A Day at the Museum, Photography Not Included

I'm a traitor to photography.

Don't get me wrong. I love to take photos, and I greatly admire amateur and professional photographers. I'm also happy to contribute to the nearly 100 million photos uploaded daily to Instagram.

It's just that I have zero interest in learning to control the technical aspects of cameras.

I take no joy in adjusting shutter speeds, apertures, ISOs or white balance. Which is strange because I seem to own every electronic gadget imaginable and have spent many a blissful hour fine-tuning computer and cellphone settings.

I own a camera that can do all that photography stuff, but I'd generally rather use whatever cell phone I have at hand. When I do use a digital camera, I trust the automatic mode to calculate all those settings on the fly.

While this doesn't make me a bad person, I can see where this makes me a traitor to many of the photographers I admire. Photographers who are steeped in the technical aspects of their craft are amazing. It's like watching magicians to see them at work -- and they actually know how to use all those accessories that came with the kit I received from my family when they gave me my camera.

I enjoy going to photography meetups (where, to conceal my dark secret, I carry my camera as a beard and take most photos with my phone) to explore and socialize (or "parallel play," as my wife likes to describe it) and hopefully come back with an image or two I can manipulate and enhance with Snapseed filters.

Recently, in a Facebook post, a fellow member of the great Black Glass Gallery photography group (whose moderator makes a point of being inclusive to people who take photos with their phones), made me feel a little better about things. She wrote:

"I am taking a master class online with Annie Leibovitz, and her words were so strong to me as I struggle with never having the perfect lens, camera, etc. 'It has nothing to do with technology,' she said. 'Well, it does and it doesn't. That is the last thing to worry about. You can have the best equipment, but it doesn't help if you can not see.' I just love this. I know I struggle with never having the right stuff and sometimes it gets in my way. I love to just get out and shoot and the feeling I get it something I can't quite describe. I just love the feeling I have when my camera is in my hands."

Similarly, the legendary British fashion photographer Nick Knight has also proclaimed that "photography is dead." He said:

"I think photography stopped years ago and we shouldn’t try and hold back a new medium by defining it with old terms. For 150 years (photographers) did the same thing. Then something else comes along at the end of the 1980s and you could do things you could never do before. And now we’re much further down the line than that. Now I can take an iPhone and form a sculpture. And some people are still calling it photography. …I call it image-making — please could someone get a better description of it — because that’s what I do. Because that can take in sound and movement and 3D, which I think are really part of this new art form. So it’s based on image. That gets away from the thing of truth. Photography has been saddled as the medium of truth for so many years."

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The world around us is so beautiful and evocative. There are so many stories to tell, so many wonders to see, so many people who care.

And yet, truth is illusive. The images we modify are just as valid as the images we capture; manipulated images are no different than manipulated words. Creation is self-expression, and self-expression is an invitation to connect, and even parallel connections are better than no connections.

I went to a photography class at the Museum of Natural History last weekend. The instructor was top-notch. He buried us all in our camera settings, and we all took the same images of the same exhibits.

Everyone else was happy, and the class was fine. But after a long half hour, and as inconspicuously as possible, I wandered off on my own.

It was Saturday, I was in New York, and I realized that I didn't have the desire to learn the technical knowledge of a dying technology. I simply wanted to go out and play.