Jake Catlett Photography

Sick of Digital Photography

Yes, it’s true.  Digital photography begins to wear thin for me.  My beautiful, shiny Nikon D3 with it’s 1 megapixel LCD, it’s massive, crystal clear viewfinder, ultra-fast, ultra-accurate autofocus, blah blah blah…  It became boring.

Digital processing was never my favorite part of the deal, and that, too, started to seem like more of a task than anything else.  Everything started to seem like this:

Click click click click – look at LCD, check exposure.  Not happy?  Step exposure up/stop exposure down, click click click click – look at histogram, check tonal range.  Click click click click – look at LCD, check composition, zoom in, check for sharpness.  Not happy with some or all of the above again?  No problem, I have 5000 shots worth of storage space left, take another 50 shots.  Browse through what I have, delete delete delete delete.  Oh!  This shot’s GREAT, but the exposure/saturation/white balance/fill in the blank isn’t what I want.  No problem, photoshop it later.

I could go on and on, but why?  Meh, I’m going to insert another pic here.

The challenge has been drained of photography for me in many ways due to the digital medium.  Digital cameras have become so equipped with features that do everything for you, that you almost don’t even have to think anymore.  Hasselblad, a company which has made the highest end camera bodies available for the most serious professional photographers in the world has just released a new digital body, and the advertisement online basically begins by saying “any idiot that’s never touched a camera in their life can take pictures like a professional in less than 15 minutes of opening the box.”

And so every asshole on the block is a photographer now.

This is what the digital medium has done in the last few years, as far as I see it:  made me lazy and undisciplined, made every idiot with more money than brains convince themselves that they, too, are a photographer and an ‘artiste’, severely degraded the collective sense of the value of a photograph (it’s just a picture, anybody can do it, and photos are FREE on the internet!!), and caused a lot of people that used to make a damn good living through their hard work and knowledge suddenly very afraid for their jobs.

Yeah, I know – that’s how things are.  That’s how the industry is now.  That’s the reality these days.

I want out.

I want to have to think really hard before I snap a shot, because each one costs me money.  I want to have to get it right, in my camera, the first time, or else be stuck with the crap I produced.  I want to learn how to read the light properly, and know when I can or cannot get the results I’m looking for.  I want to learn more discipline, to be stuck with the film type and speed that’s in my camera and be forced to work within those parameters until I finish the roll and put more in.

I want to shoot film, period.

And now I have no choice, because I’ve sold all my digital gear.  I’ve gotten myself a beautiful Nikon F4s, and an old Nikon FM, fully manual camera that looks like it’s been used about twice.

Photography started as a passion and a hobby for me.  I didn’t do it for any other reason other than it made me feel high, and because I would get all tingly thinking about what I might come up with, what I might LEARN the next time I went outside.  I started with digital, yes, but I started with crappy digital, when DSLRs were a new thing, when people would see mine and say “holy shit, is that thing digital??”.  It was still challenging, still new.  And still hadn’t sadly degraded an industry that I have a lot of respect for, an industry which already had enough trouble with it’s workers being cheated, screwed with, tricked, and basically underestimated and underrated.

I don’t care if I never sell another photo.  It will be nice to, and I’ll take my opportunities when they’re available, but now I don’t want to worry about anything except what I want to do with it.  Photography belongs to me, it’s my passion, and I almost lost it for a minute there.  But I feel it coming back, and I’m excited that by simply deciding to go back to the way things were, I’ve made it more challenging and more FUN!  Gee…  I wonder what I’ve got there on that half-finished roll of Kodak ColorPlus sitting inside my little Nikon FM?  I’ll have to shoot the rest of the roll before I can find out!  Dammit!  I had my meter set to read it as ISO100 film, and it’s ISO200 I’ve got in there.  That cost me a few bucks.  Guess I’ll THINK about that next time, rather than just counting on my LCD to tell me I’ve been an idiot.

A good friend of mine made some decisions recently that helped me to start thinking about this myself, and I need to thank him for it.  But the real issue was me asking myself “how do I get some fire back in my belly for this thing called photography that I know I really love??”.

Film.  Good old fashioned film.

Since I don’t have the luxury of working in a dark room now, I do have to take the liberty of adjusting my pics in photoshop just a touch for contrast.  But I didn’t change the color on these shots one bit, not for tone, not for white balance, not for saturation.  I’m going to do that in my camera, or suck it up.

I walked around my neighborhood, and district 1 of Saigon in general and got some shots taken on Fujifilm Velvia ISO100 transparency film.  I’m out of touch with the differences between one type of film and another, so I’m going to be experimenting to see what I like about the different kinds I can get here in Vietnam, and I’ll be putting up some of my not-so-crappy results.

I know on my last post I said I’d put up more Ratatat photos.  I have them, and I will eventually, but for a while now, I’m going to play with my oldschool tools and post some film work.  Hope you like looking at it as much as I like shooting it!