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Humour or Truth
- Thread starter Photofarmer
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A little of both, I think. In the end, it is the composition, the moment, and the story that the capture tells that matters the most. But so many of those moments and stories were missed by a half second or less back in the day. Many times we didn't take the risk and press the shutter button we had to be selective of our 36 exposures/opportunities.
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For a person who owns a camera? Yes. For a photographer? Not even close. But that's completely irrelevant.
As Jim said, when you're wasting nothing but a few megabytes you're likely going to squeeze the shutter button more often with digital, and hold it down longer. With film photographers learned to recognize "the moment" an instant before it happened, anticipating the frame because they only had one. Being able to capture 20 on either side of that moment doesn't make you lazy or "worse" if you can still recognize the moment, it simply provides you a choice of images milliseconds apart that you didn't have before. All would have been deemed good or even great in the film days, but you now have a choice.
Keeper rate, which is what this meme is talking about, varies wildly by genre. Teach a fine art photography class and give your students each of these and you would expect it to be the same. Teach a wildlife class and you might be happy if they got one great image on film. I've been shooting wildlife almost exclusively for 12 years. In that time I've gone from 5fps to 30fps, 12MP to 45MP, 9 usable AF points to corner-to-corner AF that'll find the eye of a bird in the middle of a tree in the shadows. My keeper rate has barely changed - 10-15% are usable or better. That's about what I hear from most people who do this regularly and talk about it.
Memes like this are why we accept so many straw man arguments that obsure the truth, and do it where the point is far more important to understand and argue. I've been writing code since 11th grade - 44 years ago. My Dad wrote code for the Air Force in the late-50's. I can write a program in 3 lines today that would have taken him thousands in 1957. Who's the better programmer?
The answer to your question is "Neither humor nor truth".
As Jim said, when you're wasting nothing but a few megabytes you're likely going to squeeze the shutter button more often with digital, and hold it down longer. With film photographers learned to recognize "the moment" an instant before it happened, anticipating the frame because they only had one. Being able to capture 20 on either side of that moment doesn't make you lazy or "worse" if you can still recognize the moment, it simply provides you a choice of images milliseconds apart that you didn't have before. All would have been deemed good or even great in the film days, but you now have a choice.
Keeper rate, which is what this meme is talking about, varies wildly by genre. Teach a fine art photography class and give your students each of these and you would expect it to be the same. Teach a wildlife class and you might be happy if they got one great image on film. I've been shooting wildlife almost exclusively for 12 years. In that time I've gone from 5fps to 30fps, 12MP to 45MP, 9 usable AF points to corner-to-corner AF that'll find the eye of a bird in the middle of a tree in the shadows. My keeper rate has barely changed - 10-15% are usable or better. That's about what I hear from most people who do this regularly and talk about it.
Memes like this are why we accept so many straw man arguments that obsure the truth, and do it where the point is far more important to understand and argue. I've been writing code since 11th grade - 44 years ago. My Dad wrote code for the Air Force in the late-50's. I can write a program in 3 lines today that would have taken him thousands in 1957. Who's the better programmer?
The answer to your question is "Neither humor nor truth".
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I totally agree with Jake. Nowadays the keeping rate is a lot higher. And even in the old days, professionals and more serious amateurs like the ones in this forum had a more decent keeping rate because every bullet counted. You know what I mean.
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I certainly see the humor in that meme, but I agree with Jake and Frank. Having access to cheap "film" probably doesn't increase the keeper rate; it just makes it harder to find the keepers.
From a learning standpoint, however, digital's cheap "film" does allow you to take chances and shoot images that have dubious merit, and hopefully learn from them.
From a learning standpoint, however, digital's cheap "film" does allow you to take chances and shoot images that have dubious merit, and hopefully learn from them.
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