The Digitization and Sterilization of Photography (or "The Death of Motion Blur")

"When you shoot a roll of 35mm film, you don't always know what you get.  Sometimes the image comes out blurred, or there's bad lighting, or the autofocus didn't quite kick-in right.  So you don't really know if you got the shot or not until you have the roll developed.  Now with digital cameras you know right away if you got the shot you want or if it's garbage.  Then it's a matter of deleting it and shooting again!"

This was the sales pitched I always used when I was selling cameras at the dawn of digital photography in Ritz Camera many moons ago.  And I've been regretting it ever since.  I had been successfully ignoring digital SLRs since they came out, relying instead on my Canon 35mm and even my trusty Pentax K1000 for the majority of my shooting.  Sure, I have a Canon digital point-and-shoot I use for less serious image taking, and even a Fujifilm Finepix S6000 that I used as a demo camera when teaching class.  But for serious shooting, contracted shootings, I always used my 35mm.  Did I always get "the shot?"  No, sometimes there were mistakes, things happened, and I didn't find out about it until it was days after the event.  But then there were the happy mistakes, the things that you can't plan, can't predict, can't even imagine.  And honestly, those sometimes end up being the best shots.

Well, I finally broke down and bought a DSLR, and I soon noticed that shots like those stopped happening.  It's not that the DSLR was better than my Elan7e or K1000, it's not that shooting on a CMOS chip was so much clearer than a 35mm negative, it's that if any shot I took didn't look "perfect" on the digital back I deleted it.  Choosing only those shots that looked like perfect focus, perfect exposure, perfect white balancing.  I didn't have to work with flawed images, I didn't take time to let them remain on the card and admire the benefits they had to offer.

Digital cameras, IS/VR lenses, and even programs like photoshop have all lead to a disturbing trend in photography.  They have lead to images looking sterile and lifeless.  Every image now has to be perfect.  Everything has to be sharp.  Motion blur is going the way of the dodo.  This is a mistake.  The blurring effect adds motion and emotion to pictures.  It allows the image to be something more than just a pretty picture.  Motion blur can convey a sense of urgency, excitement, anguish, anything at all.  Robert Capa was a legend in the field of photography, a war photographer who stormed the beaches of Normandy with U.S. troops.  He came under fire with them and dove behind obstacles and into fox holes for cover with them.  He also shot one of the most iconic photos of WWII, despite the image being totally blurred.  This photo would have never happen in the world of digital media.  Photographers and publications now would go for the focused shot, the clear shot, the shot where you could see the the soldier's face perfectly.  Would that be the better choice?  I'm not the one to say definitely one way or the other.  But I do know, looking at this photo of the Normandy invasion, the blur, the distortion, adds a sense of urgency to the image.  You can't see the soldier's face clearly, it could be anyone to the viewer.  Your son, your brother, your uncle, your father, your neighbor, anyone.  It makes you uncomfortable when you look at it, as it should.  It could even give you sense of being right there in the water with that soldier, your vision being blurred from taking a hit, from being to close to an impacting mortar and having your bell rung, anything.  These are emotions and reactions that you would not necessarily get from the same image if it was in perfect focus.

As photographers, I feel and fear that we have become too obsessed with "the perfect shot."  That we can't appreciate the flaws in our images as much as the qualities.  Japan has an artistic form known as wabi sabi, the appreciation of the beauty of all things imperfect.  Art in this form always has some sort of flaw in it, a flaw that in some way adds to the artistic experience, a flaw that can make you appreciate the beauty of the piece even more.  Wabi sabi is a zen form, and it is the understand that not all things are, or can be, perfect.  That we need to appreciate and love the flaws of life alongside everything else.

Not a bad philosophy if you ask me.