10月 10 2008

英语阅读 At last, technology is making photography better, not worse (2008-10-09)

Published by at 00:09 under 英语阅读

Andrew Brown 的文章说什么样的数码相机才是最好的相机--并不是像素越多越好。

At last, technology is making photography better, not worse
Andrew Brown

The Guardian,
Thursday October 9 2008

The phone I bought last month has a camera supposedly better than the camera I bought four years ago. That’s to say it has a 5MP camera instead of a 4MP one. I could have bought a Samsung phone with 8MP, the same as my second digital camera. And the phone does take perfectly usable pictures and recognisable videos. That it functions as well as a mapping device and a recorder is astonishing, but irrelevant to this argument. My cameras will do none of those other things. When I want to take a close-up with the most recent, and expensive, DSLR, I have to go to the trouble of changing the lens first. The phone – and the previous camera – do it all in software.

This is all part of a revolution that has put good photography in the hands of everyone. Yet the paradox of digital photography has been that the standards of publicly acceptable photographs has plummeted. Perhaps I am spoiled, because I worked on the Independent when it first started, but I expect a newspaper photograph to give me an aesthetic thrill at the same time as it illuminates the news. The Guardian’s wonderful centrespreads are an example today of what I mean, but they are very unusual. This isn’t just an aesthetic argument. The influential Daily Mail demands an extraordinary flat lighting style which robs its standard portraits of any individuality, but at least they are technically clean. The quality of the digital photographs in the papers is often dreadful: screengrabs with fuzzy grey lines across them; phone shots that have been run through the ugly filter in Photoshop; in the local press, pictures are often lurid, splodgy and blurred. Sometimes these have a vitality that outweighs their flaws, but most of the time they fail the test of a good photograph.

There is a parallel here to what happened when desktop publishing (DTP) software first appeared. Immediately, the world was swamped in ugly and uninformative layouts. It took a couple of decades before the hideous tide receded and the business was back in the hands of professionals, or of amateurs safely corralled inside templates drawn up by professionals.

Incompetence and lack of self-discipline is only part of the story. Modern cameras make it very hard to take pictures which are out of focus or horrendously badly exposed. They can’t do much about composition, though they do make it very easy to recrop and recompose in software afterwards. It’s not the fault of the camera if no user does bother. Some of the new cameras will even try to find smiles in the picture and focus on them, which is a startling example of usefulness. But these are not the points that get advertised. Instead, consumer cameras sell themselves largely on their zoom range and the megapixel count. These are measures which can actively worsen the pictures they can take. When you are judging a camera’s sensor, size is about the only thing that counts. Fewer pixels on a bigger sensor will usually take better pictures than more pixels on a smaller sensor. There will be less “noise” – speckles in darker areas – and greater sensitivity to light. Similarly, a zoom that extends to 10 times its original size may make a man feel good, but it won’t be as sharp anywhere along its range as one that is less grotesquely enlarged.

So millions of cameras have been sold in the past five years where the technical improvements did very little to deliver better pictures. The advantages of digital over film cameras was not that they delivered better images but that they made things easier, quicker and cheaper.

That is now changing, even in the almost affordable sections of the market. The other day I saw Brian Harris, whose moody black and white pictures gave the early Independent much of its style. He was clutching a new Nikon D700, which costs around £2,000 – yet has “only” 12MP. But these pixels are on a sensor the same size as 35mm film, which is about 50% larger than the sensors of consumer DSLRs, and the result is a camera that is actually better at low-light photography than anything he could manage with film. He had just spent four days shooting backstage at the National Theatre without any flash at all. Technology has finally caught up with where it started.

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