I Don't Want to Farm

I was a Reedie* for a miserable year in the long-lost '80s, and met a Reedie when I was there who had developed a human developmental theory based in Gilligan's Island. The concept was that every human being can be explained by a major and a minor inflection of one of the Gilligan's Island characters. Gender did not have to match. So in his view I was a major of The Professor with a minor of Mary Ann. In other words, mainly distracted and remote, unbalanced in the direction of excessive intellectualism—too "heady"—but with a partially compensating dose of niceness and wholesomeness on the side. I hated to admit it, but....

An alternate theory of aggregated human wisdom is: there's a Mitch Hedberg joke for everything. The one that concerns us today is "Can You Farm?"

The video/stills divide
That's how I'm starting to feel about photography these days. (Oh, you like photography? What do you think of AI?) If you read behind the lines in the recent short interview with Panasonic's Yosuke Yamane published at DPReview (he gives a similar interview pretty much every year around this time), you get the sense he's being careful not to insult still photographers, while at the same time saying that Panasonic cameras will be ever more concerned about video. "Mirrorless, which has a strong affinity with video, is used in a wide range of applications, from professional video production, such as cinema production, to individual video production, such as YouTube. We believe that the need for individual video production will increase in the future." DPReview went on to comment that while there remain people who only take stills, "[Yamane] didn't make it sound like Panasonic would be the company to address that need."

You work your ass off to become a good cook. And then everybody wants you to farm. As Mitch put it, "that's not fair."

Mike

*Here's a recent article by Colin Diver, a past President of Reed College, about the oppressive consequences of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and Reed's decision to buck the system.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Elesh: "As a Reedie myself, one of the things I am quite proud of was Reed's decision not to supply data to U.S. News. It may have been the first to make that decision. Stanford followed. I don't know how many institutions refuse now. When I checked the U.S. News formula some years ago, it placed significant weight on the percentage of alumni who contributed. I found that appalling and still do. It has little to do with academic quality. Yes, it is a significant factor in the decisions of those applying to college (and their parents), but so is the success of their athletic teams. At the university for which I taught, I saw that our basketball teams reaching the final four raised applications and fall enrollments by substantial amounts. I don't recall the exact percentage of the increase in applications, but I think it was around 20%. But the increase wasn't evidence of the students' academic ability."

Arg: "I grew up using Polaroid cameras and took perfectly photographic photos with them...only to discover that everyone wants me to go into a dark room and play with noxious chemicals. Don't want to. That's not photography."

Dan: "I’m going to sound like an old man yelling at the sky, but what improvements in still cameras do we need? They are already so good that even old ones far exceed artistic demands. Perhaps making then more fun to look at, fondle and use would actually be more effective at selling more units. Video is the next horizon and improvements there would be visible and marketable."

Peter Cameron: "I have little interest in video and, to he honest, I don’t even know if the video function worked on most cameras I’ve owned. Over the last 20 years I’ve probably taken fewer than 20 videos and most of those were B roll for the video department of the company I worked for. I realize wanting a stills oriented camera is niche these days, but I do appreciate manufacturers that let you reassign video buttons to other functions (or at least let you disable them so you don’t accidentally end up shooting video)."

Stephen S.: "For anyone chasing views/engagement on Instagram, it has been true for a while that the best way to do that is to forget about posting photos, and instead post short videos. That's right—Instagram is not for photos anymore."

Comments

[Chuck Albertson]

Reed, eh? That explains a lot.

[For no longer than I attended Dartmouth. Does that explain anything? --Mike]

[Albert Smith]

This hit me with a logic smack, giving validation to my biggest pet peeve since digital photography became mainstream and made traditional film photography "ancient and obsolete".

I'm a photographer. I can go out with an old meterless body and come back with 36 frames, all exposed properly and with compositions that are correct at the time that I press the shutter release. My depth of field will be appropriate for the subject, because I know what those funny numbers on the aperture ring do besides exposure. I practiced for decades and have no fear of not getting my shot.

... But can you sit in front of a computer and fix mistakes? Don't want to. That's not photography.

[Kye Wood]

Same could apply for Winnie the Pooh. You're majoring in Piglet with a minor in Tigger.

[Speed]

There is probably a Bob Dylan song for everything as well.

