"whisky-dave" wrote in message
...
the fact that all your photos are free means that you can
experiment,

of course, but experimenting can only make you better if you know what
you're doing.

and you can see instantly which is the right exposure in a
situation where an automatic meter would be fooled.

and how would you know this. Most mobile phone users wouldn't even
consider teh term right exposure there's no such thing as a wrong
exposure.

Agreed. But that has been true of film cameras (eg Instamatic point and
shoot and Box Brownies) since photography became cheap enough for the
amateur rather than just the professional or knowledgeable enthusiast to
afford.

Does having to pay for each picture necessarily make a person who "just
wants to take a picture" and doesn't want to be bothered with things he
doesn't understand like exposure, composition. focus etc, take better
photos? Not necessarily: he just finds that "some of them didn't come out
right" without necessarily knowing why. Digital doesn't make that situation
worse, it just means they can take more pictures, some of which may be good
(by chance!) and lots which will be dross. At least with "free" photos there
is the opportunity to take enough photos to be able to experiment and to
have instant feedback as to what worked - *for those people who are
able/willing to experiment*.


For example you can correct for deliberate off-axis photos, where you
have to shoot something reflective
at an angle to avoid picking up reflections of yourself or your flash.
You
can retouch objects that you cannot avoid including in your photograph
such
as lamp-posts - I'm quite proud of a photograph that I took of St Pancras
station where the only place that avoided trees obscuring the building
involved including some street lights in the foreground: I was able to
clone
details from adjacent brickwork and windows, spotting a repetitive
pattern,
to paint over the street lights.

Fantastic ypu lied in your photo, people have been able to do that before
stonehenge was built.
Constable did that in the 17th centrury with his hay wain.
it wasn't real he imagined it.

Yes, artists/painters could do it. Film photographers couldn't (except to a
limited extent and with crude results such as the Cottingley Fairies).
Modern digital photographers can do what painters could - modify what's
there.

Obviously there is a fine line between removing unwanted distractions and
distorting the truth to pretend that two people met who never did.


did that Short of digitising a film negative/slide,
making digital corrections and then re-photographing the result to film,
that's simply not possible with film. Tweaking colour temperature (or
white-balancing for whatever the colour of the daylight or artificial
light
happens to be) is so much easier with digital.

all irreliveant unless you think being a good photographer means
you are better at covering up your mistakes.

Being a good photographer means taking good photos, whether that requires
doing all the adjustments in camera at the time of taking the picture or
adjusting things after the event, either in the darkroom for film or the
computer software for digital. I wonder how many stunning eye-catching
photos are precisely as they were taken and how many have had some form of
cropping, sharpening/blurring, colour correction, retouching etc applied in
a real or digital darkroom afterwards.

As long as you avoid the dreaded over-exposure and burnt-out highlights
(I
find it better to under- than over-expose if I'm unsure and tend to set
my
camera permanently on -0.3 stops)

so you don't know your own camera.

I know that its meter generally seems to over-expose slightly if left to its
own devices and that the meter doesn't give the correct exposure in every
situation, and that the limitation of the photographic medium (in this case
the digital sensor, but it could be film) tends to respond better, if in
doubt, to exposure errors in one direction than in the other. Most negative
film, for example, tends to produce better prints with an overexposure of
(say) one stop than with an underexposure of one stop. Most slide film is
the opposite, as is a digital sensor.

That's knowing (by copious practice and learning from your mistakes) your
equipment and your medium. And the "free" nature of digital and the
immediate feedback out in the field makes that learning process so much
easier - for those that are willing to learn, and not everyone is
sufficiently interested in photography to do so.


you can produce some stunning results with
a modern camera,

you can with some old cameras too.

especially one such as an SLR with a larger sensor and a
better lens. Which reminds me of one extra thing that digital allows:

thre's other thiungs it allows focus staking and all sorts of things

Yes I read about focus stacking the other day. I already knew about HDR
(taking several photographs from identical viewpoint with different
exposures and combining them to add more shadow and highlight detail, but I
didn't about taking "identical" photos with different focus settings to
increase effective depth of field. I shall have to experiment with that if I
can afford software that can perform the merging.


correcting for known barrel/pincushion distortion in a lens (something
that
is present to some extent even in expensive lenses, especially in a zoom
lens at some focal lengths): I have a utility that "knows" about the
distortions that are inherent in many lenses and can correct for them to
avoid rectangles looking curved inwards or outwards.

That proves that digital is better for taking photos
doesn't say much about the photographer.

I don't think anyone is suggesting the digital makes a better photographer,
but it does make it easier/quicker/cheaper to acquire the knowledge to
become one and removes the cost disincentive to experimentation. It improves
the *potential* to be a better photographer.


What all is said and done, the best camera (sorry, cliche time!) is the one
that you have with you at the time - better to take a worse-quality picture
of an unrepeatable event with a compact camera because you've got it with
you and can operate it quickly, than to miss taking the photo with a camera
capable of taking better photos (low noise sensor, lens with fewer
aberations etc) because you've not got it with you or can't get it ready
quick enough to take the photo.

In other words, having a better camera, being able to use it correctly etc
is only one part of it. Having the patience to wait for the right moment or
to get the best angle also play a major part - as does a certain amount of
luck sometimes :-)