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Author Topic: Is it Over?  (Read 43395 times)

Rob C

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #60 on: December 13, 2015, 05:16:20 am »



1  I suppose my experience with cameras and darkrooms differs from yours.  While I had the same sort of excitement of seeing the image form in the devolper, I also found it deeply frustrating since it was impossible to determine if the print was adequate under the safe light.  Eventually I took to deveoping my prints face down or in complete darkness so I wouldn't be tempted to alter the development because i had been fooled by what I saw under the poor red light.  I tried having others print the images, but found it impossible to communicate what I wanted in the print and so, if I wanted the prints to match what I was going for, I had to do it myself. Perhaps my fault here is a lack of patience.

2  I never really enjoyed darkroom work and eventally learned I prefered shooting transparencies because I could control the image in the camera and let it be whatever it was with out manipulation in printing.  The advantage I have found in digital work is that I now have the control over the image without the frustrations (and alergic reactions) of a wet darkroom.  I find I can make digital prints that are better than anything I was able to do in a darkroom.  The process of arriving at the right print; getting the right paper surface, size, tonal scale, dodging and burning etc, may take as much effort as doing so in a wet darkroom, but digital systems better suit my personality.


3 I love how utilitarian Hasselblad V system cameras are. These provide exactly the features I need without a lot else to get in the way.  But it is the fact that they do what I need that really appeals to me.  They are tools that are well designed to help me do the thing I really care about; creating an image.




1.  This I've read elsewhere, too, and it puzzles me: a red safelight was only ever used - in my pro experience - for working with line film. For bromide papers (b/white), we always used a yellow/greenish filter, which I think was called an OB or something like that. It gave a very clear indication of the way a dried print would look - and as far as memory goes, you judged the dried print to look a tiny bit darker. But there's a caveat: in the pro world there was only one surface: WSG, and as well-glazed as Kodak would allow. Glazed gives the widest tonality that paper can offer you. (Repro houses often requested dried but unglazed glossy, but that was just to make their job easier.) All of the other surfaces are, from a pro perspective, bullshit. They exist to make wedding couples look less pedestrian and ridiculous by the trick of disguising them beneath surface, to lend a helping hand to pictures with no intrinsic merit (think canvas today) and so on. Their purpose is, basically, disguise. In the commercial world, a print existed in order to make the final reproduction as faithful to the concept as possible, certainly without letting surface tricks intrude on intentions. Which of course, is also one of the main reasons that transparency film was rated the best of all for reproduction of colour.

So no, I wouldn't blame you for lack of patience, simply for using the wrong safelight all that time. It's almosty impossible to process well using red, despite the fibs that feature and perpetuate the myth in every movie that shows an active darkroom scene bathed in RED! From college days I remember something called the Purkinge Shift, which partially explains this. Incidentally, for C Prints, it was total darkness, and development by the Kodak rules, with exposure simply a product of experiments in fixed dev. time and varied exposure steps plus, of course, filtration calculations built in. (I wouldn't dream of doing E6 at home: I did Cibas for a while but not by choice!)

2.  Yes, I can also make digital prints that are more accurate interpretations of what I can achieve in micro detail simply because of Layers, but this carries a penalty: they can end up too perfect. Is this paradox possibly also a reality? It certainly is, and to illustrate it, I must use another medium, paint, and take it to a bit of an extreme. Just think of what Van Gogh's stuff looks like, and then switch to Dali's famous works. I want my pictures to resemble the emotional look of Vincent and not the clinical look of Dali's oeuvre, maintaining, the while, their photographic integrity.

And the above, deadly, digital precision is what I dislike most about much of today's fashion and makeup photography: too much impersonal perfection in all things. Soul, the raison d'être of these two genres, has been sacrificed to artifice and falsehood. Look no futher back than at Sarah Moon's Cacharel adverts for cosmetics to see what glamour and emotional aspiration consists of, and then turn rapidly to todays stuff and ask yourself: do women really want to look like plastic Barbies on a bad day?

3.  I couldn't agree with you more: in fact, the older and possibly the physically slower that I become and the more sure of what really appeals to me in women, were those old 500 Series still in my case, the models still available to me, I'm certain I'd give up every other camera and genre and concentrate right there. And when film finally dies, I'd go with it, happy I hadn't betrayed either it or myself. I think!

