Analog Habits Die Hard

Part of my job as the web designer for Virginia Homes is to travel each week to every home being built and photograph it. I then take these photos back to the office and upload them to the web, where home owners can see their new house under construction. Nice gig, and gets me out of the office on a regular basis. Now often, I will encounter the different tradesmen and subcontractors while photographing, and they inevitably (and politely) strive to stay "out of the frame" - much like how people jump out of view when tourists start taking snapshots.

So here's the weird thing - I'm using a digital camera to do this. In the past, jumping out of the way showed consideration to the photographer; each shot that person took was one less piece of actual film being used. A photographer had only 24 or 36 shots (on average) on a roll, and it cost hard money to develop each and every one of those shots. So jumping out of the way was not only polite - it saved the photographer money and other resources. But now that I'm using a digital camera, this isn't the case. Three button presses and the photograph is deleted into the void, and with current memory cards I can store hundreds of shots before having to swap media. So while I may not want every Tom, Dick, and Harry wandering into my shots, it's not a big deal anymore.

Yet this is behavior which I don't see changing, at least not for a long, long time. I mean, it's habit - we've all grown up with traditional cameras, and I'm sure the majority of cameras still in use employ actual film. Still, I forsee film being used less and less every year - it won't be too long till most cameras are digital in nature. So will we hold onto this polite dance we do when someone pulls out a camera? Will we continue to treat the camera as an analog medium, though the new generation of cameras have few of the limits their predecessors had? How hard is it to change memorized manners and behaviors?

Note - I probably should state that I am not advocating not getting out of the way of photographers; it's still a polite and considerate thing to do. I certainly plan to continue the behavior. It just seems anachronistic, that's all.