Taken last year this scene already looks dated. Outmoded. Obsolete.
When I first met my friend, Paul, he was becoming one of the key architectural photographers in our part of the country. He was a proponent of doing his work in the best possible way and with the best possible tools. At the time we met, back in the early 1990s he was firmly wedded to his Linhof technical view cameras, the best 4x5 lenses he could find, and a catalog's worth of big, Profoto electronic flash lighting. The big cameras, big film and exquisite lenses were the bedrock of his business right up until digital photography became mature enough to at least get close enough to the quality he was able to get from the film gear. When he converted almost completely to digital he looked for the best equipment on the market. And his work allowed him the budgets to pick and choose instruments that I, for one, would never justify affording for my business. I use him as an example here. Not as an example of what to do or what not to do but as an example of a time in our industry when it was considered mission critical to deliver the absolute best technical imaging products one could manage.
I think that mindset came to us in the last quarter of the 20th century because for most of its maturing process film photography was hard to do consistently at a very high level. To get the absolute best color from transparency films one had to pick and choose between different batches of the same film; different production runs, and upon finding a well tempered emulsion one needed to buy it in case lots to ensure that jobs would be well supplied by known film products which had been tested and re-tested. And then stored in refrigerators. But even having access to large quantities of carefully chosen and stored film didn't vaccinate professionals against the vagaries and mysteries that could plague even the best processing labs. A change in water pH or a processing machine with an issue could wreak havoc on the color and even the exposure consistency of finnicky slide films. Many times I think the professional predilection for top quality gear was the hope that very precise mechanical and optical equipment might provide an extra margin of safety when all the things that were out of our control ended up going out of whack.
And in the days of big film, medium sized film and better budgets taking a chance with "lesser" gear was tantamount to accepting the near certainty of failure somewhere along the chain of inter-related processes and gear to film interfaces. No one got fired for choosing to work with Hasselblads... Or Linhofs.
As everyone gravitated toward using digital cameras for work the same sort of high-end practitioner followed much the same trajectory for digital gear acquisition. My friend, Paul, was the first architectural photographer I knew who branched out from 4x5 film gear to a medium format Leica digital camera and lenses to match. He also sought out mechanical experts who could make custom converters for all varieties of medium format and large format tilt shift lenses that would allow them to be used on the first, the Leica S camera and then a series of Hasselblad medium format cameras. He was the first person I knew to take delivery on the new Fuji GFX cameras as well.
But something disconnected. When film was dominant his clients were thrilled to order huge display prints to hang on their walls. When high end cameras of all kinds seemed to be required for his work it was routine to see said work in a variety of shelter magazines like Architectural Digest which hewed to the highest printing standards. The work worked for the traditional targets that defined what commercial photography was until the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. But then web bandwidth expanded and sped up for everyone and all of a sudden websites, Youtube, portfolio sites and other online resources blossomed. At a certain point it became clear that clients has stopped paying $40 or $50 to Fedex in a portfolio of luscious, gorgeous prints in order to shop for the right photographer. It was easier, cheaper and faster to just look at portfolios on photographers' websites. And it was all "free." You could look at "books" online from photographers located anywhere in the world.
But the targets changed too. Sure, there are still lots and lots of magazines but if you wade through most of them you'll find the paper being used is thinner, cheaper and doesn't hold ink nearly as well. And most of the magazines use images in smaller sizes while the photo "stories" that run more than a couple of pages are rarer than free money. Everything seems perennially headed for the web. And, if you are honest with yourself, you head for the web far more often for reading, entertainment and educations than you head to paper magazines for your content. How many of you have more than one "paper" magazine subscription? Is it a journal from your profession? Do your get it free for paying your annual dues? Would you pay for the printed magazines if they cost money from your own pocket? I didn't think so.
