Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/03/14
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]In a message dated 3/14/05 5:08:51 PM, mark1smiles@yahoo.com writes: > Technology has a way making the best get better, and having the mediocre > fall away. As you said, the pinch is on. > ---------------------------------- Mark, What bothers me is that the technical quality will apparently improve by a magnitude, but there will be magnitudinal drop in the authenticity and spontaneity of photography. A family album was grass roots history. I think we'll see the last of it by 2010 because digital is so good at making things look good, correcting and compensating and so on. I had a revelatory experience last Sunday. We went to a movie at our local art cinema. Before the show they projected slides of somebody's family prints. Who knows why? Judging by the cars, the time was 1965. The shots were all over the place. People standing in a group with hats on and long coats. I don't know who those folks were. Most of the shots seem to be taken in some town on the CA coast. Some exposed well. Most of the others were marginal. But yet they held my attention. Why? That question assailed me driving home. Then it occurred to me. The reasons those prints were fascinating is that they showed history. Streets, highways, buinesses, people walking around. Looking back, all that became precious to me because everything had changed since then. It was a lost world erased by about 4 decades of daily change. Bob