[ad_1]Photo Rangers Community 2019
Happy Holidays to all y’all! For the past three years in the Photo Rangers Photography Community (https://www.facebook.com/groups/photorangerscommunity/) we have had weekly challenges designed to improve our photography. This year, I’m changing the format a little because I’m worried about the future of photography. I’ll explain why. Our cameras are amazing pieces of technology. They are so good (even entry level cameras and phone cameras) that the technical aspect of photography has become mundane and controlled by the camera. Therefore to take beautiful and stunning calendar shots no longer requires years of experience and expertise as it did in the old film days. Today, in a matter of minutes one can learn to take slow exposure, astro and portraits that equals those years of film experience.
Recently I listened to Skylum Software’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Engineer Oleksandr Sausunko talk about the future of photography. Skylum is the company that produces the editing software Luminar. Luminar uses some pretty fancy AI to automatically enhance skies and do some amazing edits on photos. Oleksandr predicted that within 10 years we will experience cameraless photography. That’s where we tell the computer what we want in a scene and it generates a 1000 or so realistic renderings. We just choose or tweak one of these renders to suit the need. We virtually create images. This blew me away and really fuelled my concern for the state of photography today and the direction it is currently heading.
Running hand in hand with the effect technology is having on photography is the impact of social media. Have you noticed how many photos look similar on Instagram? How places that are highly ‘Instagramable’ are becoming major tourist destinations and that the pursuit of the Instagrammable image has led to some severe environmental degradation in these areas. Fellow community member DäNï Watson has a brilliant ‘Insta Famous’ documentary https://www.iaminstafamous.com/ that I highly recommend you visit.
So instafame and technology have bred a consumerist, soulless form of art in my opinion. This year I want to focus on the art of photography and will ask other photographers to help push our skills, our creativity and challenge what we do with our cameras. I want us to do more with less and strive for the art in our photography. I’ll start off leading the month of January. I hope to see you in the community group!
Along with this post I’ll share a few photos of our Christmas Lunch. Here are the dogs getting leftovers, Cecilia pouncing on our oldest daughter who was laying on the couch and the last of Cecilia sneaking a chocolate. I took these with the entry level Fujifilm X-T100 and a 40 year old Pentax Takamur 50mm f/1.4 lens. The old lens does not communicate with the camera and the focus was done manually. These old lenses can not resolve the level of detail we expect of modern lenses. I also shot in JPG using Fujifilm’s Acros black and white film simulation.
Happy Holidays to you all and your families. Please stay safe and keep shooting!
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