I’d be hard pressed to say that Nokia has missed the mark with the N82′s camera after results like this. This (unedited) photo was taken using the N82′s night setting. It managed to capture the greens of the trees and even though the snow looks a little gray, it isn’t terrible.
By the by, Ms. Jen and I were having an interesting conversation (or so I thought) about photography, post-processing, and where to draw the line between photographic illustration and photography. I think we both made valid points about how technology places constraints on our work, and how many of these constraints are self-selecting. I’m not completely enamored of the constraints imposed when I choose to shoot with the N82, but I don’t pooh-pooh them either.
I was re-reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography over the winter holidays, and something about the discussion I was having with Ms. Jen reminded me of this passage:
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
There’s something in those words that soothes my post-modernist soul. We all bring different things, different viewpoints, different constraints to the table. But no one person’s point of view is greater than my own. It also isn’t less important than my own — it simply is. We don’t have to accept the world as we record it, and we don’t have to accept the technological constraints that are imposed by the tools we choose. Whether that should be called photography or something else is a question that I’ve not fully resolved in my own mind.