[font color=\'#000000\']Unfortunately, there are others at that age, and even much younger with a very narrow mind. They simply don't WANT to learn new tricks for whatever reasons. Their problem, not ours. Â Â
Marshall,
I agree with most of your points, but there's nothing wrong with someone wanting to use film to capture their image, then drum scan it, and output the file to a lightjet or Epson. Doing so (and not using digital capture) does not make someone an 'old dog' who refuses to lean 'new tricks.' In fact, this is (scanning film) what Greg Gorman does, as you mentioned. The majority of medium and large format fine art exhibition landscape work hanging in galleries throughout the Southwest is produced in this very way. (
www.westcoastimaging specializes in these prints and even prints the late Galen Rowell's photos) And these prints are essentially perfect--no grain, tack sharp, full of color and saturation--essentially perfect.
While direct digital capture is now excellent when married to 35mm bodies, it still has a long way to go in the medium and large format world. The self contained backs now available from Kodak and Imacon have a multiplier effect of 1.5 and are still too expensive for anyone but the professional. And self contained backs aren't available for 6x7 cameras or view cameras--and there are a lot of amateurs with Pentax and Mamiya and Bronica 6x7 cameras, not to mention panoramic cameras like the Noblex and Fuji 6x17 or some of the Fuji 6x9 and 6x7 and 645 rangefinders, etc. All of the mentioned cameras are awesome imaging systems capable of producing world class work for decades to come. Wanting to keep such systems (they are all ready paid for!) and print digitally through drum scanninng is a perfectly good compromise.
This whole discussion is quite complex--more complex than you can tell from these debates. You have the issue of professional needs and amateur needs, which are quite different. The needs of someone new to photography are different than the needs of someone with a great deal of current film equipment, or equipment that can't or won't be married to a digital back. Shooting styles play a role, as does the market you wish to pursue, if any at all. And then there's the whole question of do you think a 6500 dollar 1DS will result in a material difference in the quality of your prints. It's easy to see the dramatic improvement from 35mm to medium format. It's harder to tell the difference when moving from 645 to 6x7 and difficult on color prints up to 16x20 or 20x24 (depending on subject matter) to see a 'substantial' difference between 6x7 and 4x5 in color prints. Yes, the difference is there, but is it enough to want one to use a view camera and all its attendant difficulties? The same question can be asked of the new 1Ds. Sure, perhaps the improvement is there. But it's certainly not the dramatic improvement you see from 35mm to MF. So the question becomes when do you shell out 6500 plus the cost of your Canon lenses? At a 8% improvement over 645? At at 30% improvement? At no improvement but you just want digital for the work flow issues? Who knows? I guess what I'm trying to do with this post is show that there are more variables involved in using digital than just 'is the image better.' If image quality in landscape work was the only criterion that is acceptable, we'd all be using large format. But it's not the only criterion; and thank God; because if it was, we'd have no wonderful images from the late Galen Rowell, who shot in 35mm.[/font]
