Digital BW, The Print

Hi

I use an Olympus E20 for most of my event photography, and have on occasions
been asked to do B/W prints. I find that I can usually get good 8x10s, but
larger prints do depend on the subject and use of the print.

Wide angle landscape work seems to show up the lack of detail the most. The
picture of Old John in the 'converting colour to B/W' section of my web site
<http://northlight-images.co.uk/bwfromcol.html> was done with an E20 and
makes quite a good 8x10 print. A friend asked me to do him an 13"x19" print,
which took quite a lot of work to get to an acceptable (to me) quality. The
other picture on that page is of a friend in a late night fast food outlet,
and produced a huge B/W print with no problem at all.

At the moment, I still prefer scanned film for my B/W landscape work, but
when a reasonably priced* 20Mpixel** SLR with a good wide angle lens (~24mm
equiv) is around, I'm sure that my film SLRs will move to backup duty,
although I suspect that this hypothetical 20M beast will not be anywhere as
robust, light or durable as my old OM2/24mm :-))

I do my B/W prints from either source on an 1160 with Lyson SG inks


bye for now   

Keith Cooper

Northlight Images
http://northlight-images.co.uk
Photography - Digital Imaging - Apple Mac Consultancy
Tel +44 (0)116 291 9092 Mobile +44 (0)780 162 9397

* A sum that varies with the amount of paid work I've got ;-)) - probably
$2-4k

** 20M -- very arbitrary figure based on the amount of data from a good 35mm
scan -- not intended to rekindle the film vs digital debate, which to my
mind is very much Apples vs Oranges (I like both, I like eating fruit!)