Digital BW, The Print

Martin writes:

> I have never had a chance to play around with a better quality digital for
> B&W. The wife has a Canon G2 (3.1 mega pixel) for snap shots and my
attempts
> to get a nice print were somewhat successful if I printed very small, 3x4.
I
> have a handful of 13X18 B&W prints from other people done with SLR type
> cameras that are excellent. So I have to say it can be done.

Hmm...you've got me thinking now...I've never tried making small prints from
my digitial files. Now that you mention it I think Jerry Olsen remarked once
that he was generating 5x7's from his D30 files. I'll have to experiment
some and see what materializes. Thanks.

> That said, the feel is very different from prints made from scans of 8x10
> and 4x5 negs. I think it is simply a matter of how much fine detail is
> recorded and can be gotten onto a piece of paper. Prints from 35mm are
much
> different from prints from LF too but I like work from both formats.

Agreed. On a slightly off-topic comment...back when I produced only contact
prints from my 8x10 negs (I could not afford the cost of enlarging equipment
for this size neg) I always felt that "something" was at work during image
capture due to the viewing of your subject at actual print size. To this
day, I continue to marvel at the projected image on an 8x10 groundglass.

> As Austin said, Jerry Olson did some incredible B&W stuff using montages
of
> digital images that were a blend of scanned film and digital camera files.
> Excellent print quality. I do know he was looking to move up to the D60
and
> was on a quest for as much image data as possible.

Agreed. I love Jerry's images.

Alan Huntley