Embracing Change In Photography

Some people embrace change - some resist it. Some just search for it down the back of the sofa cushions. But whichever way you deal with it, you can't ignore the fact that it exists. No good telling me it wasn't that way in the old days. I was there in the old days and I was nosey - I looked around to see what was happening. And everywhere you looked, there it was; change. We went from big old sheet film and plate cameras to roll-film cameras to little 35mm cameras...that promptly grew up into big 35mm cameras. The lucky ones then got to advance on to newer roll-film cameras and eventually into sheet film ones...The only thing that was missing on the photographic equipment carousel was a gold ring dispenser that you could lean out and try to grasp. We changed from slow monochrome films to fast monochrome films - from slow slide films to...well...slow slide films - but we did not know they were slow, so we thought they were blazingly fast. If you spent up big you could get 160 ASA and it only took two weeks to get it processed! Talk about space-age... We dutifully bought all the new film formats that Kodak and Polaroid thought up and just as dutifully discarded them when the parent firms decided to make something even worse. You have to remember that this was the era that saw blue safari suits and flared trousers, so our general judgement was somewhat impaired. Come to think of it, it stayed slightly skewed a long way into the first years of the digital revolution as well, though I was rather comforted to see that Kodak did continue their practice of selling marginal cameras in the early digital era. We had one - it worked fine until the day when it didn't, and I have to say that the day was not long-delayed. We certainly embrace change quickly now that the phone and tablet era have come upon us. DP Review is hard pressed to keep up with the new apps and platforms that the labs are coming out with. The major makers also ring the changes with a surprising regularity - I sometimes wonder whether they regret getting the new-day/new-camera culture started in quite such a decided fashion. It must be a strain for every design and manufacturing department as the model years advance and they are expected to come out with the topper to top the topper. I also wonder if they have a clock on the wall that counts down the time until the next idea has to hatch - rather like the British airplane makers used to do when they were working with wood and glue to make Mosquito wings - the big clock went on when the glue batch started and the workers had only a certain amount of time to use the mixture before the clock warned them that it was past the best strength. The pace of change being as fast as it is, and the amount of brouhaha that goes on when a model is superseded by the Next Big Thing, you would think that there is nothing but wreckage left over after the product launch. Not a bit of it. The superseded model can be brand new old stock or lightly used secondhand stock and can be even more desirable than the new stuff - it all depends upon your needs vs the publicity machine. A case in point is the Fujifilm X-E2s sitting in Murray Street at present. This is a superb mirror-less camera now over shadowed by the Fujifilm X-E3 but more capable in many ways than the new model. Someone turned it in - probably to go for a bigger and more modern Fujifilm - but the next person who buys it is the one who is going to get the prize. In the sort of natural evolution of this sort of thing, the illustration picture was taken with the previous model - the X-E2 - and it is all you can ask for.