Learning Photography with a Digital Camera

"A digital camera is an excellent learning tool".

Behold the statement I have heard repeated ad nauseam. According to just about everybody these days, digital makes learning photography easy. From my perspective, digital is for people who don't want to learn about photography, period.

If you had to have a surgical procedure performed on you, would you want a doctor who graduated from an "open-book" university to perform it? Indeed, are there any accredited "open-book" medical schools? Are "open-book" universities looked upon as the "ultimate vehicle for tertiary education"? Of course not. How much do you expect someone to learn if passing examinations depended solely on his or her copying ability? By extension, digital photography is "open-book" photography. The instant feedback of an LCD screen, with computer controlled exposure, focus, white balance, film speed, aperture, and shutter speed all strive to make photography the medium of morons. Give a beginner a digital camera and tell him, "go thee hence, and Learn Photography". Thousands of perfectly exposed photographs later, the self-proclaimed new photo-prodigy will show up to be examined. Administer the test: take away the digicam, and give him a manual SLR loaded with slide film. A couple of catastrophically bad rolls of film later, the irate photo-guru will hurl epithets towards all things analogue, and grab his digicam with nary a look back.

Poor old film: always taking the blame for a photographer's lack of technical knowledge. Using a digital camera, there is no penalty for a limited knowledge of exposure technique, for instance. There is the facility of instant LCD feedback which will allow the photographer to use an exposure compensation dial to achieve the effect he or she desires. There is no need to understand the interplay of aperture and shutter speed, or how the camera's meter measures reflectance. Film photographers (especially slide film photographers) face large penalties, in terms of the cost of wasted film, by the imperfect application of exposure technique. Like it or not, learning occurs far more quickly when there is a penalty for failure. In the "old days" it was correct to say that the photographer takes the picture, not the camera. These days, the cameras take the pictures, while the photographer just points the camera. Even the most well intentioned beginner seeking to learn photography will eventually be seduced down the path of digital decadence. The desire to produce publication-quality photographs as fast as possible seems just too great for beginners. They opt for the shortcut method to obtaining good pictures, being constantly dependent on their digital crutch. It takes a long time to reach a certain level of consistency with film, just as in any other endeavour. Digital beginners seek to eliminate the learning curve altogether.

Digital shooting impedes the ability of an individual to see photographically. Film shooters, especially view-camera users, learn to quickly break a scene down to its essential elements. When this is accomplished, it is possible to visualise the workable compositions before a shot is taken. Film shooters have an uncanny aptitude to 'know' how a scene will ultimately look before the shutter release is depressed. Digital beginners seem unable, in many cases, to "pre-visualize", as Ansel Adams put it. To compensate, the digital shooters must take hundreds of pictures of one scene, and then edit them on-screen later. This hit-and-miss approach to photography stokes the ire of many 'old-school' landscape shooters who are very disciplined in the field. The arguments go back and forth as to whether limitless hit-and-miss shooting encourages creativity, or stifles it. It certainly encourages wasting time in the field!

Ultimately, digital cameras allow photographers to express their creativity while, at the same time, remove the vagaries introduced by technical issues. For many people, the technical aspects of photography are an insurmountable barrier to the process of taking pictures. Digital alleviates this. If the purpose is learn the craft of photography, however, digital is not the way to go.

- November 2006