Today, June 29th is #NationalCameraDay. A day after my own heart. I started teaching #photography classes in September 2004. That was 15 years ago, and I’m still going strong.
It’s amazing how much technology changed in that time period. When I first started teaching, the camera manufacturers were selling about 10 million film cameras each year, 60 million compact digital cameras, 1 million digital SLRs and about 22 million smartphones. In 2010, the height of the digital camera era, camera manufacturers were selling zero film cameras, 110 million compact digital cameras, 12 million digital SLRs and 400 million smartphone cameras. In 2016, the latest data I found available online, the camera manufacturers were selling zero film cameras, 11 million compact digital cameras, 4 million digital SLRs, and 1.5 billion smartphone cameras. I can only imagine what the change has been since 2016.
What’s really amazing is that in 2004 I ran ten classes a year and they were bursting at the seems with waiting lists. Today, though the number of camera owners has increased 100 times, I can hardly fill four classes a year. Why? because the smartphone manufacturers have taken all the features away. There’s nothing to learn. We’re back to the old Instamatics from the ’70s where you just pushed a button and accepted what you got no matter how terrible it was. OK, maybe terrible is too strong of a word. Today’s cell phone cameras are definitely better than those Instamatics, right? They have changed for the better right? The focus is good, the color is good and the sharpness is good. Yes, they are good. And everybody seems to be OK with good. But nobody cares about great anymore. I don’t want to be good. I want to be great.
The biggest change in cameras has been machine learning software. The camera automatically adjusts the settings based on what it has learned from previous photographs taken. But taking these settings away from a true photographer is like taking a paintbrush away from an artist and letting a computer do the work. Let’s face it. A computer can paint a picture better than a person, right? But then you’ve taken the human element out of it. There is something special about a person holding that paintbrush and applying the right color, texture, and pressure to the canvas. There is something human about it that a computer can’t understand. That whimsical twist of randomness that comes from feeling. Photography is no different. I want to do the work myself. I want to be able to say “I created that,” not a computer.
I was asked to teach a photography class at the Rose Memorial Library in Stony Point this fall. It’s a class that teaches how to turn your cell phone camera into a DSLR and bring back the human element. I’m not going to teach these people how to use a smartphone camera. Anybody can do that. You simply point and shoot. I’m going to teach these people how to take pictures. I’m going to teach them how to take the control away from the camera and put it back into their hands. I’m going to teach them what it means to be human.
Jeffrey David Montanye #JeffreyDMontanye #Holidays
Hits: 143
