Originally posted by niels hansen In general, technology has not improved creativity. There has never been produced so many technically perfect , boring photos ( inclusive mine)Loking back at 65 years in photography there is no connection between my pictures qualiy and the amount of technology available......In 1963 I spent half a year low budget hitchiking in France and Algeria. I took 36 colordias and 72 tri x negatives, they are among my best pictures.
You must have had some good kit in 1963. Most of my older photos, a little later than that, are so technically awful that their artistic merit (or otherwise) does not even come into consideration. Yet I had a camera (a hand-me-down from my father) that was considered better than average when it was new in the 1950s - it had control of focus (unaided), shutter and aperture. I set the exposure by means of this circular slide-rule gadget :-
......... and to make matters worse, someone gave me some unqualified advice always to "
over-expose by a stop" which was probably meant for B&W but disasterous for my reversal film shots. I was estimating distance to focus, and when I used flash it was a crummy little straight-ahead thing that gave everyone red-eye and made everywhere look like a crime scene.
The result was that most of my old photos with that old kit were rubbish, including regrettably some important ones that I am recently trying to salvage on the computer. The irony was that my father was a semi-pofessional who took superb pictures but with a Rolleiflex and a Weston exposure meter - such items far beyond my budget then.
I was in my 30s, and kids growing up with no good pictures of them, before I bought a then modern SLR. I should have done it years earlier. Suddenly, thanks to the better technology, my pictures were transformed by the in-camera metering and focussing. I bought a flash unit with significant power and a swivel head, and I discovered the superiority of bounce flash. With the technical side sorted it became worthwhile to think about composition and other artistic aspects; I believe that technology and artistry are independent factors that both need to be good. I still tended to take shots in manuaI mode, but that comes to me without thinking as I am used to it (I have never used a program mode and never will). The results encouraged me, and I studied the books, and have made a hobby of it.
Having said all that, the technology was levelling out with film and is now levelling out with digital. Of course, the marketing people want to set us back to the foot of a further upgrade curve with mirrorless and video capability, but mirrorless is not a significant change and video is an entirely different field. It is hard to see where one would go significantly further with still photography but that won't stop the sales people trying. My guess is mirrorless camera bodies getting very thin (new mounts again! Cheers from the sales people!) like big phones, serving also as phones, TV controllers, and can openers too. But the photos will look the same.