What a glorious, lush green. Very nice.
As an old B&W 4x5 Zone System type, there are two things that puzzle me.
First is the attempt of some photographers to introduce grain into a digital image. We worked so hard to get rid of it and now we want it back?
Second, and to the point here, is the penchant for removing color. Wet B&W, printed well, is just magnificent. The image seems to want to pull you down into the paper with it. I have rarely seen ink printed images match good monochrome that started life as a silver neg and ended in a wet silver print. Most of the digital B&W I have seen just looks like color with the color removed. On the other hand, I find digital color to be much more flexible than wet color ever was. While I know some photos look good or even best in in mono, the readiness to print digital B&W seems an odd retrogression.
But then maybe I like the faint orange glow...
I'll probably get a good deal of disagreement here but I'm not saying I'm right, just offering food for thought.
OH hell no, no grain for me If you please!
All the years and pains I went through trying to minimize grain, I’d rather cut my index finger off than hit that damn grain button in PS/LR. Shooting Kodak’s SO-115 tech pan back in the late 70’s was a dream come true. It was as close to grainless B&W as I ever got, and I loved it.
I really don’t think of it as a regression but a progression to a different methodology. I really loved the darkroom and if money and time allowed I likely would go that route today. The problem is I no longer have a whole lifetime, or unlimited wealth, available to get anywhere near the perfection that I know can be achieved in silver or other types of wet prints; yet the nostalgia and or desire to produce the gorgeous B&W prints of times gone by simply never goes away once the bug has bitten.
We simply use the tools we have at our disposal, to produce the images that please us. B&W still pleases me greatly, many times more so than color, but I must admit that color now a day holds a very strong allure that it didn’t thirty year ago, the cost and technology was beyond my reach then, and not even a consideration.
Digital technologies allows us to print images that were simply beyond the grasp of all but a relatively select few in days gone by. The past should always inform the future and the future will always reinterpret the past. In a way it almost seems wasteful not to use the technologies of today to try and reinterpret the B&W past of photography, simply because color is so easily accessible today.
I’ve played with Praki’s thumb nail of his image and in B&W and I do believe, for me at least, it has a lot of what you speak of in the wet print B&W photos of yore. I haven’t decided if it’s a good thing or a bad thing just yet, in that it took me all of 10 minutes to produce something that 30 years ago, I likely never could have achieved in the darkroom.
Later Larry