It’s not that I don’t get the appeal of having larger artwork. But the medium itself in the way it’s used and produced doesn’t make sense. The whole audio production pipeline is digital. Producers take analogue audio, introduce quantisation and digitisation errors immediately to be able to use their fancy computers to produce the music (which introduces even more errors due to all filters being digital) just to then dump that digital piece of sound into an analogue medium at the very end. Nothing is gained except the digital-analogue-conversion happens before creating the medium whereas with CDs you do it after reading from that medium. Which is a stupid idea, as dust and other issues will then mess with the result you’re hearing.
Now, if you’re a producer that actually uses an all-analogue workflow, ignore this, I don’t mean you. You also have my deepest respect for enduring that pain. Please point me towards some records that actually did this though.
Just like shooting your photos on film, running your amp on tubes, or traipsing through the woods in the dark with an incandescent bulb flashlight, music on vinyl in this age is just hipsterism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, if that’s what you’re into, and this is coming from someone who nearly exclusively writes with a fountain pen because of hipsterism (an opinion that did not make me popular on the fountain pen community recently). But at minimum people who do it ought to be honest about it.
Retro is cool and people want to feel cool by being retro and/or bucking the mainstream. Being “better” somehow doesn’t enter into it, and claiming otherwise is inherently disingenuous.
History is littered with formats that were contemporary to LP records that people don’t go all starry eyed over, other than occasionally for historical interest. Compact cassettes and eight tracks leap to mind.
It’s not necessarily hipsterism - it can be, but isn’t automatically.
Do you use a fountain pen for the image you present to the world, or because you genuinely like the experience of using one?
I used one a long time ago because I liked the way it wrote, and the technology had improved to where using one wasn’t an inconvenience.
I can understand someone wanting to use a modern incandescent flashlight for it’s color - all my good led flashlights use a similar color.
I can appreciate listening to vinyl as it’s a different experience (one which I’m very familiar with as I had a massive collection before CD’s existed).
All of these things can be done for “hipsterism” (i.e. Presenting an image) or because someone genuinely appreciates certain attributes of a thing.
I don’t agree with you that being hipster is the only good reason for it.
There are many benefits with physical and DRM-free media.
I just posted another comment on this post making my point though 😄
Compact disc, compact casettes, eight track, even reel-to-reel tape are also all DRM free physical media formats for the same type of content, too. And yet, there is no CD renaissance happening. Nobody is making daily posts of their cassette deck showing off the album art on the tape case propped against their stereo.
Maybe in another 10 or 20 years there will indeed be a CD renaissance, if it becomes retro enough to be fashionable. It’s already happening with video games (says the turkey with two entire bookcases full of old cartridges and disks).
If somebody likes vinyl records I’m certainly not going to stop them. Even if they like them for spurious reasons.
CDs are making a comeback already!
Albeit not as big as vinyl yet, but it might catch up given time!
A couple of months ago I overheard a couple guys in their early 20s who were happy for finding some specific CD in a local record store.
You are wrong about CDs, which have exploded in popularity. 2 years ago, I could walk into any Goodwill and walk out with dozens of excellent classic CDs for $.50-$1 each, and I’d still have to leave some good stuff behind.
Today, I walk into any Goodwill, and they have hardly any decent CDs. The used CD market has completely flipped.
I would not lump film photography in with the other stuff. Modern phone cameras are heavily post processed and filtered with AI. This is fine if all you’re doing is sending a pic of your latest meal to Instagram. If you actually want to control the process of taking a photograph then film is your best bet.
Film photography forces you to get everything right BEFORE you press the button, rather than letting you fix it later. This is thought to be one of the biggest reasons modern movies look so bad.
This comment somehow seeks to erase the entire history and development of digital photography that isn’t related to movies or cell phones. TIL the Canon R10 sitting on my desk right now apparently doesn’t exist.
The digital still camera has the same issue as digital movie cameras highlighted in that video: it lets you defer too many decisions to post. You can sit there for hours in Lightroom, tweaking everything to “perfection.”
It’s fine if you’re using the camera as a tool to make money (such as a wedding photographer) because it makes your job genuinely easier than shooting film. For amateur photography it takes away a great deal of the serendipity and intentionality of the process of actually taking the photograph.
Or you could just… not do that? I certainly don’t. Practically none of the bird or wildlife photos I’ve posted here are edited. Most of the time I don’t even bother to crop them, and when I do I usually mention it. I take them out of the camera, I show them. (To be fair, I also watermark them with marching penguins first. But that’s not an aesthetic modification. It’s more for my own amusement and also tracking my images when the get stolen. This is the internet, after all.)
Don’t pretend that in the film era, photographers did not go to heroic efforts to edit their photos after the fact using analog means and especially development techniques, which were hassles and problems that digital explicitly set out to solve. When you develop your film photos, you make decisions during the development process that determine what the final output will look like. This is exactly as much of a “tweak” as what most digital photographers do to their photos and is done for the same reason.
“But I don’t do that,” you say. Awesome! I don’t do that with my digital photos, either. See above.
No, we’re right back to where we started. You’re claiming that intentionally shackling yourself to the limitations of film allows you to hold yourself aloof in some way from the mainstream which is doing it digitally. That is a textbook argument from hipsterism. Using a digital camera instead of a film one does not automatically detract form the “serendipity and intentionality” of your photography. I have an entire album I posted recently that proves this. Likewise, shooting film does not inherently make your actions any more “pure” or “authentic.” That’s down to the operator, not the equipment.
Now, now next job is to not come at me all pissy because you think I’m attacking your preferences, because I’m not. Any workflow is valid provided it produces the output the artist (I’m using that term rather loosely, especially in regards to myself) wants in the manner they want to. But conversely, an intentionally high effort workflow does not invalidate the work produced by others via some other means.
Oh yes, I’m well aware of darkroom techniques such as push processing, dodging and burning, masking and airbrushing. The hassle is the point. Even if you want to do it, the limitations of the process prevent you from doing most of what you’d imagine possible.
Film has a much narrower dynamic range than digital. Slide film even more so. With digital you can take a test shot, look at a histogram, and dial in a perfect exposure right there on the spot. With film you simply cannot do that, so you are forced to figure it out before hand. You can use bracket exposures, but that gets expensive. Shoot on 4x5 sheet film or plates and it quickly becomes cost-prohibitive for a middle class hobbyist.
Look, I’m glad you’re happy doing digital photography. But seriously fuck off with the “film photographers are hipsters” thing. Do you shit on people who paint with oil paints or water colours instead of Procreate?
I see you didn’t read my last paragraph. Thank you for proving my point.
I read that paragraph. It doesn’t undo the fact that you dismissed a hobby by calling all its practitioners hipsters. It’s like insulting someone and then saying “no offence” after the fact. It’s pure cowardice and I let it slide until you drew attention to it.