The Almighty Pixel

After several attempts to fully utilize our little digital camera for photographing art, I finally got it. Not that there was much to get. It remains too small, is hard to see through and, like all digi-stuff, is impossible to look at the readings without bright light or no light. It helps to also have a magnifying glass! Why does this piss me off? It is not because I am a Luddite and spent years developing hard earned skills with photo floods and our Nikon 35 millimeter. It is because our gadgets are defining us and I see this as persecution of Geezers. After years as a graphic designer where the whole idea was to get decent pixel resolution and transfer it to print technology, we are blessed with good resolution and it is, well, pointless. We’ve got resolution for its own sake and, in the case of my art slides, less resolution but more portability. E-mailing slides? That’s indecent. Maybe looking sharp in your slides has become just one other thing that has slipped away? One step forward and three back. What a drag. In Olden Day, I laboriously set the lights and played with the focal length and took loads of bracketed pictures and took it to a good developer. For a while I had them make digital images of the slides but that was a stop gap measure. Pretty silly. What next? Should I make a power point demo of my own slides: “This is the year I began experimenting with acrylic, film noir and made pictures of men boxing,” or, “This is when my drawings were mailed to myself using a false name.” Perhaps I need an agent? In any case, at this present rate, as my eyesight decreases, I’ll need a digital camera the size of a toaster. My new animated work and music presents another issue. It is designed to be, not only “retro,” in a possibly ironic/un-ironic way, but muddied pixel-wise and the opposite of slick. So, luckily, I have stumbled on a perfect union, combining my rapidly decaying tech skill set with the rapidly advancing micro-technology that makes a once upon-a -time crude home video have professional, “production values.” Do we need hi-def versions of boring childrens’ birthday parties. As for my “slides,” eventually we will get a new body for the Nikon and I ‘ll be making digital images using the expensive lenses we have already purchased. Eureka!