Noel Norton Goes Digital

Editor's note: calm down you digital zealots! Many of our articles are written 'tongue in cheek', so refrain from the hail of hate-emails, thank you! Lighten up!

Noel Norton has gone digital, and the sky just fell in. Well, we'd guess he has been using a digital camera for a while now, but we will pretend that this is just a recent development as we attempt to preserve our delicate constitution. Norton's website confirms that he is now using a Nikon D300. Why, oh why, has this happened? Is it an infatuation with the newness of it all? Or perhaps it stems from collegial peer pressure to switch away from film? He doesn't give a reason for switching on his website, which suggests to us that he didn't feel a need to give a reason; which, in turn, may imply that he believes that it is universally understood why someone will proceed to digital. If our deductions are correct, he can, ahem, scratch 'universally understood' as WE obviously don't get it.

Mr. Norton is now archiving his film records of Trinidad & Tobago life stretching back almost 50 years. We'd like to state that if Norton captured his iconic pictures 50 years ago using a digital camera, there wouldn't be any pictures to archive. Those pictures would have been zapped by a catastrophic hard drive failure, rendered unreadable on decomposing disks, or be of an incompatible file format, long before 50 years had elapsed. We are just waiting to see if our smug contemporary digital shooters' pictures will be around in 50 years' time. At the very least we assume that many would be rendered broke by the perpetual purchase of multiple redundant hard drives.

Paradoxically, one of Mr. Norton's 35mm transparencies from decades ago, scanned on a modern film scanner, gives an equivalent level of detail comparable to a 16 megapixel camera of today. In other words, a fifty year old slide thumps 90% of all digital cameras in use by Trinidad pros today, who nonetheless pontificate about 'honest to goodness' digital 'quality'. Don't believe us? Go research it on the internet, and download 16 megapixel files for yourself. People can be so blinded by apparent scientific progress sometimes that it can be hard to step back and take an objective view: when you hear photographers waxing lyrical about the pictures from their 2 megapixel Nikon D1, you have to wonder. Imagine if Mr. Norton recorded his irreplaceable historical pictures on a 3 megapixel camera (don't laugh, as just a few years ago 3 megapixels were touted as 'professional quality', when it obviously wasn't), we guess he could have printed some nice high resolution stamps from the files. And, thank you very much, we don't want any emails about your film-smashing 3 megapixel digicams, okay?

The first time we saw any of Mr. Norton's photography was in the first edition of Trinidad & Tobago: Terrific & Tranquil, the second edition of which is now currently in print. At the time, most, if not all, of the submitted photographs were done on film. Mr. Norton's pictures, side-by-side with those of his colleagues, made one thing clear: Norton, quite apart from his sense of aesthetics, possessed a technical mastery of the medium light-years beyond that of his peers. It was almost embarrassing. A viewer could easily identify Norton's photographs from the rest at a glance by virtue of technical excellence alone. Digital technology, however, is the great equalizer. Digital cameras are the salvation of the technically wretched photographer as these devices produce perfect pictures, and require of the user a skill-set no higher than that of a typical chimpanzee. Oh, sorry, we aim too high, observe the picture below:


A competently executed picture, no? Well, our CAT took that picture, by stepping on the electronic cable release. Yes, we said CAT, Felix catus domesticus, furry four-legged critter, fuzzball, you get the idea? The camera auto-focused, and exposed all on its own. It's no wonder photography gets no respect these days as it has been dumbed down so much that even pets can take pictures. Digital cameras allow Norton's colleagues to reduce the disparity between his pictures, and theirs. We miss the good old days when years of accrued experience, and technical mastery actually mattered.

There is always pressure to conform. We steadfastly resist even though it isolates us, makes us unpopular, and often invites derision, most recently from a Trinidadian blogger who described us as, "...off the handle". To us, though, there is no challenge inherent in digital photography, unless getting that 'curve' adjustment just right in Photoshop constitutes a 'challenge'. If there is no challenge, for us, then there is no point taking pictures; it's just an ode to boredom. Strangely, we've noticed with many amateurs, after a flurry of activity with their fancy DSLRs, they eventually get bored, and move on to the latest ipod, or whatever. We hope that Mr. Norton has found a new challenge, but we think he'll get bored of it. We can only hope.

Many photographers believe that using film places them at a decided disadvantage with respect to their digital-wielding counterparts. There is no arguing that point, it is true. Yet, we would like to think that we are still holding our own. Norton would likely do better. On the other hand, digital shooting inevitably involves digital editing at some stage, and Photoshop requires a steep learning curve to master.

Trinidad and Tobago owes Noel Norton a debt of gratitude for capturing its history; and by extension, his use of film ensures that that history will be available for viewing in coming generations. Our slides and negatives of Trinidad and Tobago's natural spaces will last for more than 100 years, once stored properly. We are pretty sure, however, that our digital pictures will not fare as well.

- September 2008

P.S. We have more to write, but we are being distracted by the Nikon D90 DSLR which records HD video. AN ABOMINATION! We're going to drink some fixer now, shaken, not stirred.