Tag: Heiferman

No other art form is going through so big and fast changes as is photography. We are witnesses to a photographic revolution, a “photolution”.

 

What is it?

It has many element coming together in synergy. Here are some:

• The smartphones, their ever smaller and lighter equipment with ever more imprssive camera performance. It belongs to the past that, say, iPhone photos had to be low quality. True you can’t do with them what you can with a ‘real’ camera, a digital SLR, but you get super quality pictures with which you can do other things such as using:

• Apps small and cheap tools helping you to do hitherto unimaginable things when taking and processing a shot. That you can’t do – yet – with a digital SLR, although I guess we shall soon get apps for them too – like you can now get extensions and accessories including lenses for the iPhone that make it come even closer to the DSLR.

• We can carry them with us permanently – “the best camera is the one you carry with you” and not the one you left at home, too bulky, heavy, expensive and thus risky to take along.

But of course the smartphone revolution is only one sub-revolution of the larger photolusion. Whether you use this or that type of digital camera, you become part of the very dynamic changes caused by:

• Digitalisation – the end of expensive films and darkroom processing. Digital formats are free and can be processed in millions of ways – even to the point where the original shot is hard to identify.

• Photoshopping – the immense possibilities embedded in that super complex software that makes your old darkroom look like a thing of the stone-age. While you can’t make a bad image better in Photoshop you can certain make a good one better – or turn it into something completely different such as a piece of abstract art, but still photography- based.

• We increasingly live in an age of images and communicate through images. still or video. It is very true that one image can say more than a thousand words – not because texts are not important or effective as means of communication or because they can not give more vivid information and details but because people, grosso modo and sadly so – don’t seem to think that they have the time to read but do take time to see.

The latter is often quite superficial, however, as any gallery owner or museum guard will tell you. Research done at art museums reveals that the average time people spend in front of an art work is 15-30 seconds.

• Social media and globalisation and Continue reading It’s a photolution…