Digital BW, The Print

Roger,

In general I agree with your thoughts. I found my way to the Zone System via
Fred Picker's book before I picked up the Adams trilogy. Fred always seemed
to come up with terribly outrageous statements intermixed with gems of
simple wisdom. I can't say that I would recommend his writings to anyone at
this point but he did say one thing that has stuck with me.

Find someone whose prints you really like and then find out how they do it.

It is in the "how they do it" part that we can't help but get embroiled in
technical "discussions". I went from Picker, to Adams, to using a
densitometer and on to doing some very extensive film, development and paper
testing. I certainly do not see that as a necessity to producing great art
but at the same time I do feel that I benefited a great deal by increasing
my understanding of how it all worked. In the end this let me step back from
a strict application of the Zone System to my own way of working that is
Zone based but a bit more intuitive. Maybe it was just all the practice.

I do have to point out that if no one was measuring printouts of step
tablets there would be no curves, no drivers and no workflows for us to
print with. It can also be extremely helpful in figuring out what is going
wrong when you hit a problem.

This is a very new technology compared to photography as a whole and the
scope of the technical issues is much greater. It is going to take us awhile
to determine which of those issues are critical and which we can safely
ignore.

We have to keep in mind that even though me may have mastered conventional
photographic printing this is a whole new ballgame and there are no real
experts yet. The technology needs to settle a bit and we need to put in the
practice time with these new digital tools.

Martin Wesley

----- Original Message -----
From: "rlsopher" <rlsopher@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 11:53 AM
Subject: [Digital BW] Random Thoughts


> Not to be a complete nihilist and fun as it is to become embroiled
> in technical arguments, they really don't, to my view, address the
> final result which is to produce a print that "says something."
>
> Fred Picker used to make the point that to make a great print you
> had to see it as it was going to hang on the wall about the time you
> snapped the shutter. He taught technique just so far as to give one
> the tools to produce a good print of archival quality and spent most
> of the time in his workshops trying to teach people to see, a far
> more difficult task than learning how to develop and print. In my
> experience there are far more good printers than good photographers.
>
>
> Seems to me that thanks to a few noble souls digital B&W is
> approaching, perhaps now equalling, good silver prints and the tools
> are now there to be used. The tools have to be mastered to be sure
> but measuring the density of innumerable step wedges isn't going to
> produce a single memorable image. Somethimes I wonder if having the
> ability to modify so many parameters compared to wet printing we
> wander in the trees and have lost the forest.
>
> Roger
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