Member-only story
Photography and the Art of Seeing the World
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange
Diane Arbus
Digital life has changed everything, including photography and how we take photos.
Everybody can take a photo, just pick up a plastic cased digi-machine and point and shoot. The results appear to be astounding, flabbergasting. For a while digital photography, it’s amazing capacity to balance the light and darkness, to tone the colours and pick up the smallest details of an object that caught our eye, made us all go nuts and buy some sort of digital camera.
Smartphone or DSLR or Mirrorless, take your choice and enjoy photographing the world as you see it.
The question is, are we really photographing the world as we see it?
Do we take the time to get over the amazing technology and stop long enough to look at the object that caught our eye?
The world is full of techies, gear-freaks, and early adopters who seem to be hell bent on using the latest, bestest equipment that’s on offer. They swear blind that their camera, the latest technology, is what you need if you want to take great shots and if you want to be taken seriously as a photographer.
Digital photography has overcome many problems that photographers used to love working out for themselves. How to set the shutter speed, the aperture size and the distance, the shadow, the light, the trick of adjusting the ASA (ISO) rating up a notch to trick the camera into working as if you had a fast film roll inside.
Now, all you do is twist the dial and set the whole camera onto “P” setting if you don’t want to control things. It’ll take great shots when you push the button.
My question is, why are you and me taking photographs?
The camera type doesn’t matter so long as you have a lens that leads to a box of tricks…