;-)

Rob C

Rob C

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #61 on: December 13, 2015, 06:06:50 am »

Rob - regarding negative film vs digital,
From your perspective, in the continuum from GOOD or SOULFUL, (film to enlarger to print) to BAD or SOULLESS(sensor to memory card, to computer, to printer/print), where do you place the process of film to scanner to computer to printer/print?

Perhaps another way to ask the question... what is the key item in the path that makes the film era process "GOOD"?   Is it the film itself?   Or is it light from an enlarger passing through the negative?   Or is it a wet chemically processed print?  And given the answer, where do you place scanned film, digitally printed into the discussion?
Brad


Brad! What a complicated question-within-questions!

What do I like about film? Well, it was my first love - the medium within which I earned all of my living. My entire photographic thinking was based on what I found out from using different films, and the greatest realisation was to use as few different ones as possible: learn a few well. So, on Nikon it was Kodachrome and FP3/4 and HP3/4 whilst on 6x6 it was Ektachrome and TXP 120. All the b/w film went through the same developer, D76 1+1. Prints went into D163, and were always Kodak WSG in, usually, either of two grades: 2 or 3. Almost never did I need softer or harder.

Negative to print. I still have an old fashion image that I shot in '72:



This was shot on HP3, I think, and with a 2.8/35mm Nikkor almost certainly. As a paper print, along with some very few remaining non-fashion images still in a box somewhere, it has a 'look' that I never got from printing digitally. I speak in the past tense about digi printing thanks to HP and a dead HP B 9180 that now serves to help stop the desk flying away.

(Edit: looking at the blocked highlights, these were often intentional and added to the flavour of the time; today, with digi, nobody would be free in their minds to think of light like that.)

Oddly enough, despite a lot of people claiming that Kodachrome is the worst film to scan, I found it gives me good b/white digital prints! Perhaps it just happens to react well with the way I like to make things look, and that's why people with another aesthetic find it poor. In the same way, I found my first foray into Velvia 50 to be a bit of a difficult one, and certainly useless, in colour, unfiltered at least, for people shots. But, again, it scanned okay for black/white, as in the cropped Nikon shot below:



The thing is, you always end up having to cope with your personal state of reality, and mine is that a darkroom is impossible, and the financial cost involved in film, whilst possible to handle, is unpalatable in the extreme, and simply not worth it as an amateur.

Added to that, the dead HP means that all I shoot now has one ultimate destination: my website. If it works for that, it works for me.

But in that elusive ideal world, I would accept a real, double weight glossy print before a digital one.  Its just my way, my thing, as it were.

Perhaps the best compromise would be to shoot 6x6 black/white film and scan it on a dedicated, top-quality film scanner, which also puts such tricks out of my limited choices. Not only do I think that 6x6 suits girls very well, it also seems to coincide with the few landscape pics I like, as with Michael Kenna. Colour, I feel less and less affinity with as time moves on. It becomes just another distraction unless it can be the actual focus of an image, in which case it become indispensable.

Difficult to say, with mere words, how emotional responses to images work; the danger seems to be that it all ends up reading as pretentious bullshit, which serves nobody well, least of all the writer.

Rob C
« Last Edit: December 13, 2015, 06:10:42 am by Rob C »
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GrahamBy

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #62 on: December 13, 2015, 04:19:44 pm »

Colour, I feel less and less affinity with as time moves on. It becomes just another distraction unless it can be the actual focus of an image, in which case it become indispensable.

I have an occasional fruit obsession...
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Rob C

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #63 on: December 14, 2015, 03:54:30 am »

I have an occasional fruit obsession...

That makes for a wonderful sunset, Graham!

Expand the black background and insert a tiny building (or camel) silhouette...

;-)

Rob C

GrahamBy

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #64 on: December 14, 2015, 06:49:58 am »

I already have problems suppressing the cat hairs from the background (both the ginger and the black & white like sleeping on the back-drop).
I'm not sure I want to get involved with camel-hair :-)
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razrblck

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #65 on: December 14, 2015, 08:41:00 am »

I already have problems suppressing the cat hairs from the background (both the ginger and the black & white like sleeping on the back-drop).
I'm not sure I want to get involved with camel-hair :-)

Don't get me started on cat hair. I have a white, a black and a mixed colors one so there is NO safe color for me!
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wmchauncey

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #66 on: December 30, 2015, 07:45:39 am »

We seem to have a penchant on these pages for debating the undefinable...it takes me back to my younger years when,
in the grip of several pitchers of ale in the ole familiar ratskeller, we would debate the "meaning of it all' while curing the world of it's ills.
Like the snake eating it's tail...round and round...never-ending.
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Rob C

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #67 on: December 31, 2015, 03:12:57 pm »

We seem to have a penchant on these pages for debating the undefinable...it takes me back to my younger years when,
in the grip of several pitchers of ale in the ole familiar ratskeller, we would debate the "meaning of it all' while curing the world of it's ills.
Like the snake eating it's tail...round and round...never-ending.

