Over the past year or so, I have been piecemeal reading Kim Biel's 'Good Pictures'. It is a book that lends itself well to such an approach. Fortunately, because that's the way I read these days, alas...
But anyway, one of the concepts that keeps coming up for me as I read this book is the notion that as technical barriers to capturing photographs are overcome, what were once 'challenges' become aesthetic choices. As modern film emulsions were developed, for example, older technologies, now collectively described as 'alternative processes', became aesthetic possibilities in the image maker's toolkit. These days, between hardware and software, I would argue that digital sensor noise is a solved problem. So, is it surprising then that using old digicams, with their noisy sensors and funky color rendition, is kind of a thing now? Today's image, smooth as a baby's bum, was taken at ISO 8000. Digital 'grain' or computational perfection? A choice I made as I processed the image.
