Digital Media

When I was a tadpole trapsing around with my carmera and my doc martins, smoking camels and listening to The Cure there was very little more satisfying to me than making images that felt beautiful and then going to the darkroom for a few hours of magic. Since high school there have been too-brief stints where I had access to a darkroom so I could burn-n-dodge to my little heart's content. Sadly those days seem to be over for me.

Yesterday I spent a little time in Iris looking at the digital SLR's and listening to the very informed guy there tell me all about image stabalization, lens compadibility, battery types and lives, and relative costs and qualities. These cameras have almost no delay between the depression of the shutter and the image capture, there is one that is even "weather-sealed" (though likely not for paddling trips or long hikes). Insert here any petulant little noise, punctuated with a "but..."

I don't know yau'll-- at the start of my photography carrear it was serious this question of where does "documentation" end and "art photography" begin. And I beleive that this question burns hotter and brighter now than it ever did when it was just me and my K-1000 stromping the world. Perhaps I am simply resistant to change (why did I bother with that perhaps), and maybe it is an issue of capital (I ain't got it), but possibly it is something bigger. The PHYSICAL, CHEMiCAL, and (frankly) magical acts of film photography are quite different from digital media. The quality of light is quite flat and unrealistic in a digital image--is this perhaps what the analog recording artists are yapping about?

When i was a kid I had this strange fascination with making things "last". I would write dates on things, I would cover paper trasures in plastic tape, and I would THINK about wanting "it all" (whatever "it" was) to last for good. And then later when I met photography this fell in wonderfully with my already developed quest for the permanant. What you have in a negative is the ability to recreate an image over and over no matter how many prints you give away, ruin, or lose. But-- and this is what appeals to the Taurean in my methinks-- it is still a physical item, the negative. And tragically therefore, being physical, can be eventually, or acctidentally, or ruthlessly destroyed.

As I have encountered more ideas on the subject, I have now grown fascinated with the idea that impermanance just might be what causes the temporary state known as ballance. How about them apples. So, all this dithering about digital vs. film: what's the point? Would I even be making a fuss if I could afford that $800 Pentax K-whatever I saw on sale at Iris yesterday and just test it out for myself? Probably. Any philanthropists out there reading one lone girl's blog? Wanna fund an experiment?