Digital BW, The Print

Hello Tyler,

>...these kinds of comparisions, with real prints not numbers, 
>have to be done by those interested in nailing down a personal 
>materials preference.

Thank you, well said.  It's so easy to get caught up in the numbers
and think that's all that counts.  There's a whole 'nother world of
perception out there that often defies explanation, especially when it
comes to art.  

Take, for example, the recent work of Sally Mann, who is one of
today's most acclaimed photographic artists

"Mann has won numerous awards, including Guggenheim and National
Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her photographs are in the
permanent collections of many museums, including The Museum of Modern
Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the
Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C."

Her current Deep South photos are bringing wide acclaim, yet they are
the very antithesis of everything we attribute to AA and the western
landscape school:  often underexposed, out of focus, extreme
vignetting, corner softness, light leak streaks, or any combination of
these.  Yet, they convey a powerful emotional intensity.  Here's a
quote of her answering a question about her equipment:

"Well, you know I told you that none of my equipment has ever been any
good, I certainly could go out and buy a good, tack-sharp lens that
would take the perfect picture that's in focus from end to end. But
instead, I spend an awful lot of time at that antique mall looking
around for these lenses with just the right amount of decrepitude. The
glue has to be peeling off of the lens elements, it's great if its
mildewed and out of whack—a lens is made up of several different
pieces of glass which are supposed to stay glued in the right
relationship with each other—but my most prized lens has one of the
pieces of glass askew, so when the light comes in it it's refulgent.
It just bounces all around and does this great sort of luminescent
thing on the glass. You can tell a good ruined lens right from the
get-go....they are the ones you find in the trash cans of old photo
studios, in some ghost town in Iowa. I mean, that's the kind of lens
I'm looking for."

Some incredibly beautiful landscapes are grainy, soft focus and low
dmax (often platinum).  There is more to this than numbers.

Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm