Digital BW, The Print

Mark,

I think that is the key. The commercial guys are shooting digital, 
John Q. Public is buying P&S digital cameras, the artists are sure to 
follow.

I am not sure about the "sterility" of digital capture. I think that 
we can still use softar lenses, creative lighting and vaseline, and 
all the tricks we used before. The difference is in the workflow.

Last Monday I stayed in a old historic hotel in St. Petersburg while 
visiting the Stetson law School with my son. I had not used my Nikon 
D1x for anything serious since I bought it in December as I have been 
very busy. Well, I thought it might be a great time to try it out.

We awoke on Monday morning to a lovely warm sunrise. The east light 
was streaming into the room through the venetian blinds. The antique 
dresser, mirror, and lilly lamp were all receiving a soft warm light. 
I thought "now this is a keeper". I tripod mounted the Nikon and 
nailed a few expsoures.

I got home and forgot about the images. Yesterday, I downloaded them 
to my PC, opened the RAW files in Photoshop and utilizing channel 
mixer converted to monochrome. I save the image as a grayscale tiff. 
I them printed the 17mb file onto a 16x20 sheet of William Turner 
with MIS FS inks and the ImagePrint 4 RIP. I was agast, the print was 
lovely. Soft, creamy, smooth tones. Excellent sharpness, detail and 
presence.

I must tell you that I feel awful not using this wonderful camera 
before. People have told me about the D30 images, the D1x images, the 
Fuji S1 images but I never believed that they could be so good. This 
evening I had a Board meeting at the Photographic Centre. They had 
just hung a new exhibit of images from Turkey. They were matted and 
framed 11"x14" Epson 2000P prints on Epson Archival matte. They were 
stunning.

I believe that creativity will evolve with digital capture just as it 
has with film. I too look forward to the next 363 days.

Mike
--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "marktuckerdotcom" 
<mark@m...> wrote:
> Like Andy says, let's all set our watches now for 363 days, for the 
> next AIPAD show, and see what happens in that short a time. We 
> all might be surprised what we see on the wall next year. (Just 
> as long as it's not a damn six-foot-high nasty color print of a 
> fishing lure....)
> 
> -MTucker