71
B+WThings change. A vintage
Contax these days is worth a
fortune and the Carl Zeiss lenses
on the front considered to be
some of the finest ever made.
A recent visit from a
gentleman to my home for a
private workshop revealed that
he was a member of a camera
club. And in that camera club
not a single member shot on a
mobile phone, that he himself
had never considered using the
camera in his (very expensive
and brand new) phone and that
the reason was that obviously
the quality would be rubbish and
that no-one in their right mind
would ever enter an image shot
on a phone into one of the
regular competitions held at his
camera club even though the
size of the prints required to
enter were only10x8 inches.To say that I bristled is the
understatement of the decade.
So, just as no-one in their
right mind these days would
refer to a beautiful 35mm
Contax as a ‘miniature’ I would
like to formally announce the
death of mobile photography. It
is, like Monty Python’s famous
parrot, an ex-genre. It has
ceased to be, bereft of life it
rests in peace – the reasonbeing that ‘mobile photography’
or ‘iphoneography’ or whatever
you choose to call it has
become – photography.
Does this information render
my writing this column
unnecessary? Hopefully not,
as there are still a lot of things
I would love to share and pass
on to you, all about my favourite
subject and yes, I will continue
to wave the flag whenever I can!