In one regard we are a distinct demographic. And the demographic I'm talking about is: professional men over 50 years of age who read stuff on a big laptop or a very big desktop computer. We're trained to see flaws in photographs and a 27 inch screen helps us find them. One of our own flaws is thinking and believing that everyone is just like we are. But in the real world most of the younger people are looking at your photographs and the photographs of Annie Leibovitz and Josef Koudelka on screens just about the size of their palms. ( more likely looking at YouTube influencers we've never heard of..). There are some who are sourcing their visual content on 13 inch laptops and while that's a step up none of these applications requires, or can take real advantage of, the ways in which we used to create photographs. A 180 GB scan of a 6x9 cm transparency is mutilated in the downsizing required to put it up on the web and share it. Destructive overkill.
I've said for years and years now that most of the work people do is destined for the web. Peter McKinnon's work will end up on the web. Allan Schaller's work? The web. Paul Reid may make a few prints but the only way the vast majority of people will only see his work is through the magic of the web.
Which brings me back to Paul who recently did a job with big cameras but took along his new iPhone 15 Pro. Which he used to take video and stills alongside his Nikon D850 outfitted with some really nice Zeiss glass. He was up in a cherry picker and after shooting the requisite "big" photographs he pulled out the phone and covered the same ground over again. He also took video with his phone while the crane operator executed a very slow and smooth ascent, at twilight. The footage from the phone was astoundingly good. Sure, if we project it at a theater we'll probably see all kinds of artifacts and soft areas. But on its intended media? The web? It will look superb. Better than the raw material coming out of the bigger, heavier, more expensive and more intensely needy Nikon. But he has both. From the "traditional" camera and from the new tech. He can use the images straight off the phone, he'll need to post process the ones from the traditional camera.
I predict that knowing the phone images and video footage looks so good will push him a bit into embracing a new way of navigating image making. Using easier methodologies. Smaller form factors. Taking advantage of massive Apple image processing. Oh, he'll never give up the big cameras because that's what he grew up with. That's what he made his mark with. And in Texas we always remember the saying from the UT football coach, Daryl Royal: "Dance with them as brung ya." But I have a hunch that the phone as camera will make far more frequent appearances than before. Even though Paul is emotionally wedded to working at the demanding edges of the "envelope." He's wise enough not to waste time in overkill driven by nostalgia. The right tool....
I often read blogs by people now eligible for Medicare. They grew up with black and white images at a time when the only way to share them and get them in front of people was to go into a darkroom, measure chemicals, work under a red safelight and make black and white prints. It was a slow and cumbersome process. And then the print came out of the wash was dried flat and, after it was spotted, got shown around. If the photographer was lucky enough to have a local audience willing to take the time to meet and view the work firsthand. Most prints from that era got a dozen or two dozen views before the photographer ran out of steam and tossed the print into an archival box and went back to work on something that would pay the bills. But for some reason this imprinted on my generation as the "gold standard" of photography. Too bad the rest of civilization passed us by. Or was it that we were to inflexible to change?
Now even a poor photo of your cat, taken with much more pedestrian photo gear, has the potential of being seen by hundreds or thousands of people. And the image hits this market almost instantaneously. The print from yesteryear just can't compete. Well, unless you scan it and put it up on the web.... And then, really, it's no longer a "print."
If we lived in a world where a pervasive reality ruled our actions instead of reactive emotions, sentimentality and an overly ripe respect for tradition, we would all see how the markets moved, the sharing modalities changed, the portals to seeing images shifted from physical to electronic/digital images seen on screens of all sizes. We'd understand that trying to match the images we made with supremely great, silver rich papers that no longer exist is pointless. The galleries that would have shown such work, locally, are long since closed. The plastic cups of red wine and the little cubes for white and orange cheese are no longer being served at gallery show openings because galleries have become almost extinct.
And yet, here we are shooting for yesteryear's media. If we were videographers would we be making 5:4 aspect black and white 480 video in reverance to its roots? Gee. Probably not.
Just a thought after having bought yet another huge, over-engineered, full manual 50mm lens.... sigh.
