's better for you? And for what purpose?

If you don't define that much further, then sure, go ahead, pray and spray.
Or not.

Recently I returned to the place where I initially started photography (on film). There, I found an old camera shop wherein the staff (whom I had not visited in over 35 years) instantly recognized me and engaged me on my more recent work and other shop talk and news from the western world. Remember, this was decades later and on the other side of the world. I couldn't believe it - but there were more wonders in store (literally) that day:

(apart from the fact that the staff were there for 40 years, and recognized a client from back when he was in his teens, and now an old man, and also knew his current work and wanted to know about what was going on in the city where he now lived... a mind-blower in and of itself, but a salient and real reminder that some people really do live their bliss - and clearly these folk lived photography, cameras, and the photo business, still and always)

The entire store, with probably a 90-ft container's equivalent of camera gear in it for sale, had NOT ONE digital camera in it.

Never had, never would.

I was stunned, to say the least.

Of course, I had to ask both why? And also of course, how had they stayed alive - and apparently thriving still - selling just film cameras and not digital?

The answer for them:

1) the mechanical cameras still yielded better (there's that word again) results - for their customers

and...

wait for it...

2) the countries they were selling like hot cakes to did not want to use digital for fear of invasion of privacy issues, facial recognition software, governmental control. Simply put, they wanted their photos to remain their own, their families' own, their friends' own. They wanted to control which of their photos went public and which did not. And which remained private.

3) they wanted their prints, on paper and in slide form, to still hold some weight, have some relevance. Their family albums to retain their relevance, gift value, and emotional content over their generations, unlike what they had observed in more "modern, advanced" digitally-leaning societies and countries.

4) they wanted their slide shows to be real shows, in a darkened room, with friends and family, a shared and precious experience of their own magical past, and very specifically not as separate individual experiences on iPhones wherever and whenever.


Didn't see that one coming.

Food for thought.


So - of course in the end and back on topic, it's just a medium we're talking about.
Is painting with oils 'better' than acrylics or water-colors? Is a race car a better car than a 16-wheeler transporter? Is an apple better than an orange?

A slightly simplistic question, don't you think?

How 'bout this?

"Hey, all, can someone show me what's the fastest way to photographic excellence, preferably on YouTube and in 15 seconds or less?" (just kidding)

JM2c and of course, YMMV.

ncribble, hello!

I take your point and your thought - but if you simply cast your thoughts toward the other modernized art form that's become democratized in the last couple of decades, music, you can see that electronics or software has become a part of it, not apart from it.

In fact, no dissemination of any recorded music is possible without electronics, and thus the encroachment of software into the actual content of the music itself is a foregone conclusion and just a matter of time, taste and the flavor of the period.

Likewise, the idea of the black Leica framed print from a Focotar neg holder representing an un-cropped image, and thus what the photographer "intended to see in the frame" as an artist's choice, will become increasingly blurred over time. A lot of younger photographers put a black frame around a shot just 'cos it looks cool and OG, without realizing its original intent or meaning.

Also, please consider modern CGI shots in feature films. The motion picture industry increasingly uses digital effects, movements, backgrounds, and all the rest of arsenal to reproduce, supplement and enhance nature or super-nature.
Given that most CGI is a blend of computer-generated software powered imagery that's allied in some form or another with scene elements that are either supernatural or imaginary, isn't the artist who is conceptualizing that blend actually the same type of person that's composing music? MIDI, sampled or original? Isn't that why we call them concept artists and digital artists, rather than craftspeople or technicians?

That's a much clearer field of distinctiveness though, the field where shots are made, not taken. [That's specialized language, so permit me to explain what I mean:

To 'take' a shot, one starts with our existing universe (the real world, eg) and removes from one's frame all that one doesn't want to see. In this sense, this is a reductionist approach, like the documentary or non-fictional piece.

To 'make' a shot, one starts with am empty frame (white paper, studio background, blank digital screen, etc.) and only adds into the frame what one does want to see. This would be the synthesist's approach, like fiction books, or the movies.

One form isn't necessarily harder or easier than the other (witness my 80-something climbs up a mountain for a "snapshot"), and in both cases a camera is placed and a shot is taken, in much the same way as reality TV and docs are shot in similar styles - i.e. realistic-looking, like snapshots.]

