Digital BW, The Print

Herb, I agree 100 percent with you on this.

Jerry






hsitz wrote:
> 
> --- 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