I've finally severed a long and very happy association with 35mm film - I just sold my wonderful old Canon T90 and lenses on Ebay.
 
But it got me thinking about the analogue/digital corollary between photography and recording music...
 
Just as the arrival of digital audio has allowed anyone with a computer and a few accessories to produce music at home that was once only available at enormous expense in analogue tape-based professional studios, so the advent of digital cameras and Photoshop has given the amateur all the benefits only previously available to those with a darkroom and a lot of ancilliary equipment.
 
I see this undeniably as a good thing, but maybe with one question.
 
The technology now available undoubtedly means that far more people can get involved in these pursuits, especially in the music world, but I wonder if the overall 'quality' of the output is in someway lowered by the ease of use of the modern DAW and the digital camera?
 
I have a foot in both camps here, and can appreciate this from both sides of the fence.
 
I've never set foot in a recording studio, and my entire knowledge and experience of recording and mixing is based wholly in digital audio. On the other hand, I learned photography on very basic film cameras, where a working knowledge of the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, focal length and film speed often meant the difference between getting a decent shot or not. I can even remember carrying around (and being able to use) tables of guide numbers in a time before TTL flash metering.
 
So, from a personal point of view, I believe that my knowledge of 'analogue' photography gives me an enormous benefit when it comes to using digital camera equipment, I'm in position to make the same comparision between analogue and digital audio. Would having used tape at some stage now make be a 'better' user of digital audio?
 
I'd love to hear from those who have worked in all four scenarios, i.e. both using film & digital in photography, and tape & digital in audio.
 

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And goodbye old friends, we had some fun
 

 
 
 

Just wait until the debate starts about the use of a new product called EZShoot.

I still have my Mamiya/Sekor 500 TL with a bunch of lens, several zoom, wide angle, macro, regular...but I hardly ever use it. It is all manual but it works great, it works better than I do. I should use it more. Lately I have been using a Kodak Zi8... easy pics and movies.

J

Part of the graphic design course I did back in the late '70's was a photography class, and I spent many a happy afternoon with an Olympus SLR, then went through that arcane ritual in the darkroom developing the pics. Something very magical about seeing the photograph slowly appear in the developing tray under that red light.

Spent a lot of time in a recording studio in the early '80's, and I don't have particularly fond memories of hanging around all day waiting to do a take while the engineer endlessly twiddled with a kick drum sound. Very happy to be able to record as and when the mood takes me these days.

Pluses and minuses. 

For every important thing someone learns from doing things the old way they tend to have some other thing where they are stubbornly conforming to limitations that no longer exist for no good reason.

And I find people often:
1. Argue that the limitations still exist, even if it's easily demonstrated that they really don't.
2. Argue that even if the limitations no longer exist, pretending that they do is beneficial. But whether that's really true or not is hard to evaluate, particularly for someone wedded to their ways.


I find that youngsters who think they know everything and have nothing to learn from their elders and their well established ways tend to learn less over time.

And oldsters who think they know everything (important) already and thus have nothing to learn about newfangled ways tend to learn less over time.

But then I like to try all kinds of stuff, new and old. And I'm still young enough at heart to still like to thumb my nose at the establishment, even if I'm part of it.

I still have my Canon A1 Steve.
I take it out every so often just to look at it. I have a lot of very old cameras
but my wife made me store them...I understood.
I have a digital camera now. It seems to dial me in.

I like the digital stuff.
The band for many years had a very nice 8 track analog studio and it was
great fun. It was great for that time. Life is different now and the digital
fits in nicely.

Still takes effort to be good....just a different effort I think.

I have three old 35mm/film cameras that I don't use but can't let them go.  I remember how I would take the time to pick the film ISO, set the lens aperture, and look through the veiwfinder to check my composition.  Now with my digital camera I set it to "P" and shoot.  Who cares about composition anymore thats just a simple click on the computer. <<(sad)   I miss the days of holding a 4"x 7" picture in my hand.  Mama don't take my Kodachrome away.

I'm surprise they haven't changed the old shutter click noise when you take a pic.


I've been in a couple of big studios but only to visit.  My recording past has been the Tascam 4 track until now.  Funny how everything digital in recording is trying to sound like analog gear.

Hi,

There is a side of the old photography thing that I liked ... knowing the fstops and the shutter stuff was nice, because you could easily add/subtract the background and add something else to the picture.  But you don't really get more of this until you also do the photo lab thing, and you know that you can adjust the printing so you only get that part over there, and it looks like it was the photographer's shot, but in reality it was only a quarter of the whole picture.