But here, I trust, we can do it sober and perhaps learn something new; discover a fresh point of view?

Rob C

jani

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #68 on: January 01, 2016, 09:00:57 am »

It looks to me the same old lamenting about digital manipulation vs film truthfulness.
The only interesting part (which, obviously, is not explored enough since is not "philosophical enough") is the archivial problem.

But aside that, just old (and boring) stuff.
Sorry for the late tackle. :)

Even the "archival problem" is pretty boring. It's the same as it ever was: people need to care enough to preserve whatever must be archived. Think of all those movie film rolls that have been destroyed by a lack of care, of my mother who threw away the negatives and kept the 70's Kodak prints that quickly lost their color balance, and so on.

The challenge with digital archives is not about their intrinsic archivability or lack thereof, it is whether anyone will bother keeping the stuff.

My guess is that this will work out just as it has been in the past: museums and archives will archive things to the best of their ability, as will some enthusiasts.

We've had a few discussions about archivability in the past, I tried looking through my archives (haha), but all I found was this post:

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=5355.msg44543#msg44543

I recall that I once mentioned that the only way to be sure, was to take these checksums I mentioned and re-verify your data at certain intervals, while copying the data to new media, in perpetuity.

So, technically speaking, if anyone bothers, archivability for digital is infinite. If nobody bothers, archivability is moot, regardless of the medium.

YMMV.
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jani

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #69 on: January 01, 2016, 09:01:19 am »

Indeed, it would have precluded any interest in the medium at all for two principal reasons: I do not enjoy using or interfacing with hi-tech (which is how I see digital cameras);
I hope you realise that this emotion about "hi-tech" is an artefact of your mind, and your background, and nothing else.

There is no such distinction for the two-year-old who sits down and learns how to use a modern, touch-screen tablet computer (iPad, Android tablet, Microsoft tablet).

Back in its day, the Nikon F3 and your chemical printing processes was the hi-tech you now loathe.

Why did you not loathe the F3, and these processes, back then?

Or, if I'm off mark with my comment about the specific model F3, please substitute any contemporary state of the art camera of the day when you vigorously pursued your love of chemical photography.

The point is: it is easy to get set in your ways.

I grew up with computer, I am extremely comfortable around computers, and I learned touch typing early on. SMS typing and virtual keyboards are, however, not my friends, and if I were tempted to fall into the illusion that my truths are universal truths, I would probably write about how soulless these virtual keyboards are, and how they are not really about typing things anymore - my writing loses touch with the reality of putting things down to the computer, and how that affects the results.

There are differences in the process here, and the differences may affect us individually, but they do not impose a static truthiness on a certain, time-limited technological state-of-the-art that once was.
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amolitor

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #70 on: January 01, 2016, 09:57:47 am »

The archiving problem has very little to do with the medium.

There have been a handful of archives in the 100,000 negative range that have been effectively mined. The task was monumental, and only done because of affection combined with very high perceived value.

In the digital world 100,000 frames isn't even a large archive. There are many people reading this right now have bigger archives.

At the same time the perceived value of photographs is dropping fast.

Who's going to dig through a million frames? Why would they?
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jani

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #71 on: January 01, 2016, 10:02:06 am »

At the same time the perceived value of photographs is dropping fast.
I disagree. Photographs have never been more valued by so many.

Quote
Who's going to dig through a million frames? Why would they?
People are collectively digging through orders of magnitude more frames than that, every day.

They do so because they love photographs, sharing them, and showing eachother what they like.
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LesPalenik

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #72 on: January 01, 2016, 10:17:51 am »

Just googled "tomato image" and in .39 seconds, Google found over 67 million tomato images
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amolitor

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #73 on: January 01, 2016, 10:23:11 am »

Collectively digging through millions of pictures posted online is not the same thing as digging through someone's archive. The two activities are not even related.

