Posted by bestcamera in
I can’t believe the number of photography courses which still want you to shoot black and white film and develop it yourself.
I have no objection to b&w and all it entails but time should be spent on composition and exposure, not mixing chemicals.
Digital, with its instant feedback and dirt cheap cost-per-shot, is the all-time killer photography teaching tool.
Why would educators not see this?
I think a lot of the teaching time is spent on the development and chemicals so if they removed that part, there would not be much left to teach.
i personally love everything about the darkroom and i think a lot of other people do too. yes, technology has advanced to where it seems only natural to teach digital photography but many people would prob use some sort of photoshop. AND it would cut out the darkroom experience.
Might be true that people would cheat in photoshop (as one of your respondents claimed).
Me, I learned on a film camera… a 35mm with manual focus and “auto” aperture/shutter, switchable to manual. I always chose manual, made a bunch of mistakes along the way.
I still shoot film, but when a digital camera is put in front of me, I rarely have trouble sorting it out.
There are issues of white balance, which in film has to do with filtration based on the light source.
There are issues of exposure, which in film has to do with metering and the values you get for different parts of the frame.
There are issues of depth of field/focus. Shooting manually, you have to sort this all out. When you shoot digitally, or with autofocus, you pretty much know where to put the locus of your focus to get or approach the desired result, that is, if you have experience with manual.
But you’re right that instant gratification/feedback is invaluable! Back in the day, it was called Polaroid. Pro photographers have wanted to see what they’ve got right away for decades… and it cost them a buck a shot.
So why not digital? For one, the algorithms on today’s cameras are sooooo good that digital, in my opinion, might actually keep you from figuring it out yourself. When you’re pressed to come up with a shot that works for you based on principles of chemistry and physics, you pass through quite a bit of territory along the way. This is where you come up with styles of your own, and where the photographic principles are solidified.
If what your camera does automatically is so much better than what you would do instinctively or based on your rudimentary understanding of the art/craft/science of photography, might that not be a hindrance to your development as a photographer?
To my eye, photographers who have a broad and solid understanding of the principles involved in the production of an image have a much greater range than those who “trust”
the camera to give them a “good” image. Notions of what constitutes perfection change over time, yet the algorithms that come with a given camera pretty much stay the same. My fear is that the future look of photography will be determined by camera, chip, and software makers more than by the experimenters.
As to the the cost, education is always expensive. We can read a book for free in the library, but if we pay somebody to help us read and understand it more deeply (as in a professor), it ends up costing a ridiculous amount… yet we’ve decided in this society that it’s worth it to pay for higher education, whether it’s coming from tax dollars or out of our pockets. All I’d say is you either trust your educators or you don’t. If you don’t, bail out like I did.
Final note: the little screen on a digital camera RARELY gives a true representation of what the final image is going to look like. If you can see in your head what your shot is going to look like on paper, that’s when you’re a photographer.
Good luck.