Going digital, the death of creativity.

There is something about the analog process of shooting on film and making your own prints that made those photographers a lot more creative. I think it was the smaller margin of error that working with film afforded that made these photographers more creative. Limitations inspire creativity. When there’s room to make mistakes, people will make mistakes, but sometimes those mistakes turn out to be wonderful surprises. Did you forget to process your film correctly? Maybe you pushed it one stop, but forgot to process it that way. Maybe you left the photo paper in the chemicals for too long. More often than not, these mistakes led to disasters, but occasionally they might produce something extraordinary that might lead you to try new styles and techniques. It inspired experimentation and creativity.

The lack of instant feedback also inspired creativity. You never knew if you got the shot or not, so you’d take the same picture over and over again with different exposures, different lighting, and different film; hoping that one of the shots would turn out. If you were lucky, you’d have many versions to choose from afterwards.

Unfortunately, I’m finding a lot of that type of creativity has gone missing in today’s digital world. You would think that the instant feedback, lower processing cost, and unlimited post processing possibilities would lead to unheard amounts of creativity. Instead digital seems to have narrowed the vision of many of today’s photographers. The lack of limitations creates paralysis. Everything from EXIF data to Photoshop settings are studied and duplicated from one person to the next. It has become a game of precision, rather than creativity.

Before, photographers would talk about their stories of how a particular picture was taken. How one waited for the right moment, said something silly to get the right expression, or how the light reacted in an unforeseen way. Those stories are far fewer these days. Instead it’s all about the lens, camera body, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, exact time of day, or light placement. The subject becomes secondary to the technicality of taking the picture. Everyone wants a formula that says if you do x, then you will always get y. Photography doesn’t always work that way.

I suppose this type of formulaic precision was bound to make its way into photography, once digital became popular. Over 15 years of working with computers has taught me that. Working for corporations that wanted their business plans to be as simple as a formula that could be predicted by a computer. Our strategy is x and the computer predicts that the result will be y. To assume that the computer must always be right has been the downfall of many business strategists. It isn’t. For one thing the computer can only make the calculation based on what it knows, and it cannot know everything. It lacks information relating to experience, trends, and most of all it lacks imagination.

So the next time you pick up your camera, think a little differently. Try not to worry so much about what your settings are. Experiment, play, and be creative.



Photographing the Total Lunar Eclipse on February 20th was challenging. After reading several tutorials on the web about how to do it, rapidly changing conditions due to cloud cover and winds made any planning I had done go straight out of the window. So I winged it.

This image is available for download as a desktop wallpaper in several resolutions:

Widescreen 960 x 600 Full Screen 1024 x 768
Widescreen 1280 x 800 Full Screen 1280 x 1024
Widescreen 1440 x 900 Full Screen 1600 x 1200
Widescreen 1680 x 1050 Widescreen 1920 x 1200