Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., Bruce <smthopr@e...> wrote:
> Unless you can light your photograph from scratch, and have most 
equipment
> you need at your disposal, including crew, then selective 
lightening and
> darkening, and curves etc are essential to making a fine photograph 
and not
> a technical reproduction.
> 
> It's very very rare that nature provides perfection without a bit 
of help
> from a visionary.  
>  
> -Bruce


I'm with Bruce here.  Austin's statement that he does no manipulation 
in Photoshop sounds bizarre to me.  I realize he does some amount of 
digital manipulation in his wonderful scanner in capturing the scan, 
but this is nowhere near what seems necessary to come up with the 
best image possible.

Austin seems to take some pride in the fact that he takes pictures 
that don't need Photoshop processing.  But one of the surprising 
things to me when I first discovered photography was that even the 
great photographers do lots of work processing the image after they 
capture it on film.

At the beginning of his book, _The Negative_, Ansel Adams says:

"My work, for example, is frequently regarded as 'realistic,' while 
in fact the value relationships within most of my photographs are far 
from a literal transcription of actuality.  I employ numerous 
photographic controls to creat an image that represents 'the 
equivalent of what I saw and felt.' . . . If I succeed, the viewer 
accepts the image as its own fact, and responds emotionally and 
aesthetically to it."

Sorry, but I just can't believe that you can get the control over the 
image you need to produce the best photos (in a digital workflow) 
unless you're doing some work in Photoshop.  I realize you can get 
some of the control you need from scanner settings, but you certainly 
can't get the kind of selective control that is often necessary.

-- Herb