But it should be obvious here a shot that's 'made'... must be made with intent.
If one starts with a blank piece of paper (and unless the blank paper itself is the intention), whatever mark is made on the paper cannot be attributed to accidentally being there at the time the shot was taken. Someone had to have made that mark, with or without intention, before the shot was taken.

Likewise, when a street shot of a beggar is taken, then obviously that beggar must have been there by some, more or less haphazard, intention.

However here is the distinction: in the 'taken' shot, the prior intention was not that of the photographer's. In the 'made' shot, it was. So if the photographer paid the beggar to be there, then that shot was made, not taken. The basic difference between documentary and reality content lies right here.

Put simply, when a shot that is 'taken', then anybody could have pressed the trigger and taken whatever the camera happened to be pointing at, at the moment the trigger was pressed. That feels more to me like a snapshot.

And of course, like jazz music or random/improvised art, the borders between the two can be blurred or merged.

But I don't think that was the OP's original intention.

So snapshots vs planned shots, made vs taken photos. Crafts v art. These to me are very different aspects of what we do.

Talking about shot quality, which underlies "art":

For me, a shot's quality is gauged on: emotion, lighting, texture, background, balance, movement, shape.
Those are the elements I was trained to examine after, and to be aware of prior to a shot.

And of course there's the "meh/interesting/I like it/I love it/Wow!" school of evaluation for each one of those elements, and how they combine into a single shot (or a moment in a movie).

Ultimately though, the definition of a fine art is "that which tends towards the point of view of a single human being." i.e. the fewer people involved (creative directors, producers, agents, managers, talent etc.), the finer the art.

Thus the finest arts are, traditionally: painting, writing, music composition, and/or some kind of derivative of those. But always executed by single people, on their own. And solely to their own muses.

The rest, especially by a professional team of "creative professionals", is not fine art. They're making money, not photos, movies, music, whatever, and likely or not their motivation is their paychecks, their careers, their bottom lines.

To me, and speaking about art, that isn't it. That's craft.

Perhaps it's the original intention.

If one's intention is to have a great holiday and record it, then that's probably snapshot land.

If one goes out on the same holiday trip, but with the intention of grabbing street or candid shots, then that's probably more like a shoot and not holiday snapshot land.

I think the former garners great feedback from the missus and the kids and the latter quite the opposite effect.

Take that from someone who's been there, done that - as an assistant camera on a "holiday trip" with a pro photographer. His family didn't appreciate it at all.

Now whether it's art or not I feel is apples and oranges to the intent of snapshot or planned shoot. After all, anything lasting, say, 1/15th of a second or less in time is really a snap shot recorded in time, isn't it. i.e. almost all photography is snapped, in one way or another.

So is all photography art? That's the orange to the apple discussed above, methinks.

JM2c, YMMV, etc.

My take is a story from my days as an apprentice/assistant to a Magnum photographer.

The subject was Hong Kong, Central District, long shot from around 10 miles away, first light.
The photographer wanted a certain look, with spotted highlights falling on certain buildings in the shot.
We woke up at zero dark thirty, drove to an overlooking mountainside, climbed up it in pitch darkness, set up the camera, waited for dawn...

Nope, light not right. Took it all down, packed it away, went to do other shots.
Next day, came back. Nope.
And the next. And the next.
Finally, 82 days' worth of zero dark thirties and blind camera setups later (Boy, I sure did get good at that after awhile), the sun rose just so... and the clouds were there just so... and the light fell on the required buildings just so...
and one shot.
Click.
End of story.
"What?" I asked him, aghast. "We spent all this time, all these days... for just one shot?"
He looked at me, at first very angry, and then less so after a while.
Then he took another shot.
"There", he said. "Is that better?"

I've owned a 24-120, 24-70, 28-200, 28-300, plus more.
Which to use depends on a) FX or DX and b) lighting and subject conditions.
I grew up using 35mm Nikons and a street sweeper (24-120). I still have a D version of the street sweeper. Had the modern one, very nice lens, couldn't justify keeping it (not cheap).
The 24-70 is used all the time, but not in travel.
In travel right now I'm using a 28-200 with a D810. That's enough pixels to do a decent crop out to 300mm and not give up much in the process.
I'm shooting FX cameras, of course. In DX I have an 18-200 but no more DX cameras so I use that one for digital video mostly.

