Digital SLRs

So I get home from work tonight, watch Dr Who (iPlayer catch-up), have my dinner and go shopping. The weekly shop - you know the sort of thing meat, veg, sandwich stuff. Anyway, there's this 'lightening' tree near where I live and I've been wanting to capture it's image for a loooong time. And I get home with the shopping and think - now is the time. The light is right, the weather is right, what's to stop me? After putting the shopping away, I'm picking up my camera and I'm off.

"Where're you going?" was the response from the better half.

"To get a picture of the lightening tree."

"Oh."

Quick as a (dedicated) flash, I'm out the door and walking up the road towards this tree.

Now in the old days of celluloid, one of the things that would bite my biscuit was night-time photography. I would experiment with the bulb setting, set a small aperture, aim the camera and about two or three days later there it would be the best (or worst) picture I'd ever taken. But that was the old days. I had some moderate successes, but on the whole this was experimentation.

Back to this evening: I've been preparing in my mind for a few months now about how I'm going to plan this and get the best image I can of this tree and I'm nearly at the tree now and this is the plan:

Set up in the field (with tripod, camera etc.), use a long exposure time and try some flash bursts (from my off-camera dedicated flash). I don't have a shutter release cable or remote so I'll have to use the self timer on two seconds so that I don't get camera shake. (Note to self: get shutter release cable)...

And I get there and the fence is covered in barbed wire all around and there's no way in (or at least not visible in the dark). As a consequence the first part of the plan fails. So I set up the tripod, camera and get it in position; switch on the live view mode and this is what I saw... Wow!

Let's go back a few years when digital photography was in it's infancy (ok quite a few years) and I could only afford a standard 35mm film camera. I would have had to chance it (based on a few calculations and guess work) take the picture and wait until the next morning before I could check the results.

These days, I can see the results instantly (well after setting up and having a 30" exposure time). I can then take these pictures home (I took about a dozen in all), upload them into my computer and manipulate them like this:

And this is my point: digital cameras have a real advantage in that they allow us to set up and view images instantly. However, I have a draw full of 'imperfect' images that once-in-a-while I get out and inspect. Often, I see things in the background that I hadn't noticed before: buildings that have gone, people I haven't seen for a while and I'm wondering what they're doing now. With digital photography we either instantly view (and delete) the images that we take or we simply load them onto the computer and forget about them. Perhaps with the advent of digital photography we've lost some of the memories that make us who we are. Perhaps it's an indication of the culture now - 'If we don't like it we can dispose of it'. I'm convinced that this is not the way.

So for me I'm keeping my images and most of the mistakes and now and again I'll look at them and smile at my own ineptitude. And as a bonus my chief critic likes the lightening tree image and wants a print out framed and on the wall - now that's a result.