So far, I just bought me a cheapie digital camera, it's ok ... though I'm finding that when I want a specific shot, to make adjustments on the digital camera is a hassle ... but this might be on the account of its "automated" stuff, instead of my knowledge of the camera and its lenses.

I always had a Wide Angle lens, that was also a Zoom that went quite far, and I miss the Zoom lenses in the digital cheapie ... I always liked the idea of adjusting how far and how close ... which is something that comes from film, for me ... for example, if someone is licking their lips, a face shot would not be as efficient as one with just th elips and the stop action of the moment ... this is easy to see in film and in some of the digital stuff that films it, but really hard to select the proper moment with a live camera. In this case here, my trusty AE-1 was dandy, because I already knew I could move this 2 stops to the left (or right) focus, and then go for it.

All in all, I will be able to add more to this later as I get used to my little bugger and go from there.

But I got my eyes on that one biggie with a couple of lenses so I can get back and shoot the music again ... who knows ... we might even see a few shots of Bapu playing some stick on his hand!
 
I'm thinking (can't tell yet) that effects are going to be the hardest thing to learn with digital cameras. I'll let you know after I take the class from a good friend of mine, and professional photographer ... he does night courses here in Vancouver on Digital Photography ... but I'm not sure that my cheapie camera is good enough for his class ... knowing him, a bit more is better! 

I hear what you're saying - I used to have this conversation a lot with my father-in-law who was a video filming buff who would at the same time tell you that his digital video cameras and then hugely expensive pc based pro editing software were the bees knees whilst at the same time saying that the digital point and press type cameras that everyone has these days are bad because they are killing the art of photography and that most people don't even know how a traditional photograph is made, which is a bad, bad thing.

My take was that most people just want snapshots of their families on holiday or whatever and don't care "how" a photograph is made and nor should they. Also, the same technology has allowed them to see the picture in situ, so it can be re-taken if necessary and avoid patiently waiting for two weeks only to find that the picture taker had his thumb over the lens or whatever and ruined the pictorial record of something that cannot be recreated.

In musical terms, the advent of the PC DAW certainly gives everybody access to things that can make them sound better than they really are (I include myself amongst those) and I can see how those who spent many years doing it the hard way would see this as bad. Is it cheating ? I don't think so, unless you are going to call everyone who ever added a reverb or effect of some kind to a recording of an instrument a cheat too. Is recording the playing a guitar through some kind of effect pedal cheating ? The guitar doesn't "really" sound like that does it ? My only "proper" studio experience was just exciting for me because I was young and it was "cool", but looking back there was much hanging around - which at the end of the day we were paying a lot of money for the "pleasure"  of doing so !

We don't live in caves anymore because we have centrally heated houses and we don't ride a donkey because we have cars and trucks. At then end of the day it still takes a creative mind / talent to be up there with the very best and that's what really matters to me. Exactly how someone produced that particular fantastic piece of work is not as important to me as the end result.

I always end up thinking in terms of quantity vs quality. We never had fancy cameras when I was a kid, but I remember each photo being precious. W/ only 12 or 24 shots in a film, you didn't want to waste a single one. So taking 40 pics of yourself at Time Square on your first trip to NY was out of the question. Similarly, you wouldn't take a picture of your meal.

Easier access to unlimited pics somehow changes our relation w/ photos. Almost as if photography was a way to immortalize something back in the days, whereas now, it's a way to share the moment make the present more "official". As if things weren't happening unless we take a picture and update Facebook. As if we didn't really take pictures for us, but to share, to have witnesses. It's all about now.

On a similar note, one thing that bugs me to no end... When I go see the show and see all those people w/ their iPhones and iPads filming, sometimes paying more attention to their screen than to what is happening on stage. And then uploading all those crappy quality bootlegs to YouTube. It's like, who will ever want to watch that stuff anyway? I can't believe that the people paying over $100 for a ticket will actually watch that thing again after they've dumped it on YouTube... Yet they miss most of the show.

Musically, I think there is a parallel. Coming from the old days, even though digital audio removed limitations and we can now "keep the tape rolling" and record every idea, personally, I'm still thinking in terms of highlights and moments. And there is something about earning those moments, earning the skills. It's always about making the best possible song in order to learn and be able to do even better the next time. It's all part of a long-term process, so instant gratification isn't part of the objective. And some songs are written just for that purpose - not to be shared. Their like a study or something.