Images

All of these images were created with either 35mm point-and-shoot film cameras or early low-resolution digital cameras. The latter use different sensors (CCD) as opposed to the CMOS sensors of most contemporary cameras. The continuing quest to produce cameras with higher megapixel counts is obviously (partly) a ploy to get people to buy another camera; the inference being that if your camera is 10 megapixels, then the new model which is now 20 megapixels is going to be superior. The problem for me is that the images that are produced from higher resolution cameras have become increasingly unreal; they have moved from looking natural and have entered a world of hyper-reality. Two of my favourite cameras have a resolution of just 1.5 megapixels and have created some of my favourite images (as well as being a joy to use). Their images are much more redolent of those produced by film cameras. They will obviously degrade the more they are enlarged, but that’s never been an issue for me.

The quality of an image can surely not be measured in terms of pixels. The aesthetics of a photograph are far more nebulous and cannot conform to any kind of scale of measurement. When I read the following comment from Patti Smith, I knew exactly what she meant.

Bemoaning the fact that because the film she needed was no longer manufactured, her Polaroid Land 250 camera (her companion for two decades) was now obsolete, she says in her wonderful ‘A Book of Days’,

 

Nothing really matches the atmosphere of the old Polaroid film. Except perhaps a poem, a musical phrase, or a forest hung with mist.