Digital BW, The Print

J Brubaker wrote:

>I've been reading this thread with interest. I don't understand how
>over-saturating colors, adding noise, combining parts of more than one
>image, etc. are any different than cross-processing film, developing for
>grain, solarizing, bleaching, intensifying, etc.  These are all accepted
>darkroom practices.  Combining image elements by double exposing or
>double printing are standard procedure.  Why should Photoshop work be
>treated differently?  The image you end up with should be judged on its
>visual appeal, not by how you got there.  A bad Photoshop image is just
>bad, as is a bad darkroom print.  
>

Actually it's worse...

I'd liken it, for those Rock and Roll fans, to really horrendous 
overproduced pseudo Pink Floyd or badly copied Emerson, Lake and Palmer. 
 The layering of technique and tools simply ends up muddying the waters 
instead of clearly illustrating an emotion or idea. 

In Rock there are "purists" who see people like Buddy Holly and Eric 
Clapton (and later,  punk) as the "true" practitioners of the form, 
 while others see Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes, etc. with their 
interwoven techniques from other genre as higher forms of musical evolution.

Getting back to photography.. Is a Franks, Capa, or Strand BETTER than 
say a Man Ray, Eugene Smith, or even a Hockney? For me, it isn't a 
question of better but whether the sum total of the tools and vision 
convey the emotion and vision..  All too often PhotoShop is used to 
simply obscure the essential weakness of an image instead of making a 
strong vision truly exceptional...

For those of  us who choose to create art: tools, be it PhotoShop or 
paintbrushes,  are not THE question, but,  properly seen, are only an 
answer to solving problems we face as artists in trying to convey an 
emotion or idea.  For at its heart that is what we do as artists, we 
attempt to convey an idea or emotion to others..



Keith
 
 



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