If an image is worth maing, then surely it is worth doing so at the highest level open to you; if it isnt worth the effort, how can it be worth shooting in the first place? What on earth can you want to do with second-best?
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Hi Rob,
Please don't take this as an insult or personal criticism (you can't hear my tone in the typing -- this is not meant in an aggressive way) but I think your comment empitomizes the mistake-in-concept which plagues a large sector of the online photo-community. Namely, that the ironically labelled notion of 'Image Quality', whatever it is defined as, is an end-in-itself. It has become the false-god of choice for far too many people.
What really matters is 'IC' - *Image Content*.
Daguerotypes have awful IQ by contemporary standards. As does virtually anything shot before 1989 on other than large format film. As I observed on another forum recently, most of Cartier-Bresson's work is, by our IQ standards, soft, grainy and of very low resolution. Half of Capa's combat photos are motion blurred (combat is a bitch that way). Eisenstadt's work has very little shadow detail. Larry Burrows' photos' from Vietnam are seriously lacking in dynamic range. Eddie Adams and Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winners are both unsharp. Ditto Doisneau's Kiss. I could go on and on. Do any of us care? Did any of us even notice until we started talking about IQ?
On a theme more related to the type of photography this site is principly dedicated to, Galen Rowell shot most of his work on 35mm chromes, which are profoundly inferior by today's technical standards. Again, did we notice or do we care?
The answer, of course, is no. These secondary traits of the image -- focus, accutance and the presence/absence of inherent medium-based artefacts (grain, loise, whatever) -- are just that, secondary. What compells us is the content of the image.
Several of my most treasured photos were taken with a 6MP fuji P&S. They look great at 5x7. But what matters is that they captured a magical moment in time when I fell in love with the woman who is to be my wife. I would hand over my entire collection of hard-drives unflinchingly if forced to chose between them and my oevre of 'serious' digital photography. Why? Because of the 'IC'.
Should I have brought an H1 with a $40K Phase back on a romantic escape? Of course not. More to the point, had I hoisted such a beast between myself and my beloved, the moment would have been erased before it was ever captured, by the shere size and mechanical mass of the camera.
Similarly, the reason Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Rowell, et. al. were able to capture their images AT ALL, was because of the size/type of cameras they used.
For me, when I travel alone, I usually rise at dawn, and walk 10-20 kms over the course of the day. The ONLY way I can make the images I made on this trip was with a camera like the G9.
If commercial imperative had driven my trip, then of course I would have taken cameras capable of better resolution, tone, etc. But the nature of the equipment taken cannot be separated from the nature of the experience itself, which is, of course, central to nature of the images made during the journey. This applies equally to weeks in Japan and the span of one's life.
So you are totally right, and totally wrong, at the same time. Every image is worth capturing at the best level of quality. But the quality of many images, in fact their very existence, is largely, if not exclusively, dependent upon the camera-in-hand, if only because having to carry "better" cameras would in many cases prevent one from getting to (or getting) the image at all.
If we went on the same trip, me with the G9 and you with a full kit of the best cameras, lenses and accessories made, I would outshoot you every time. Why? Because I will be able to go further, longer, and harder because I have no physical burden, and because I will see more, and more deeply, because I am not distracted psychologically by the responsibility and myriad of choices and technical distractions imposed by such a collection of *stuff*.
My point in this article, and here, is that, while still deeply flawed as measured against the 'ideal', a P&S camera like the G9 can produce image quality which will allow me to do just about anything I want with the images at the end of the day. Assuming you had herculean strength and kept up with me on the trip, the files yielded by the 'Top Gear', while 'better' according to various arbitrary empirical measures, wouldn't actually afford you much greater ultimate useability. Sure, you could print a cleaner 30x40 print. How many 30x40 prints have you ever made? Me, about five in 20 years of shooting. If National Geographic would print a double-truck off K200 shot on Canon FD glass (and they have) they sure as hell would print a well processed G9 file.
So, to borrow a concept from buddhism, unhook from your stuff! Stop worrying about IQ and start worrying about IC. Don't judge the picture by whether your eye sees noise, but whether your heart sees meaning and feeling.
Wow -- is it 9:30 already? I better go to work....
Cheers,
- N.
