Excellence

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but the underlying thought has occurred to me more than once, so --

I was just looking at a page of digital photography -- one of the apparently thousands of sites where people put up photographs to be admired (and sold, at least on this one). I don't have a digital camera yet, though I have eyes on one specific model. As I looked at these photographs, I found myself wondering if I would ever get shots as good as this, at all, let alone routinely. (To which the answer probably is, Yes, but not routinely). Then I noticed that the page had an option for viewing the most-viewed and the highest-rated photos, but also the least-viewed ones. Well, some of the latter were undoubtedly least viewed simply because of placement -- I gathered that the page always puts the newest first -- but some of them just weren't that good. Its not that they were bad, but they weren't good -- they didn't grab your attention, make you focus. They were -- okay.

So I started thinking a bit about what makes one photograph better than another. Much of that is subjective, I think -- once you get past the basic concepts of focus, balance, color saturation, and so forth, you're now talking about very fine gradations of evaluation. When I used to read photography magazines routinely, I was always a bit surprised at the comments that the staff photographers would make about the submitted shots -- I could not usually tell any difference between the submitted photograph or the 'improved' photo, or, if I could, it didn't look better, it just looked different. I'm willing to say that there were levels of betterness in there that I simply could not see, but which do exist -- like people whose taste buds are so nuanced that they taste differences in the finest gradations in the intensity of tea. But past that? I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that maybe, once you've gotten into that range, its all good. And that digital cameras, just because you can shoot and shoot and shoot, make it possible to hone the abilities, so that you tend to get into that zone faster, because, you get feedback faster. And if you have a bit of an eye, you get better. The bar of possibility gets raised, because everyone can do better.

So will there be a level of digital photography which is so good that only 'experts' will be able to differentiate it from lesser efforts? I'm thinking, maybe yes.

Just musing....