Shel argued that the recent ethic is for MORE images rather than for BETTER images, and cited a bunch of technical reasons why this might be so.
A lot of these technical reasons involved the aesthetics of the finished print, which are important in one way but are only tangentially related to the craft of the photographer in finding and composing a good image. A lot of recent technology might also HELP get good images at least from a technical standpoint. AF works. Autoexposure is getting pretty good with multi-zone metering and auto fill flash. Modern films and digital processing allow many technical mistakes to be salvaged. Now if you work like Ansel Adams using a big camera, hand-held meter, and manual everything, none of these fancy-dancies are going to help you. In fact, if some of them might cause trouble (AF does tend to screw up composition if you are not careful). Ansel and his followers had the advantage that nature usually stands still. If you are shooting people, who usually don't stand still and tend to do things in poorly lit venues, then things like AF and auto-exposure DO help. People are very unpredictable, and catching a great moment is often a matter of luck or patience. Here, volume DOES help get great shots. Whether it makes you a better photographer doesn't matter in this case as long as you got the shot somehow. If you can always bring back a good shot then you must be considered a good shooter somehow. (Do you know how MANY shots Sports Illustrated shoots during the super bowl, which is basically just a football game? Getting the best possible shots is usually hellishly inefficient) When I was pursuing a graduate degree in Visual Communications, one of the things I wanted to do was a parallel stylistic and technical history of photojournalism. I'm really curious if the award-winning pictures improve over the years with the advantages of better cameras, lenses, etc. Of course the winning 3 per year or whatever could essentially be luck, but overall you'd think you could see a trend (or not). DJE
