A PHOTOGRAPHY SETBACK - HAS ANYONE NOTICED?

When I was a kid my parents gave me a Brownie camera. It was a square box camera with a big flash bulb that you had to replace every time you took a picture. And the heat from the bulbs! Yowser!  And remember those massive negative strips?!

Then I got a polaroid camera. Woo hoo! Take a photo and 30 seconds later the print would pop out of the camera! Wow - an instant photo!


In my teens I splurged on an instamatic with a four-sided flash cube. You could take four photos with a flash before changing the cube. Which was scalding hot!  I started taking my camera to concerts. Of course I had to hide it because rock stars were afraid us photographers were making money off their images. On an instamatic? Right.

Maple Leaf Gardens. Probably my most cherished photo, not for the subject so much as the lighting, the finger blur and the colour.

In the photo pit at the Ottawa Civic Centre. I was closest to the stage, until the security guy pulled me out of the pit and said "gimme your camera!"

Then I moved up and got a Canon 35 mil with a 70-210 zoom lens. I took thousands of photos at rock concerts and some of my shots were amazing. I finagled photo passes from the promoters for Maple Leaf Gardens and the Ottawa Civic Centre and took some pretty high quality photos. I actually got skilled at it and I blew them up and framed them and, 20 years later, they're still on display at home.

Nashville. John Schlitt singing "Creed" to a track, performed at the WAY-FM 5th Anniversary Bash. It was the first song aired on WAY-FM.

If I was to list all the bands I've shot in concert, I could write a book. Actually, I am writing a book - a photo book of my favourite concert shots and the story behind getting the shot. A story? Ah yes - getting chased by security guards time after time. The STONES photo I almost didn't get and the KISS-security guy tried to bust my camera. And then there was the time .... never mind. You can read the book when it comes out.

Then, I moved to digital and bought a Minolta 7000. At last I could see the photos as I took them! No longer having to wait a week for prints.

Rich Stadium, Buffalo. Taken halfway back in the football field. Zoomed and edited massively. But I got it!

And then...I got my iPhone. I love the iPhone but - hello?!  The camera...? Good grief! Convenient? Absolutely! But the quality of the photos is about the same as my polaroid!

You know what's funny? We think it's awesome! We're snapping photos of everyone, everywhere, all the time. We hold our iPhones up high in the air to take a photo of our favourite rock stars from 100 feet away as the stage lights wash out the faces - and don't get me started on the blurriness!  Haha - we're paying 10 times the amount for a concert ticket and the concert photos might as well be disposable! And - we think it's great!

Taken with my incredible iPhone camera. I think it's Lady Antebellum. This is 21 Century technology!

What happened to setting the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO? Those settings made our photos great. But now we have these futuristic smart phones with really no settings and a lens that is wearing out against the inside of our pockets and for some reason we think these photos look really great.

They're not. They're lousy. And we don't care. Photography has moved forward at a wonderful pace - but it seems to me with traded in photo quality for convenience.