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Renowned
Jamaican Photographer, Michael Stanley - shares tips at
CARIMAC Workshop - “digital cameras don’t guarantee good
photographs”. |
June 21, 2007, Kingston, Jamaica: Photography
has been made simpler all on account of the pervasive
digital camera. But Michael Stanley, well-known local
photographer points out, that “digital cameras don’t
guarantee good photographs”. Stanley will go through various
techniques for getting those pictures perfect at a three-day
workshop on Digital Photography this July at the Caribbean
Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), UWI in
Jamaica.
The following are excerpts of a discussion held with
Stanley.
Q: Are there advantages to digital photography as opposed
to film photography?
A: There is an advantage to digital photography. It’s
a much quicker and cheaper way of making photographic
images. You can have a flash card in your camera. You can
select just one of those images, if you want, and print
that; whereas with the old system [film] you have to make a
contact sheet first, and then choose your picture from that.
It’s kind of nice to get away from that craft aspect of film
as well. But film does have its strong points. It’s a good
way to learn to how to produce pictures through learning
about the different processes. When you go digital it’s not
really a craft thing. Everything is so automated now that
the camera will now do it for you.
But all photography is about images, so with digital and
film photography the important emphasis is on content of the
images.
Q: Do you think camera phones are re-defining how
we take photographs?
A: To an extent. The technology’s readiness,
accessibility and ease of use make it an ideal tool for
capturing images. However, anybody wanting to take
photographs of good quality would need a camera phone that
has high resolution. Digital quality is determined by the
number of pixels; the bigger the mega pixels the better the
quality of the camera and the photograph. Some camera phones
now are technically sophisticated but most of them aren’t.
Most of the technically sophisticated ones still cannot
match the quality of photographs produced by a digital
camera.
Q: Why is image quality so important?
A: Images are images and however they’re produced
they can analysed as an image. So ultimately it doesn’t
matter whether you’re using the old technology or the new.
The elements of design that go into making photographs like
colour, line, shapes; those qualities aren’t peculiar to
photography. We often hear that one good picture is worth a
thousand words, this is true. Photography can be another way
of telling a story. Photography is a medium within itself,
which has design elements like other art media. It also
tells a story. The images are related to stories. It’s not a
word based medium. It’s partly those design elements, in
terms of how you put those elements together, that make the
photographic medium.
Becoming photo-literate, being able to identify quality
images is different to being ‘word’ literate. It is
something that can be learned by constant contact with
photographic images. Quality photographic images are an
essential part of present day communication. |
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Q: Will film photography ever become extinct?
A: I don’t think so. I think it has a niche. There
are certain things that are peculiar to that whole
technology. There are certain processes that give you a
specific kind of technical result. One of those processes is
CIBER Chrome which produces one of the highest qualities of
images. Those images have a depth, a richness that’s
difficult to duplicate with digital technology. You can
produce images with a different kind of high quality,
digitally, but they are different. It’s the same with black
and white photos shot on film. The quality of black and
white archive print on photo art paper cannot be easily
reproduced digitally.
Q: Questions have arisen about the need to verify that a
photograph has been taken by a digital camera. What’s your
take on this?
A: I think it’s important to create some identifying
mark for photographs taken by digital cameras. Photographs
are information it’s therefore important to know that the
information is true. It’s like passing fiction off as
non-fiction.
Because digital photographs are so easy to manipulate, in
terms of the image itself, you’re never quiet sure if a
photograph is a photograph, in the sense that it’s an
un-manipulated image. You can always manipulate images
created on film in a darkroom to an extent. But the ease
with which it can be done now with digital technology is
astounding. |
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