You might as well argue that the rhinos are doing fine because everyone eats their horns, or because children like stuffed animals.
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Zorki5

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #74 on: January 01, 2016, 11:25:39 am »

I disagree. Photographs have never been more valued by so many.

Collectively, yes images are valued probably more than ever before. But, on average, each individual image is now treated as a disposable.

People are collectively digging through orders of magnitude more frames than that, every day.

Yeah, yeah. This conversation reminded me of one of Kevin's recent rantatorials, about a box with old photos.

If I were Kevin, oh yes, I'd be very worried about his archives, and willingness of his grandkids (let alone grandkids of his grandkids) to browse through all those RAWs in Lightroom 827. Does he regularly export his images into JPEGs, into folder structure that makes sense for those who'd want to browse it? Something tells me he doesn't.

Truly, unless somebody has a time machine, I'm not inclined to listen to what he/she has to say about the future of digital archives. All speculations I've seen so far were gross oversimplifications (this includes the aforementioned rantatorial).

Digital archives have huge potential, but it's not clear at all whether it will be realized of not. The younger among us will have the answer many decades later...
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jani

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #75 on: January 02, 2016, 02:25:25 pm »

Collectively digging through millions of pictures posted online is not the same thing as digging through someone's archive. The two activities are not even related.
You are absolutely correct, and for those who did not spot my point quite as easily as you did:

Back before we shared images on the Internet, nobody did that collective digging.
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jani

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #76 on: January 02, 2016, 02:33:24 pm »

Collectively, yes images are valued probably more than ever before. But, on average, each individual image is now treated as a disposable.
Which they are, to a large extent, for better or worse.

Additionally, copying photos is easier than ever before, so the "good" photos (well, the ones that the most people like, anyway) are valued more than ever before, but I suspect they are not valued as much financially.

Quote
Yeah, yeah. This conversation reminded me of one of Kevin's recent rantatorials, about a box with old photos.

If I were Kevin, oh yes, I'd be very worried about his archives, and willingness of his grandkids (let alone grandkids of his grandkids) to browse through all those RAWs in Lightroom 827. Does he regularly export his images into JPEGs, into folder structure that makes sense for those who'd want to browse it? Something tells me he doesn't.

Truly, unless somebody has a time machine, I'm not inclined to listen to what he/she has to say about the future of digital archives. All speculations I've seen so far were gross oversimplifications (this includes the aforementioned rantatorial).
Yup.

What helps us a bit these days, is image comparison algorithms, which are pretty good at finding images that are similar to something.

Okay, we do not currently run Google's extensive image search on our own computers' digital archives, but this is something that has been worked on quite a bit.

Remember the silly feature "find pictures for tagging" in your old Photoshop Elements?

Quote
Digital archives have huge potential, but it's not clear at all whether it will be realized of not. The younger among us will have the answer many decades later...
Curated digital archives already exist, but may not be directly accessible to the public due to rights restrictions.
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ibarryhyman

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #77 on: May 29, 2016, 01:11:12 pm »

This is a Post duchamp and beuys world where the problem lies in what isn't art?

My personal experience is the world is against art, including forbidding photography , in all open spaces , and destruction of world treasures like the Buddha in Afghanistan . 


Leica article that started this forum about or bases its influence to forbid photography, in the name of emulsion. Digital Photography came out of ecological concerns about a fragile environment.

Film was and still is a dirty business and not very ecological and with
humanity reaching 10 billion in the world I can't imagine 10 billion bathrooms draining silver halide and color dyes down the sink.

I never want to start a conversation of what isn't art, but rather how all of us can embrace art .


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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Rob C

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #78 on: May 29, 2016, 01:55:26 pm »

You've been on the old fixer again! Whenever did bathrooms equate with number of people? Getting a ratio of one to two is still considered pretty modern: the average is more like one to a hundred. (Source: my own head.) It's rumoured that W. Eugene S was prone to doing your fixer-tasting trick during his sleepless sessions doing Pittsburgh. Or so I've read. Is it nice?

Welcome to the fish tank.

;-)

Rob C
« Last Edit: May 29, 2016, 02:01:32 pm by Rob C »
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tom b

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Re: Is it Over?
« Reply #79 on: May 29, 2016, 04:34:03 pm »

 Is it Over?

Yes it's over. Around 1.8 billion images are posted online each day.

http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/now-upload-share-1-8-billion-photos-everyday-meeker-report-224688.html

Cheers,
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