Maggie's Farm

[Mike Ferron]

The old theme song only referred to Marianne and the Professor as “the rest”. Bob Denver insisted they be included and the professor and Marianne were, by name added to the song.

[Rip Smith]

You’ve hit on one of my pet peeves. Generally in the morning while I’m having my coffee and whatever else, I go through a fairly set sequence of web reading. A couple of news sites to get caught up and several photography related sites to see what is new. It is getting to the point when I don’t spend much on the photo sites because so much of the content is presented in video. So even though some of the topics are of interest, I typically skip over several of them because I’m not interested in sitting through what is likely a poorly produced video presentation. I finish up with “The Online Photographer” because if the topic is of interest I can READ about it at my own pace and absorb whatever the message is. Just wanted to know I appreciate your good writing and I still enjoy reading.

[David Aiken]

As the proportion of photographers who want to shoot video increases, the motivation for camera manufacturers to produce cameras dedicated to still photography decreases. Yes, manufacturers should satisfy their customers' needs but they need to turn a profit in order to stay in business and if they're not in business they satisfy nobody's needs.

Those of us who are only interested in still photography are a shrinking proportion of photographers. Meeting our needs is becoming harder for a manufacturer to justify as a business decision. That's a hard fact for us to swallow. It's not that we are cooks who are being asked to be farmers, it's that we're sashimi lovers who are being asked to consume cooked fish because raw fish can no longer be delivered to us because it's in the producers interests to sell their fish to customers who are going to cook it since that's where the biggest sale numbers can be found..

If we really want to get angry about this situation, just wait for the moment when the big camera manufacturers decide it's no longer economic to include still photography functionality in their cameras, period. That's when we all start looking for cameras like the Leica M and Fujifilm X-Pro3 from the smaller manufacturers and stop complaining about the price because they're likely to be the last option available.

If we want a better range of choice for still photography cameras what we need to do is to start convincing as many as possible of those people who use their cameras for video to give up video and take up still photography.

[Patrick D Perez]

A few years ago, in the Portland area (home to Reed College), on the light rail one afternoon, a racist started harassing two young women, presumably of Muslim faith. It got to an extreme level when he drew a knife, and a young man, only a few years graduated from Reed, stepped in to protect the young women he didn't know. He was fatally stabbed, and his dying words were to say "tell everyone I love them" and I think of that young man at least monthly, and it always brings me to tears his love for humanity. I think he found the right community at Reed.

Patrick

[Bruce Bordner]

I think that one of the factors driving your B&W, print oriented approach is that it can be done "at home". You can make your own film, chemicals, print material - maybe even a pinhole enlarger for all I know.
Color photography in either film or digital requires some heavy machinery somewhere... out of your control. You just like hands-on cooking, or you would if you did and maybe you should but don't ask me.

[R. Edelman]

After reading about the sex cult scandal that emerged at Sarah Lawrence College, I'm inclined to be skeptical of college rankings. Indeed, in that context, junior college looks pretty good (and a lot less expensive)!

[Kevin]

Maybe there is a small opportunity for a company, like Ricoh/Pentax, to serve the still photographers of the world. Making dedicated, optimized, stills cameras with no video capability.

I have enjoyed their digital cameras since I first bought an DSLR in 2008, and still am a Pentaxian.

A lot to hope for, I know.

[Rod Thompson]

Coming from the perspective of a thirty years stills shooter, I have just the last two years embarked on a video growth spurt. The thing that struck me early is the very real similarities the two share. Composing video is much the same as stills photography, obviously different in execution, but the basics are the same and I have found the more I learn, the better my stills are, but also, I ambringing a lot with me. I was an early M43 adopter (G9, EM1x, Pen F etc) that helped, but recently purchased a full frame, something I found no desire to do for stills, nor for video, but the sheer value of the camera (S5) compelled me to.

[-et -]

I'm a bit surprised to see that your time at Reed was miserable. My older granddaughter (from Phoenix) graduated from Reed two years ago with a degree in Art, loved the school, and loved Portland.

That degree may not have provided her with a lot of marketability (she is now in Chicago, but working as the buyer for a wine bar, not at the Art Institute), but it gave her great satisfaction, and her thesis was featured at an Art Festival in Venice last year.

- Tom -

[The misery was distinctly my fault, not Reed's. --Mike]