Digital BW, The Print

Jeff, you have managed to take all of the least admirable aspects of
my last two posts and have them add up to something a bit harsher than
I intended, though I probably deserve it.
First of all, I am very sorry if I've have made anyone feel attacked
for offering workshops, advice, whatever, for profit or not.
But since you do indeed seem accomplished, I'm sure you know what I
mean about the preponderance of mis-information, I'll bet you fight
misconceptions in you workshops every day, your comments would imply that.
Regarding the rest-
My preference for film was in reference to files from 1DS captures at
best, and for B&W printing. I am quite sure a digital back would make
me very happy. Whether or not it would make me happier than film, I
won't say without personal lengthy experience. I don't have a mk2, and
no one has yet given me a mk2 file to print, so I don't know how much
better it will be. Again, the context was 1DS level quality, or
lessor, and strictly for B&W printing.
Regarding my experience level with digital and it's relevance to my
comments, I am aware of every issue you mention below. Of course I can
claim to be competent and have it mean anything here. I might add, you
may find Noiseware worth exploring, it may be a hair more useful than
noise ninja, haven't yet decided.
I am not making any judgments about the medium in general, only the
specifics above. I am and will continue to use digital capture when
appropriate to the task, and will advance with it as I can afford to.
I will stick to my observations and conclusions from personal
experience though. I can make an Iris size quad tone print from a drum
scanned 35mm neg and have it be more subjectively attractive than the
same size print, well processed, from my 1ds no matter how well done.
It will have artifacts and certain characteristics, every medium does,
and the crisp film grain is subjectively visually superior here. As
soon as I move up in film size, the difference becomes even clearer.
With an 8x10 print, obviously the 1ds does just fine.
Again, this is subjective, not a wholesale judgment of the medium.
Lastly, no one I know would accuse me of being fashionable.
I hope that puts a better light on my statements, my apologies if any
offended.

Tyler

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Jeff Medkeff
<medkeff@g...> wrote:
> 
> 
> Tyler Boley wrote:
> 
> 
> > I have to say, I don't think there is any debate at all, and I have a
> > 1DS. Maybe the mk2 blurs the difference a bit more, but right now I
> > prefer film.
> 
> I think the operative word here is "prefer" - there are two different 
> media being spoken of here. I find they have some superficial 
> similarities....
> 
> I prefer film for many applications, and digital for many others. But 
> I've been using a wide range of digital cameras, including three Canon 
> SLRs and several digital backs. I've definitely had enough use of the 
> gear at this point to identify what works for me for different shooting 
> circumstances. Whether or not I'm doing B&W output is rarely a 
> determinant in the decision about what camera to use. All of that said,
> 
> 
> > Even for 35, I may prefer the film grain to this
> > cottage cheese.
> 
> > Digital has brought in so many new photography enthusiates (that's
> > good) that I wonder how many people making some of these comparisions
> > have even had that much experience with film, and getting the most out
> > of it.
> 
> I wonder exactly the opposite. I get many experienced film users in my 
> workshops who have high-end digital SLRs who don't know how to expose 
> for digital. They don't know their camera's sensor is linear. Once they 
> are told, they can't figure out that this means the brightest stop 
> consumes half the ADUs. Sometimes they have a hard time understanding 
> what "linear" means. They wonder why they get a so-called "purple 
> fringe" on very contrasty boundaries. They attribute this and many
other 
> image problems to "blooming," but they cannot explain the physical 
> mechanism of blooming, and they persist in a belief that it occurs in 
> images that have no clipped pixels once they are told. They believe 
> their fuzzy results are caused by crappy lenses and don't know what an 
> antialiasing filter is. They think Unsharp Mask is the best way to 
> sharpen their images. Many think in-camera jpeg is all you ever need. 
> They don't know what "lossy compression" means. Bayer mosaic is a 
> foreign concept, as is demosaicing. Many think that each pixel in the 
> resulting image is from four extremely tiny photosites, such that an 8 
> megapixel file was made by a camera with 32 mega-photosites (others 
> think an 8 megapixel camera produces a 2 megapixel image). They make 
> extreme adjustment layers to apply to their digital images which are 
> equal-opportunity ruiners of film scans, then criticize the new medium 
> for their poor results. They think the use of smoothing tools like
Noise 
> Ninja (etc) is entirely optional when shooting at ISO 800. They don't 
> know the difference between a device-specific profile and a color
space. 
> Etc.
> 
> Now, ignorance is the original state of everyone. I'm not trying to 
> brand these people stupid or say that non-willful ignorance is a moral 
> issue. I'm just saying that this is a pretty standard list of 
> misconceptions and mistakes that very experienced film users - many of 
> whom I deeply respect - make when turning to digital cameras. 
> Presumably, these people are really smart, because they are taking a 
> workshop to overcome these misconceptions. But they still have the 
> misconceptions. And when someone who prefers film lets fly with a 
> strange criticism like "cottage cheese," it makes me wonder how much 
> experience they really have with digital, and whether they are really 
> knowledgeable enough to make a reasonable judgment about the medium.
> 
> With words like "cottage cheese" being used to describe your 1Ds
images, 
> it is no wonder to me that you prefer the look of film. The cottage 
> cheese makers in our workshops are the ones who don't know how to 
> expose, and/or who apply adjustments to their images that they would 
> never attempt with film scans, and/or who don't bother with noise 
> reduction in challenging images. That's what is happening when we see 
> cottage cheese - 100% of the time.
> 
> Lest in your fashionable cynicism you accuse me of evil and nefarious 
> profit-making by trading on my expertise, I should mention my workshops 
> are done for no charge to participants and no payment to me, under the 
> auspices of the Eagle River Camera Club. Of course then you can say 
> people get what they pay for, but some people will never be happy.
> 
> --
> Jeff Medkeff
> Eagle River, Alaska