Creating something new and enduring is extremely difficult. I think most creative efforts are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is the latter that we as proclaimed artists must strive to achieve otherwise our creative efforts fall into the cliche and mundane realms. I really believe the digital era has reduced photography to a commodity. There is nothing wrong with it being a commodity. Actually it’s great. Everyone is going click-click-click without even a thought. The length of a thought has become the time we spent looking at an image. Many years ago printed images were unique, now they have become a way of reading. There are so many images and so many ways of seeing images on various mediums that they have become how we read. So fast.
The speed at which technology advances to satisfy our desires is incredible. Image quality is defined by the price and complexity of our equipment. Our focus has shifted to the complexity and obesity of the sensor and its casing. Very little in comparison is marketed on how we see the image, i.e. the lens. To me the lens is everything. The camera is simply an image capturing device of little value, it’s a commodity. Camera manufacturers jam so much complexity in modern digicams that we get brain numb with options. I guess the average advanced ‘photographer’ uses about 5% of the functions available.
People see the complexity of a camera as insurance, and they will pay a lot for the comfort zone that it provides
Technology is a barrier to many of us in taking good well thought out images. So too is the unrestricted ability to take as many shots as we like. If you were shooting with film you only had 36 images to take. That was a psychological limitation and your outing or project was usually divided into how much of each aspect can be crammed into that roll of film. So each image you took better be good or you would run out of film. These days we can store 1000 images on a chip. It just does not make sense. Imagine the workload after taking all that crap and sorting the good from the bad.
Challenge yourself and take a standard 50mm lens, limit your ISO to 200. Set all other settings to off such as sharpness, colour etc. Set the camera to manual and have a hand held light meter at hand. Now go out and take 12 images in a time span of 1 our. If you start doing that, you will see a difference in the type of shots you took. You will also have more time to enjoy them and less time wasted in front of your PC. Don’t be afraid to delete all your images and start over again.
There is no better indication of a good potential image when you wonder if you should take it.