I asked my favorite graphic designer for some insight and I was startled by what I heard. She said, “It’s faster and easier to get my ideas down on paper. It’s also less sterile. When I try to concept on the computer it seems to me that the machine gets in the way. The presets push you to conform. The screen makes you filter in assumptions about how things will ultimately look on paper. Designing on paper just feels right”.
All this “regression” in the arts mirrors what I hear from more and more photographers. We were so enthusiastic about the promise of “no cost” digital that we swallowed the program “hook, line and sinker.” In retrospect we’ve done one of the stupidest business moves imaginable. We moved from a mature, repeatable and robust system of making images that yielded exquisite quality (and which most practitioners had already paid for the infrastructure and amortized ) into a system that gives us only one advantage: We can do all this stuff quicker than ever before!