Ms. Laura Raedle
Advanced Composition, English F1103
Assignment #10 – Pet Peeve Argument
Auto-Focused Art
Is photography art? That is a question that critics have been debating for a century and a half. The invention of photography certainly changed art, as was seen with the movement in painting from realism to impressionism and then non-representational art. After all, how can a painter get any more realistic or representational than a photograph? But is photography itself an art? Certainly there is some amount of skill involved. For example, the photographer chooses what to shoot, how to frame the shot, and the lighting and film to use. Also the photographer has to focus the lens and thereby picks the subject, the clarity, and the depth of field. Or at least he used to.
Nowadays, cameras do just about everything but push the button. I think that in this complete automation some of the essence of photography is lost. First came built-in light meters, then electronic shutters, then auto-advance and auto-rewind, and now auto-focus. But isn’t a camera that focuses itself going a little too far? I think there is some artistic decision that gets made when the photographer rotates the lens until he thinks the image looks right. I mean, is focus really simply on or off? Can someone definitely say that a picture or object is either in focus or not, and if not, how can a machine make that decision?
Fifteen years ago the only cameras that had auto-focus were cheap vacation models. They were plastic and square and clearly identified their owners as tourists. Any serious photographer carried a traditional manual camera that was heavy with a large lens and a thick strap that went over his shoulder. The bigger the lens, the more sophisticated the owner. The reason these automatic cameras didn’t catch on was because their automatic focus had serious drawbacks. They determined a focus distance by firing an infrared beam and measuring how far the target was in the same manner that radar works. The problem was that the camera was often wrong about what the intended target was. For instance, if the photographer was taking a picture of the scenery through the observation car on a train, his automatic camera would invariably focus on the train window. Likewise, if he wanted to photograph a friend standing in front of a mountain, the camera was just as likely to focus on the mountain as the person.
Today, however, auto-focus is much better since it uses an image processing technique to determine how sharp the picture will be, at least in high-end models. But that’s just the problem. Until the last decade, high-end cameras didn’t have auto-focus, but now its nearly impossible to buy a camera without auto-focus. All the latest Canons and Nikons have auto-focus. Worse, these cameras don’t look like the chintzy electronic snap-shooters of the 80’s, but instead masquerade as traditional macho cameras with big lenses and shoulder straps. For the most part, even the professionals have switched over to these new cameras, and the camera companies no longer make the old ones.
The art of focusing a camera is disappearing. Sure it is faster to let the camera focus itself, which is important for sports photography. Yes, auto-focus solves the problem of defocused pictures caused by the photographer having to remove his eye-glasses to look through the viewfinder. And yes, auto-focus makes photography more accessible to everyone (just as paint-by-number canvases would make painting more accessible). Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of control and decision that is surrendered to the camera, and I, for one, am proud to use my ten-pound twenty-year-old Canon. I don’t think Ansel Adams would have used an auto-focus camera, and I think that for quite some time, all the pictures that anyone is likely to consider art will be taken with a manual camera.