Since Dektol in Darkroom has turned to software in Lightroom, I have become a PHOTOGRAPHIST.
Time to coin a word for it, for lack of any other phrase shorter than my blog here.
Yes after years of clicking the titanium curtain shutter, now I click the enter button on a tethered laptop. I have become a Photographist instead of photographer because I no longer graph photons, now I am a Photon Artist and so I paint with shadow and light using digits instead of emulsion.
And now reality fades away. Photography was more real in the era of film and chemicals, we saw what the lens saw, now we see what the mind sees and a lot of photos you see out there are partially synthesized. Now software can totally manipulate the face and body with complete control over many human parameters.
People are liking my work as a Photographist, take the example of the Golden Girl shot above which won top spot, click the image to see how many times it has been listed on Model Mayhem by the industry, more so than my other “photography“.
The “Film” industry has caught up and surpassed photography in this regard, many sequences are composites of real and digital elements put together by computers and the Photographist. The industry is not even film, its 99% digits. Now a 12 year old consumer (my nephew) with his iphone apps can do more FX and HD production & editing than entire crews did on a 70’s movie photographer.
Where are we headed? Next generation’s “Photoshop” will be a chip inside their DSLR cameras and the generation after will have personally target profiled nano particle Photoshop embedded with the motion-digital paper print ads that will be filling the landfills of tomorrow. I totally enjoy my digital freedom, and because of my perspective I know when to be a photographer or Photographist.
The perspective is what’s being lost.
