Digital BW, The Print

Hi Tim,

> Fist, photography always has and always will be about artificiality and
> manipulation (it's two dimensional for goodness sake - how real and
> true is that...?).

I certainly disagree with that.  A LOT of photography is about accurate
reproduction of a scene.

> Secondly - it takes just as much skill, expertise and experience to use
> Photoshop well as a photographic tool as it does be an excellent
> darkroom technician. Differnet skills, but just as rare in both cases.

Absolutely BS.  How many did USM in the darkroom?  How many of you even know
that USM is a chemical darkroom technique, and know how it's actually done?
Not many, I assure you.

I think the ease of using PS is FAR FAR FAR greater than doing the same
thing in the darkroom.  It takes FAR less skill to do most anything in PS
than in the darkroom.  That has no bearing on the ability to get the result
you want, mind you...but the technical skill to do USM in the darkroom is
far greater than that required to do it in PS.  Does it matter?  Probably
not in reality.

That doesn't mean that someone using PS isn't a great technician...but just
because you do something in PS that can be done in the darkroom, doesn't
mean you have the same technical skill level.  That's the beauty of PS, it
takes a lot of the difficulty of doing certain things.  There's a bit of
narcissism to using PS for some, I'd say...because it allows people to do
things they couldn't or didn't do before, far more easily.

This is an aside, but somewhat, (IMO) related.  It's funny to listen to
people who weren't brought up around computers and know someone who "USES" a
computer...they think they are a "computer wiz" simply because they can
 "use" a computer.

Austin