Digital BW, The Print

May I make a confession about grain? I love it. I really love. Yet it is,
essentially, noise, and I don't love noise in my audio recording. So it
made me think, why the heck do I love grain? Grain is, after all, about
interruption of resolution. It's randomness, a limitation of the medium.
What's to love?

Then I got to thinking about special effects. Huh? Really. Two jumped out
has having had the most amazing, out-of-context, profound emotional
response from me.

1) Jurassic Park - the first dino, the beautiful brachiosaur. But wait.
Remember the almost-next scene? Cut to an extreme wide angle (EWA) of two
brachs swimming in the lake. Around the edge, a herd of parasaurolophus,
the duckbills with the crest. TINY in the shot. One moved his head and,
small as it was, thanks to digital vs. stop motion, the movement had weight
and mass. I was so involved in the reality that I had to snap myself back
to reality!

2) My award for a not so hot film with a brilliant start, the 2002 version
of The Time Machine. About a half-hour in, there is the time travel
sequence, worth more than the price of admission... especially one shot in
particular. It's a truck shot. Hardegan is seated in the temporal "bubble"
and the camera moves from cam right to cam left through another EWA of the
lab. On shelves in the background, plants are furiously withering, growing,
dying back. Another amazingly evocative shot, made so by the tiny details,
one that can elicit an amazing response from me when I so much as listen to
the (wonderful) soundtrack.

So THEN I remembered MacLuhan (Sorry, Woody Allen) and his treatise on
"hot" and "cool" media. To encapsulate his work is a foolish chore, but the
relevant thought is that we're most involved in media that force our brains
to do part of the work. TV, for example, made of dots, makes our brain
reassemble the image. AHA! Grain, in a sense, "interrupts" the normal
gradations of our vision, forcing that reconstructive involvement.

And then finally, thank the Lord, I came to ask, "Well. Might that not
explain the power of B&W, the hyper-real, compelling, emotional richness of
a necessarily limited vocabulary? Our normal experience include chroma as
well as value. With B&W, we become participants in the event, losing
ourselves in the simplified world of value, yet recalling color.

Cool! Thanks, list. I just got a whole lot more interested in limiting my
color palette, at least for now. Of course, like anything, this could be
carried to an extreme. There's only so much "connecting th dots" we can do
before it becomes an exercise in connecting, rather than perceiving. So I
don't plan to be making many25 dpi prints. But you you never know.

Bobbo

Artwork and Nature Photopaintings -- http://www.bobbogoldberg.com
Voice over demos and services -- http://www.bob-vo.com