The End of the Decisive Moment?

Thanks to continuing technological improvements, we could be on the verge of something very new. History has shown us that digital storage space and processing power increases rapidly over time. At the turn of this century, $800 would buy a 3.3-megapixel camera with a 16-megabyte memory card. The megapixel count has since risen steadily, with the lowest now coming in at around 10 megapixels and costing around $100. But the real leaps have been made in storage space. Memory cards are now up in the 32 gigabyte range, which represents an increase of two thousand times the capacity. They are also drastically cheaper. And they keep on getting cheaper while the capacity levels continue to increase.

Until now, this ongoing increase has had an incremental impact because the benefits were limited to not having to swap cards out so often and a financial savings. Memory cards are now becoming large enough to store high-quality video from which still images may be extracted that are of equal quality to a traditionally shot still image.

Most photographers are aware of CartierBresson’s decisive moment concept: everything has an exactly right moment, and the photographer’s task is to become skilled enough to instinctively press the shutter-release button at that exact moment. Now, consider that at some point in the near future, video formats will be developed for 10-plus-megapixel uncompressed formats that operate at extremely high frame rates. When this happens, each second of video footage will yield at least two-dozen high-quality photographs.

The question is, how will photographers respond to this development? Will they still try to capture the decisive moment, or will they shoot video and then select the best frame either in-camera or later on the computer? If the decisive moment approach is lost, the photographer will, in effect, become a photo editor whose role at the time of shooting is limited to framing and checking settings. The real work will be done after the fact on a computer.

This will be a dramatic change, but there has been a trend in this direction for some time now. In the days of film most photographers handed the film roll to someone else to develop it; but even if they had their own darkroom, the changes they could make to the images were limited. As digital has taken hold, photographers have had to become familiar with so-called lightroom techniques that mimic darkroom processes and enable more creative possibilities.

An interesting new product, the Lytro camera, captures light in such a way that the depth of field can be chosen after the photograph is taken. This means that all the information required to allow any depth to be rendered in focus is stored. Currently this camera is targeted at the consumer market, claiming ease of use as a selling point. It is not hard to imagine a higher-spec version that could be used to produce professional-quality images. It all comes down to available storage. This device again reduces the number of decisions a photographer has to make at the time of shooting. All you have to do is point the device in the right direction and press the button—all decisions about exactly what should be in focus can be made after the fact. There is nothing to indicate that increases in storage space, coupled with huge decreases in the price of storage, will not continue apace. If the current trend continues, it could result in a thousand fold increase over the next 12 years and would give us around 16 terabytes of storage. With this amount of storage available, it is possible that future cameras will be able to combine the very high-quality video approach and the Lytro three-dimensional space approach. This would allow for just about every decision to be made at the editing stage. It would also make video editing very interesting, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this book.