Here's the thing:
On all of these lenses, the first things I did were a) fine tune each lens's AF to the camera's AF system. b) find out each lens's sweet spot both in zoom and in best aperture. c) mark that down on a label and stick it on the lens's lens cap.

So even my old 70-210D lens yields superb shots - if I keep it at f/6.3 and at 200mm, and hold it steady enough at whatever shutter speed and ISO's are available to me.

That's about the trick of it.

They'll all yield great to excellent results if used in this way. There's no real magic bullet for it. Just decide if you want to use the lenses wide open or at their sweet spots. That decision will drive which lens to buy, and which lens to put on the camera for what use.

Me, traveling as I do, I use a 28-200 cos it's small, but sometimes I'll leave that at home and take my 24-120, mainly because I know that lens so well it's a no-brainer if I'm shooting in daylight and in a place where that extra 4mm on the wide side might make a difference.

However, with picture panorama and stacking these days, there's always workarounds to be had.

I'd say start with a larger sensor camera for the longer end of things (i.e. crop in post). Since there will be less vibration and camera movement on a 200 or even a 120mm, the crop will often end up sharper off of a D8xx series camera, for instance, than a 300mm or longer on a DX camera if there's not VF etc involved, and maybe even if there is.

At that point I'd also take something 35mm ish (FX) and fast for low-light and/or night/interior situations where the zoom won't be fast enough and high ISO won't work either.

JM2c of course, and definitely YMMV on this one.

One night near Christmas last year I was out walking my dog at night when I saw this and immediately snapped it (top picture).

Then I looked at the shot on my iPhone, ran back home, dropped the dog off, picked up my old D600 and reshot (bottom picture).

Maybe you can tell the difference, maybe not. For me, the camera was worth the effort, and the money, and the carrying gear, and the exposure calculation...

For you, maybe not.

High end iPhone

(Download)

D600

(Download)

So following the same logic as the OP, since you have a cell phone do your computing easier, that means the doom/death of the desktop computer must necessarily follow as well???

Not talking about a mirror or not.
Talking about a cell phone vs other cameras or not.
OP says the age of the camera is doomed. Nary a mention of any DSLR or plate film holder, or Polaroid back...

For that matter even the D800 and D800E are way above and beyond, for the time being.

Granted, the smart phones will get better...

But by then the D900s or D1000s will be??? Because they're not standing still either.

Yes, the cell phone camera has taken over the snapshot camera.
But the snapshot camera started in the US with cameras like the Kodak Brownie. Which has been superseded by many other snapshot cameras along the way, agreed.
This current cell phone camera will doubtless give way to others.

But the large format cameras are still with us. Still beyond the reach of the average person, as ever it was.
Almost the same as the digital medium format cameras, in fact, some of which still survive.
And let's not mention the 135 format company that started all of that, and that company, like Apple, has continued to thrive into the digital age.

Will Leica make a cell phone camera? Or Hasselblad? Perhaps. But I'd venture to suggest that until 16x20 or larger exhibition style or mural style prints can be successfully created by such cameras, the larger formats will still be used daily - by pros, not by the everypeople.

And even then, just like there is always a new generation of people who are keen to shoot black-and-white film and process / print themselves, cameras will still be around for many centuries more.

In fact, this past few years has seen the resurgence of a "new" form of photographic medium - large format paper negative photography, using photo sensitive paper (yes, available brand new from Ilford) that slots into your (now cheaper) 4x5 or 8x10 or indeed even half-plate or full-plate film negative carriers, get exposed as usual (slower ISO at this point), but then go to a regular B/W print process (not a negative one) to yield a paper negative that's then scanned to digital. Quite the thing, for them who's into it.

Granted, "real camera users" won't be that high a percentage of the total camera users, much the same as the Speed Graphic users were vastly outnumbered by the Brownie users of old.

But does that face mean that the age of the camera is over?

To me, that's like saying the age of the eye is over.

And then expecting others in this thread to take that comment seriously.

Pay no never mind, folks.
The OP saying that the cell phone will replace all cameras is like the "car expert" who says that an SUV will replace all cars.
To engage the OP on this level is to argue a Kia against a Masarati. Not too fruitful, if you ask me.