Digital BW, The Print

I fully agree that culling is both necessary and time consuming.

I can remember Fred Picker telling a story about teaching a friend's
daughter to make photographs. He sent her out with a 4X5 field camera
and a couple of Polaroid packets and asked her to make the best shots
she could. Sort of pushes the idea of previsualization and shot
selection.

When I was shooting large format and could only carry about a dozen film
holders I was damn careful to select what I wanted carefully. I realize
that this isn't for everybody and that it would be tough to do the
Cartier-Bresson approach with a view camera but it does help train one's
eye.

With more than a little age I admit to now using a 35mm and digital
exclusively and have fallen into bad habits but I think my previous
existence has helped to pick a little more carefully when looking at a
scene to photograph.

Even with large format film it was still necessary to cull through the
negatives and discard those that weren't worth of spending the time in
the darkroom to make a fine print. 35mm and digital simply makes that
end of the business more time consuming. Again, a Picker aphorism was
never fall in love with a negative...

Roger





On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 16:59, Anthony G. Atkielski wrote: 
> Truman Prevatt writes:
> 
> > And the time, labor, patients that goes in a 4x5 - I'm not sure the
> guy
> > with a new digital camera would understand. Hey, just shoot 500
> shots 
> > and sort it out in the computer.
> 
> One of the reasons I don't zip through roll after roll of film when
> shooting is not the cost of film ... it's the cost of sorting through
> the results.  Going through 500 shots to find ten good ones is a lot
> more time-consuming than going through 50 shots to find ten good ones,
> whether they are shot digitally or on film.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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