...There is nothing more difficult, nothing of more doubtful success than the introduction of new procedures, because whoever brings innovations makes enemies with all those who benefited from the old system , and has as feeble defenders all those who would benefit from the new.
N. Machiavelli. "The Prince".

When I was given a camera for my sixteenth birthday, I little knew that it was to be my future working tool, that the printed numbers on the camera's lens, which at the beginning were like strange mysterious signs, would become so familiar to me as time went by. How I enjoyed changing the focus, or turning round the rings of the diaphragm, or when I pressed the release and heard the click of the shutter. It was exciting to think that whatever I saw through the viewfinder, I could then hold in my hands. Although certainly, the results were hardly ever the ones I desired.
The height of my emotion was the darkroom. When the image began to appear from the copy immersed in the developer and, before my astonished eyes, it took form on that white paper, I felt enraptured to the point of falling into a sort of fascinating ecstasy.
All of these, the image and the passion I feel for mechanisms, exert an attraction on me which is almost as strong as the attraction a teenager feels at their first kiss. Perhaps, because of that, I was never suprised that, when King Charles V went off into retreat from active life to the solitude of Yuste, he should take two things with him from the world he was to abandon: clocks and Juanelo Turriano, who was an authentic magician of inventions and clockwork mechanisms.
Although throughout our lives we do nothing but change old pleasures for new, I still prefer a kiss to the sound of the release, something that digital cameras have done away with; they are virtually silent. Only at the time of processing the image, the ventilator of the other machine involved -the computer- breaks the silence producing a slight whirring. What a curious continuity in the substitution of one machine for another. In former times it was the ventilator of the head of the enlarger you heard, and now it is the computer sound. But nobody should think that this new machine operates by itself, that it is a self-activating device. Nothing is further from reality. Does it think or take any decision by itself? Only a human being has creativity, never ever a machine. The so called spirit is a faculty which is too ethereal and sometimes is lost in the maze of itself and of its own infinite possibilities. This is something that a machine could never have.
But digital photography has many more suggestive charms that the detractors of this technique -the high priests, the connoisseurs of the mysteries of the darkroom, the "Savonarola" or the moment- see to minimizing, repeating persistenetly that we are committing one sin of infidelity after another when we leave aside traditional photography, the photography we have always had, and we submit ourselves to "the other one".
Before the latter became popular, the great American photographer Ansel Adams wrote in his booklet entitled "The Negative" in 1984 : "I am waiting anxiously for new concepts and new processes. I think that electronic images will be the next great advance. Those systems will have their inevitable and inherent characteristics; artists and technicians will once again have to make an effort to understand and control them".
However, it is undeniable that this newly-arrived system puts within our reach a series of resources that, for the sake of creativity, let us at least come close to the work we had dreamed of.
There is no idea, however impossible it may seem, that we are not able to translate on paper with its help. Almost everything is possible.
I do not want to copy reality; I want to transform it into that synthesis of sensorial and rational impulses which are the ones that condition me when I try to create an image. Let ourselves fall into the infinite temptation of our fantsy. The only limits are the author's imagination and creativity.
Nevertheless, at this point I must confess that it is in the darkroom where I still hold my breath when -drowned by the red light- I look with amazament at how the image begins to unveil itself on the paper immersed in the developer.
As my frame of mind is radically far from any manichenism, I think that both systems should coexist with one another. By no means are we facing two antagonistic elements but two complementary methods.
The way required by this evolution is to adapt to the means. It is the way to "survive" that everlasting mobile or the new era with its bewildering changes. "The ones to survive are not the most intelligent but the ones who adapt better to the means."
After reading this, there is no doubt that somebody might tell me -recalling Ortega- that the technique is just the opposite to the subject's adaptation to the means, since the technique deals, in an inverted movement to the biological, with the environment's adaptation to the man.
There will be a group of photographers who will go on with the old method, and there will be another one, I include myself among them, who will try to harmonize the best of both methods. It is probable that the same thing will happen to both these systems -digital and traditional- as when video displaced Super 8. If this happened, I would evocate my admired Quevedo:

He will leave his body, not his care
they will be ashes, but they will have meaning
dust they will be, but dust in love.

Lorenzo Secades Alonso

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