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by Editor Peter Davidson
Edited and published by Yvette Depaepe, the 1st of April 2026
Candid shot taken on an old phone camera.
Recently I was intrigued by the surprising (to me) revelation that professional musicians rarely bother listening to high end Hi-Fi music at home. They seem perfectly content to listen to music from whatever device happens to be around, be that a small transistor radio or ear buds from a phone. It doesn't matter much, if at all.
Back in the day when there were only two channels of TV and radio for entertainment, it was different. The stereogram and later, Hi-Fi separates, were the 'main thing' in a home. Any self-respecting living room or student flat was incomplete unless it had two very substantial speakers and a rack of high tech audio gear prominently on show. Of course, this sort of thing is still around, but tends to be seen only in rooms of the dedicated (and wealthy) audio enthusiast.
However, and here's the thing, the aforementioned audio enthusiast is highly unlikely to be an actual musician. Musicians, for the most part anyway, seem not to care very much how technically beautiful the recorded music is actually reproduced or sounds.
What they do care about, is not how well the recording is reproduced, but how good the music is, how it feels, regardless of how the recording is being reproduced. In other words, what is really important, is how well it moves people emotionally.
Personally, I can remember years ago now, how amazing it felt when listening to certain songs through a small and tiny sounding transistor radio, fading in and out and crackling with static. None of that 'snap and pop noise' mattered a jot. The music just came through in an emotional wave, and bam, hit me and millions of others like me, in the emotional gut. It lives within me to this day. Hearing those songs, I'm instantly transported back in time. Not once did I think the music in any way 'rubbish' because it wasn't reproduced in hi-fidelity.
I think you can guess where I'm going with this. Here on our little community, there are photographers with exquisite technique producing exceptionally polished results every day. The question I'm asking is, apart from impressing other photographers, are we somehow missing the point?
The people who actually buy our photographs, I suspect, couldn't care less how technically perfect the image is. Or how expensive the camera or lens was. It's all pretty much irrelevant to them. Not always of course, but mostly. But, I hear you say, what about 'image quality'? Good question...
Without getting deep into a can of worms regarding subjec tivity, the most important aspect of any photograph I would argue - and it's much like music in this sense - is in how a picture makes you feel.
The other day, when by chance I passed a poster of a 1930's New York cityscape enlarged to wall size, and not even a good reproduction, I was struck by that thought. Because that image itself was technically pretty terrible. Not sharp, marked and scratched, but still emotionally powerful. Smoky, raw and just... overall brilliant. To hell with the technicalities, it was great. For me anyway. And many, many others too, because it has and still is, reproduced thousands of times.
The moral, if you want a moral, is the pursuit of the sublime in a technical sense is perhaps not all that we as photographers should always be striving for. We are, after all, very much like musicians in a sense. Like musicians, we strive to make our images resonate. To be felt and remembered. To have impact. What that impact is, and how it resonates, is of course, for you to create. Yet how that image is made and by what means, no one (apart from us) really cares.
It's the result that matters most, and it's to those that matter most, the people who share the connection. And sometimes back that up by purchasing the image. Having said that, I've yet to sell a single one of the images here that I show as part of my argument! Regardless, I'll carry on trying to make some sort of connection with my viewer. Or maybe I'll just get my coat...
I've struggled to find examples of lo-fi images on 1x - for obvious reasons - so forgive me if I've resorted to using just three of my own. Higher IQ images from other photographers follow.
Taken using an old 3mp camera | Write |
