I’ve been playing around with digital photography (but not on my phone, because I can’t figure out how). Back in the good old days before digital photography, taking pictures was a matter of good focus and what speed of film you used. Now the camera is so smart that it knows the speed without a roll of film, but the rest of the playing field is now complicated by rules which would fill a professional sports manual.
Before getting off a single shot, I’m tasked with learning what environment I’m in, what the conditions are, what might move in the shot, what objects from far away need to be sharp and what objects in the foreground could be a bit fuzzy, what special effect(s) I might want and how much control I want over my camera. With manual cameras, I focused and clicked; now I have a checklist as tall as Shaquille O’Neal. How does a pro get a decent Pulitzer winner of a shot if he has to go through all that rigmarole?
The saving grace of a digital camera, for those of us who might want to shorten that checklist to, say, Verne Troyer size (with all due respect, Mr. Troyer), one can use various degrees of automatic control features that let the camera decide some, most or all of the actions to take to get a good photo. This works well when learning, except for one minor detail: the shutter button.
In the old days, one click did the trick. Now the shutter presses halfway to “compose” the shot, then all the way to capture the image. By that time, your subject has packed up and gone home, and you wind up with a blurry, jumpy photo. Also you realize you should have mounted the camera on a tripod.
The process of learning the finer arts of digital photography won’t deter me, since I have no desire to stop learning. However, cameras may go further into high tech by the time I think I’ve learned it all. Sad that progress always seem to go faster than we do.
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