There Can Be A Danger In Technology

Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia; backlit from the side no one photographs! (click to enlarge)
X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 23mm; 1/15th sec. @ f/16; ISO 200

I believe there is danger in relying too much on technology when we are practicing our art. In this digital photographic world we are really fortunate to have gear that literally can almost take photographs by itself.  Auto exposure, auto focus, auto ISO, auto white balance, auto frame advance, automatically processing JPEG files in-camera, etc.  Just about everything we used to do manually in the past has been automated.  I love it, but I assert, there can be danger when turning over our long honed skills to technology.

The danger, I believe, is too much reliance on technology that the skills we worked so hard to develop and perfect are dulled by lack of use.  We don't exercise those fast and accurate focusing skills it took so long to develop before the days of autofocus lenses.  We don't think much when setting exposure values on our cameras.  We can adjust for poor exposures later if necessary.  If we set our cameras for RAW, we don't think about white balance as it can easily be fixed in an editing program.  Using 5 or 7 or 10 or now even 20 frames per second, the "Decisive Moment" becomes meaningless to many.  They just "spray and pray" as the saying goes.  One of those frames will be that optimum moment.  You get my point.

Here is a short personal I recently expressed to a friend about my own photography.  A couple of years ago, I had primarily started using Fujifilm gear with both prime and zoom lenses.  At first, I used the 18-55mm f/2.8-4 lens, which is image stabilized, as my walk around lens.  The copy I had produced excellent images and I was very happy.  I found I could photograph under most any conditions and the results were good.  My former Nikon lenses were all image stabilized as well and I felt image stabilization helped produce a higher percentage of sharp images for me.

As I often do, I wondered if a different lens could be better.  I then purchased the Fujifilm XF 16-55mm f/2.8 lens.  It was a bit larger but it was faster and had 2mm more focal length on the wide end.  I've always like the 24mm (FF) focal length.  Also, after using it for some time, I found the image quality, especially at the edges and corners, was a step above the 18-55.  I lamented that it didn't have image stabilization built into the lens.  This lens now has become my "go to" walk around lens I normally have mounted on my X-T2.

However—when I first started using the 16-55, I found a number of my images made with slower shutter speeds were not quite as crisp as I felt they should have been.  Hmmm?  Had I lost my touch and the technique of handholding a camera and lens at slower shutter speeds that I had developed over many, many years of using only non-IS lenses?  Had I relied on IBIS for so long that I didn’t realize I had become “a bit sloppy” with my technique?  Had I become—I’ll call it lazy?  Technology was compensating for me, allowed me to slack off, so to speak, and I no longer had to have those well honed camera holding skills to accomplish what I had accomplished in the past.  Identifying the problem, I then had to retrain my brain to think differently, as I had in the past when IS was not available, and I forced myself to pay closer attention to my technique.  I’m happy to say things are now back as they were pre-IS days.  An analogy would be fully relying on a calculator for years for even the simplest of math, then trying to do some math in your head.  In both cases it requires brain exercise to recover the skills.

This is but one small example but it illustrates the danger if we start to rely completely on technology and automation.  Degradation of long held skills silently creeps up on us and, if we are not careful, can negatively impact our photography if we don't practice to maintain those skills.  You never know when you might need them.

Again, I'm a big fan of all of the tech built into our cameras and lenses, but from now on I will be exercising my brain to "think" more about focus, exposure, white balance, pressing the shutter at a precise moment, etc.  I owe it to myself and to all of those years of hard work I did learning photography in a totally manual world.

How about you?  Do you owe it to yourself to maintain that skill set you have, or maybe had.....

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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