Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Under the Hula Moon | May/June 2007

Under the Hula Moon
By: JOCELYN FUJII

Bytes, Pixels and a Hostile Blonde

If a picture is worth a thousand words, where does that leave us writers? I shudder to think. At this moment I sit with my headset and microphone on, speaking into the computer through the Dragon voice recognition program, watching my spoken words emerge on the computer screen without my fingers touching the keyboard. It’s magic! The words you are reading were not typed, they were spoken. What hath technology wrought?

Of course, when I stare wordlessly at the computer, which I often do, nothing happens. That’s more like the style I’m used to. Do nothing, and nothing happens. Dragon adds another dimension—sound—to the curse of writer’s block, and it is very disconcerting. It’s like having your dirty secret announced over the loudspeaker

With the perils of the printed page and the mind-numbing velocity of technology, writers and photographers have much in common. Technology is our ally. Or is it? Try navigating the world of digital photography sometime, or making the transition from film to digital, as so many have successfully done, only to find that your state-of-the-art, larger-than-life pixel count has just turned puny. (And what’s a pixel, anyway?)

Technology marches on. Just try to keep up with it. One friend, a self-professed “advanced amateur,” has been in transition for four years and now owns six digital cameras, one for each of the moments he thought he was learning the joy of digital. “I don’t understand computers,” he laments. “That’s the big challenge. Digital cameras are much more complicated than film cameras. When I am able to put images on a CD and then print photos that turn out beautiful, I feel like I’ve climbed Mount Everest!”

In his stunning Internet essay, “Making the Transition from Film to Digital,” photographer Michael Reichmann writes with authority and detail about the choices confronting the digital photographer. These choices require a sophisticated vocabulary and a Herculean left brain. It helps to know, for example, that a pixel is a photo site thousandths of a millimeter in size, or that a DSLR is not a government agency out to get you but a digital single-lens reflex camera. A bit, I learned, has nothing to do with a dentist or a horse but is the smallest unit of data, and eight of them make up a byte. A raw file is not a type of sashimi, but a way of storing images that requires way more space than a JPEG. “Digital photography isn’t the future anymore,” writes Reichmann. “Rather, it is the current status of photography, encompassing the needs of snap shooters, ardent amateurs and professionals alike.”

Jerry Chong, veteran photographer and owner of Graphic Pictures Hawai‘i, told me recently that he uses a 16.7-mega­pixel Canon 1DS Mark 2 camera. “It’s very heavy,” he sighs. “There’s a new one coming out with 22 megapixels that is supposed to be lighter.” He talked about a 39-mega­pixel camera made by Hasselblad, which costs $39,000, $29,000 when it’s on sale. (Incidentally, when I said “Hasselblad” to my Dra­gon program, it typed out “hostile blonde.”) Says Chong: “Digi­tal can print 16 million colors. Beyond that, you can’t print. But it’s going up, and it’s going infinite. It’s more than we need for everyday use.” With cameras costing more than some cars and the world shrinking by the minute, the future of Luddites is grim. Many of us resisted e-mail and now we can’t live without it. Some of us loved the clack-clack-clack of the typewriter and were reluctant to convert to a word processor. But I have never owned a camera: photography is too complicated, and writing is difficult enough. Flannery O’Connor wrote about the necessity of truly seeing before knowing how to write. Perhaps that is why some great photographers are also consummate writers.

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