What We Lost When Cameras Got Better

We've been told every upgrade makes us better photographers. More megapixels, better autofocus, computational photography that fixes mistakes before we make them.

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Every time we gain something, we lost something, too. And what we lost might have been more valuable.

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Then digital arrived. It promised freedom. No film casts. Instant feedback. Delete the bad. keep the good. It felt like liberation and for a while it was. Then smartphones put the camera in everyone's pocket. Computational photography made every shot technically perfect. HDR, portrait mode, night mode. The camera thinks for you. We went from 36 exposures per month to 36 before breakfast. We photograph everything. Sunsets, coffee. We have more photos than ever. So why can't we remember taking them? Last year, I found prints from 2005. 20-year-old disposable camera photos, and I remembered every single shot. The moment, the feeling, why I pressed the shutter. Then I opened my phone, almost 8,000 photos and I couldn't tell you the story behind most of them. That's when I realized we didn't upgrade, we traded.

You don't know what you got until prince come back. And that waiting it made you care. You remembered the moments because you had to hold them in your hand. Now we see instantly and forget instantly. There's no space for the photo to become a memory. We lost imperfection.

The fifth loss is the one that brought me back to film. Mindfulness. Film photography is a ritual. You load the film, set your ISO, can't change it until the roll is done. You advance manually after every shot. You feel the mechanism. Every action requires presence. You're not just capturing, you're participating. The camera isn't doing the work. You are. Digital cameras are tools. Film cameras are teachers. One gives you results. The other gives you discipline. And in a world that moves too fast, that discipline is what I needed most.

More photos, less meaning, more gear, less creativity. At every advantage modern technology could give me, and I'd never been more disconnected from my work.

Unlimited charts gave us unlimited forgetting. Limitations gave us meaning. We didn't lose these things because film disappeared. We lost them because we stopped valuing them.

We didn't lose these things because film disappeared. We lost them because we stopped valuing them.

The tools don't matter. The mindset does. You can shoot digital with film discipline. Limit yourself. Shoot like you have 36 frames. Turn off the screen. Don't review until you're home. Set constraints and honor them.

Because photography isn't about capturing everything. It's about remembering what matters. We didn't lose these things when cameras improved. We lost them when we stopped paying attention.