It's art. Sometimes, ease of use and perfection aren't the goals at all.

It's easy to take quickly take a series of as many very realistic photos as a person wants with a wide variety of digital cameras, including the ones were all have in our pocket supercomputers. We dial in the settings (if we want to), and then push the button to get instant results.

I can take twenty photos of a thing and instantly review them all as they happen. One of them is probably going to work for me; if not, I can keep shooting. And then, if I want to edit it later, I can do that: There's countless ways to mess around with photos in post-production. These are optimizations we can make that utilize aspects of the system's capabilities.

And that's a valid way to do things, but just because we have identified one valid way to (hopefully!) get one good photograph with one category of hardware doesn't mean that we've exhausted the possibilities.

This way is different. Push button, and get imperfect results eventually -- even the viewfinder itself is very late to the game. This adds friction to the system. Since the time-cost of reviewing each photo is significant instead of instant, this shifts the optimization path. I get to think about things like framing and composition without even being able to see the frame or the composition. I won't get to see the results until later. This might motivate me to work harder to get it right beforehand, while using my brain in interesting ways to predict what the result might be without instant feedback.

That's OK. There's no rules in art; it's fine for people to choose their own methods. And to be sure: There's no accounting for taste. Just because one method implies more work doesn't mean that it will get better results, or that others will find anything of merit with any of it at all.

Sometimes, the mere process of doing is art in and of itself. That's OK, too.

In terms of modernity: If I want a particular scene of a particular place, I don't have to take it myself. I don't have to get out of my chair to hire someone to do it for me, or I can just Google one up. And here in 2026: I can have the bot make something up that suits me.

We can elect to get that chair using laborious old methods from a particular time period (pre-lathe or post-lathe? do we get to use a block plane? maybe we're just using stone-age flint tools, instead?), or with new methods and electric machines, or by handing over money at IKEA.

These are all valid methods by which to get a thing to sit on and then talk shit about art.

ReFrame – The EPaper Camera