Shall we start on the subject of Leicas? It's not like I've talked about that before, is it?
I came across this piece (NSFW) on the internet today. Frankly, his complaints about image quality are hard for me to see, even though I reflexively agree with him, but his rant at the end was an interesting new thought on my old digital vs. analog question. Indeed, I have and regularly use Leicas that are 60 years old. They work great, and it puts me in direct control of the image (no auto functions causing the camera to refuse to fire because it thinks I'm making a mistake, no weird artifacts added by some secondary processing function, and so on ...)
But how long will there be film -- nice, Kodak-made Tri-X, for example -- not to mention the chemistry and so on to process it? I have said that one could take solace in the fact that there are photographers out there still making daguerreotypes and ambrotypes -- techniques from the very earliest days of photography -- but those are processes that use very basic chemicals that can be combined in essentially a home lab. 35 mm Tri-X is not something you can cobble together in your garage.
Back in December, Craig Mod contemplated about this subject in the New Yorker. He told his story of transition from various film cameras, through digital to his positive impressions of pictures shot during one trip on an iPhone. "Tracing the evolution from the Nikon 8008 to the Nikon D70 to the GX1, we see cameras transitioning into what they were bound to become: networked lenses," he wrote. In other words, he sees the whole process of photography shifting as the value of the pictures themselves become increasingly measured by the ability of people to see them through the network. I'm not sure I agree (per the Vivian Maier Test), but it is an interesting thought.
Finally, there's this. Spoiler alert: this is the final sentence: "No doubt, cameras capabilities will continue to improve and amaze, but I wonder as camera design evolves just how much joy will be left in the process of taking photos?" However, the journey to that point is quick and interesting.
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