The thing that captivated me the most about this reading was the view Ritchin has on our relationships with the screens. How the world was first seen to be flat, then to be round, but now with the entering of the digital, flat once again. Our relationships with computer screens, digital camera screens, tv screens, etc, is toxic, completely toxic. This made me think a lot about how the photographs we take digitally can be so, so easily lost and aren't always a depiction of what's even real. With the digital, we are able to manipulate white balance, ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and many other things to create this 'perfect photograph', when sometimes, it just doesn't even depict the true subject at hand in a way that's accurate to the eye. In photography, there's often depth of field that comes from the camera lens that produced onto the photograph, and that's something we don't actually see with our eyes, it's a mechanical consequence. With that, so are long exposures, for example. With all the manipulation that digital photography can give us, one could question it's worth in context to what photographs are supposed to do in its most technical definition; to depict through film a copy of reality. With people so absorbed in manipulating the photograph and creating this relationship with the computer through Photoshop, the photograph is starting to have shifts in its meaning that are so much different than they were originally. The digital has made it so any amateur can make a great photograph, strictly through having skill in the digital field. The taking of an amazing photograph is starting to matter less in this day and age, but rather changing of a mediocre photograph to an amazing one is starting to matter more, and have more prestige. The way the medium is changing is incredible in good ways and bad ways, certainly, but Ritchin's take on how it's been changing is very interesting in reference to his views of the screen and our relationship with it in creating a generational shift.
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