Digital BW, The Print

I know, me too 20 years ago. Frederick Sommer had this technique where
he cut out a density relief map in acetate sheets and contacted that
to his 8x10 contact printing frame in layers of opacity. And, remember
highlight masking with Cibachrome? Talking about the dark ages, and it
seems like yesterday...

There were some guys here in town who were doing still life work
combining multiple shot files out of a Foveon digital camera about 4
or 5 years ago. They went through a process that registerd the files,
then assigned layer groups to each one to carve out masks of important
data and really extended the subtlety of the range. Now Adobe is
letting us do it the easy way. This is going to get very interesting
and go way beyond film very soon in terms of dynamic range capability,
at least if you are a still life, landscape, or architectural shooter.
But I wouldn't put it past Canon to find a way to do instant multiple
exposures for outdoor people shots too. 

John

 

--------------
 I did
similar excercises in a wet darkroom many years ago involving lots of
multiple
prints and
lots of hand cutting of custom masks and dodging and burning tools. 
It was very
tedious
and really only illuminating the first few times you did it, then it
became
drudgey.   HDRs
ability to soft proof the image before going to the first sheet of
paper, I
think, opens up a
whole new world.