Analog film photography and cameras

Hoefla, having a look at it tonight and if it's good probably buying..

There needs to be less chat about why this is better or that is worse and more doing. The chit chat is what infuriates me, because more often than not the equipment has no bearing on what you produce, it's your use of it which makes the difference.

So yeah ride your bike or use your camera, Or whatever...

The image capture interface (camera, objective) and capture technology (film) and its means of reproduction (wet darkroom, hybrid etc.) do have an impact on the produced work. Large format and KB are not just different negative sizes but define within their means of capture their own tempo and directly influence composition. Motors, reflex viewing, auto-focus and any of a number of "technical innovations" too were never neutral but left their fingerprint on the work produced using them.

Technology is hardy ever neutral but typically defines the work. This is not limited to photography but to pretty much all creative endevours.

An author, for example, writing with pen on paper will tend to be driven by the interface and produce differently than one using a typewritter, just as an author using a typewritter with its contraints on text manipulation will write differently from one using a word processor. That's why a number of authors (Nadine Gordimer, Frederick Forsyth and Don DeLillo being perhaps the most famous that quickly come to mind) insist on using typewriters.

Phillip Roth switched to computers.. Here is his take given in an interview with the LA Times.

What does this mean in terms of process?

The process has changed in part because the machinery has changed. Working on a computer is very different from working on a typewriter.

You typed? You didn't write longhand?

No, I typed. Doing that, I tended to write through. Write through a chapter. Write through the chapters. So I would have many drafts. Because the changes involved... there was only so much you could write in the margins. You had to retype the changes, and rewrite as you retyped. That's why, I think, everybody had many more drafts.

But beginning with "Sabbath's Theater," I guess, or maybe "Operation Shylock," I began to work on a computer. Now I’m doing so much changing as I go along that the drafts disappear, as it were, into the rewrites.