We are living in the golden age of photography and people don’t realize it. We have capabilities to record, edit, print, publish and disseminate photos that were barely imagined a decade ago.
Photo technology has done some cool things since I got my first camera. I’ll mention just a few. The earliest big news in my photo career was the Olympus OM2N. This SLR, tiny compared to competitors then and now, had a meter that was accurate at -6.5EV, meaning auto-exposures in the 3 to 4 minute range. Nothing Nikon or Canon had came close. Better yet the OM2N performed real-time metering, meaning it processed changes in light level during the exposure; you could autoexpose a light painting. I don’t follow photo gear closely, but I don’t think any DSLR today can come close to the OM2′s metering. Mine lasted 20 years without a problem, scratched and dinged to hell because I carried it naked in a pack full of climbing gear.
For me the most impressive change in film technology was the release of Ilford XP1, invented because the price of silver rose by a factor of eight in 1980 (scan of XP1 print at left, 1981). XP1, the first chromogenic (dye-based) black and white film, was rated at ISO 400, but gave fantastic results from ISO 25 to 1600. Its latitude was so great that you could practically pick any combination of aperture and shutter speed and get a great B/W shot. In other words, you could effectively switch ISO values from frame to frame within a roll.
The Nikonos 5, released in 1984, was an engineering wonder, and digital photography has nothing remotely equivalent (damn you, Nikon). It was nearly indestructible and served my caving, water sports and bad-weather needs for two decades. Its lens had giant, mechanical depth-of-field and focus indicators that let you plan focus and DOF of a shot (without looking thru the viewfinder of this non-SLR) like nothing that exists today. Think about using your DSLR in the cave environment shown below (original exploration of Cueva de Agua Carlota, Mexico, 1990), even with a plastic housing.
For normal SLR work, I switched from Olympus to the Canon EOS not because of EOS’s autofocus, but because the EOS Elan (EOS 100 – around 1991) had a big wheel on the back, the Quick Control Dial. That meant you could simultaneously change aperture and shutter speed (or aperture and exposure compensation) with your right hand without dropping the camera from your eye. This meant everything to a guy who had missed a lot of action shots. Interestingly, my EOS Elan also did eye-controlled focusing by tracking eyeball movement. Really. Canon’s competitors and some EOS users saw this as a useless gimmick. I loved it, especially for handheld macro work. The eye control also allowed you to glance up in the top left corner of the frame to a tiny red rectangle, thereby closing down the aperture without using the depth of field preview button (still today inconveniently located near the lens mount) to show actual field depth.
In 1992 I got to use a Kodak/Nikon DCS-200 at the Comdex show in Las Vegas. This $25,000 early DSLR ran on the venerable Intel 80C196 processor and an internal 80-megabyte hard drive. Ooh. 1.5 megapixels. I also made a print on a digital printer that looked better than anything I had ever seen in all my years of Cibachrome, a print quality that museum seem so fond of and that I despised (and still despise).
I bought the first consumer DSLR, the Canon D30, when it was release in late 2000. Its 3 megapixels serve as a great reminder that all pixels aren’t created equal. D30 images rival many digicams with several times as many pixels (see large version of D30 photo of Nate with his “Titleless” hat).
Enough reminiscing – now is where the future’s at - or so a guy with long hair once said. In some ways, all this history pales in comparison to very recent advances in all brands of digital cameras. The real news of DSLR’s last generation is high ISO. Where 400 was the reasonable maximum ISO on my D30, my 5D Mkii (and your Nikon D3x and probably others) can make very good images at ISO 3200. This is huge. An entire world of hand-held night shots and shots in dark museums that don’t allow flash or tripod just opened before us.
Also amazing, yet already taken for granted, is the fact that you can effortlessly publish a photo at no cost and write a description of it that will be found by a Google search one second later. Try it. Post your image, add a description involving a statistically improbable combination of words (e.g. “William Storage Agua Carlota”) and search for that text in Google. Voila, your photo.
Another unsung aspect of photography is truly of Gutenberg significance. For the price of two movie tickets and dinner at McDonald’s you can have Blurb or Lulu print a 75-page hardback book of your photos with an image-wrapped (casewrap) cover – not merely a photo dust jacket. That’s not a per-copy price based on an order of 1000; its the price for an order of one. In other words, there is no minimum order size and no nonrecurring setup fee. Edward Weston could not have imagined such a thing.
Finally, the most underutilized modern photo resource: peer review. When your friends and family tell you how wonderful your photos are it means they love you. Until a few years ago you had very little opportunity to get any impartial review, simply because there was little means of getting your stuff 
seen by strangers. Flickr and Picassa get you seen, but comments on your submission will tend to be positive or none at all. The culture of photo sites is not generally one of critical review. However, Flickr has a number of forums aimed at this problem; I’ve mentioned my favorite, Delete Me Uncensored, in previous posts. You can post a photo on DMU and receive intensely critical comments within minutes. After weeding out comments that stem from personal tastes of the reviewer and a few (surprisingly few, actually) that are ignorant or revengeful, you’re left with a free but nearly priceless resource - critical peer review. Reviewers unconcerned with telling you they love you will instantly find things in your photo that you never saw (e.g., they trashed my prized dahlia). And they’ll clobber you with them. This can be a good thing. Posting on DMU requires that you first judge the recent postings there. Giving reviews will make you address your own criteria for what makes a good shot. Try it, and you might discover an increased awareness to those criteria next time you’re shooting.
These are good times for photographers. I’m happy to be here.
“Try it, and you might discover an increased awareness to those criteria next time you’re shooting.”
Great point, and yes, that did happen for me. Maybe more for editing than shooting, though.
Nice article. Somehow I know I’m one of the surprisingly few you mention.
Actually, it was the conversation with you about issues in photography that motivated me to write this. DMU would be nothin without the Futz!
Good points all around. The main point – that we’re living in the golden age for photography was a minor revelation for me. My judgment has been clouded by too many people bitching about how little their stock photos fetch these days. Thanks for sharing!