Sometimes I feel that digital (from digit, “number”) photography is just that : photography by numbers (just like paint-by-numbers…). It’s not only pixel number but also zoom range, writing speed, resolution, percentage distortion, crop factor, file size, image quality, card capacity, battery power, battery life, and so on… And camera makers sometimes seem to rely only on incresing one number or an other as a sales argument. Now, for all intents and purposes, as far as the end user is concerned, the “quality thershold” of being able to get a 4×6 print that looks good (which, for a minilab print at 150 dpi, means 600×900 pixels, which is pretty good, even a little largish for the web…) has been reached long ago, and 3, 4, 5, 6 or 16 megapixels is both marketing hype and useful only for those very few shots that ever get printed larger than 4×6…
But camera companies need to sell cameras to survive, and they need to keep users upgrading their toys every other year or so. The only way to do that is to keep putting higher and higher numbers on their cameras… If you want to get a digital camera, and keep waiting for the next set of numbers : don’t. Digital photography already offers amazing creative possibilities and it’s all good, as good at least as it’s gonna get until they start producing CCD with larger pixels, which is basically the limiting factor for digital photography now… More on that tomorrow…
Yesterday’s post has gotten me thinking again about digital photography, so I guess I’ll just do the whole week on digital photography, and be done with it… (euh… let’s just say, I’ll be done for a few weeks after that…) Today’s thoughts are about the now omnipresent comparison between digital and film, it’s not a fair comparison because they are basically different media. It’s at the same level in my mind as a debate about whether oil paint or watercolor paint gives the best result. The only answer that makes sense is that they can both give good results, they just give different results… I think it’s about time that film photographers recognize digital as what it is : a new media, and not as a threat to their precious (my prresssiousss….(sorry, Gollum lapse, there, happens sometimes…)) emulsions. There are things that film does better and will always do, there are things that digital does better (yes, i know, shocking !), like in low level light, where digital noise tends to be less overwhelming than film grain (in high-end digital cameras, at least…)
Now, for my own work, i prefer film, for many reasons : you can’t use a view camera with digital except with multi-thousand dollar scanning backs, and I happen to like view cameras. Digital still has trouble with high and low light values, and I like to have a full greyscale. It’s things that apply to my own work, but anyone else’s opinion can be different and digital can be wonderful when the final product is digital. Since more and more photos never get printed, and get sent by e-mail or posted on websites, or “projected” on the DVD player, a digital workflow is good in those cases. The instant feedback of digital is also very valuable, and in the time i’ve spent working with a digital SLR, I’ve learned many things, and my photography is now leaps and bounds further than it was. I’ve also learned that digital is not for me, not for now at least, and since I’m on a path to larger and larger film sizes and contact prints, I doubt that it will ever be, except maybe for snapshots and the web…
One of the arguments towards the use of digital is that it is sooo much easier that traditional film photography. And it is, isn’t it ? You just need the latest digital camera, with the right batteries and the right memory card, you have to set the white balance properly, shoot, look if the image is okay, shoot some more, look again, as nauseam until you think that one of your 300 images is ok, then transfer the whole bunch to your computer, edit, run the image through various hoops in photoshop, and voilà ! You need a printed image ? No problem, get the latest inkjet printer, calibrate the color output of your screen with the color output of your printer (just a hint : one is a light emission device, the other a pigment device, it’s impossible to get the same color…), print with the proper archivable pigments on proper acid free photographic paper… You get the idea, digital is so very much simpler, but I’m a little backward, so I’ll stick to film thank you very much…
Or : An orchid by any other name would be a polaroid transfer… (Well, you get my drift…) This week’s images represents the other technique I’m currently experimenting with. The process is very simple and this time it’s both in theory and practice : a polacolor image is taken (this one is type 59) and peeled apart before the end of the normal development time. The negative is applied to a wet watercolor sheet of paper, and the image transfers to the watercolor paper… (there is a description of the process on the Polaroid Website.) Now, the final results depends on many things : the exact time of peeling apart, the wetness of the paper, the texture of the paper, (and to some extent, I think, the alignment of the stars…), and a good dose of luck. Which means that every image is highly unique, and in fact is the only copy of the image, since at the end of the whole thing you are left with no usable negative to make a second image. This is why many practitioners of image transfers use original transparencies and duplicate them on Polacolor film. This allows for making more than one copy of each image, even though each copy will be slightly different in tone and details. It’s not to everyone’s liking, but I happen to like it ! ^_^
Editing for the web is not an easy task for a start. It seems that there are so many images on the web that you are bound to feel that if you want to be taken seriously as an image maker, you have to produce a large body of work, galleries with hundreds of images, but I don’t think that it’s wise. Remember uncle Robert’s slide show from his last trip to France where he took 22 rolls of film and felt inclined to show every last frame ? “just three carousels, we should be able to go through it tonight…”
Point is, editing for the web is the same as editing for any other media. You need to keep a critical balance between the number of images shown and their quality. If you have hundreds of images to chose from, and show only the 20, or 10 best, then people will perceive a higher level of quality than if you shoe the whole lot, with the same 10 or 20 very good images lost in a sea of not-so-good ones…
The strategy I’ve taken for the Mamut Photo galleries is to show eight images from each photographer’s work. It allows for enough images to present a general view of the artist’s work, and yet not enough to be satiated, and then you click on to look at the photographer’s website if you’re interested… It’s a different strategy than for my personnal website where I present around 60 images, and which will continue to grow. Here the idea is to give an overview of all my work, and to show groups of images, like my “squares” gallery.
In the process of creating the Mamut Photo’s online galleries I’ve stumbled across an experience that I hadn’t done before : editing other people’s work. It’s radically different from editing your own work, and somehow much easier, because there is no emotional stigmata associated with the images. You know when and where your own images were taken, and how you felt at the time, what happened on that day, etc, This means that your own images carry your emotional content in addition to their own, and changes the way you see them, whereas other people’s images carry only their own emotional content. In short, that’s why most photographers don’t like to do their own editing and gladly let other people do it for them !
Among the many influences I’ve had to build my conception of photography, i think that none has had more impact than the LensWork magazine. It’s one of the only photo magazine I know that is only about the images, and not about what camera-lens-film-developper-paper combination led to the image. (On a side note, the editor of Lenswork, Brooks Jensen, has an audio blog which seem to touch my photographer’s soul everytime…) And when I came across it, and read the book “On being a Photographer” by David Hurn and Bill Jay, which is offered on the lenswork website, it came as an epiphany that could sound simple, but which didn’t come to me easily : the important thing is the image, everything around it, the camera you use, the film, the lens, all of those things are important only up to the point that they influence the image… Thus ended my “nikon vs canon” days and “rodinal vs microphen” days, and I started concentrating on my images, and I think that they got significantly better for it…
One of the things I’ve found in my time as a photographer, is that if i don’t “exercise” for a while, I get rusty, not only in my camera manipulations (I can’t tell you how many rolls of film I’ve ruined just because of something stupid I did because i was rusty…) but also in my imagination, vision, my “photographer’s eye” if you will. That’s why I’ve taken the habit of looking at everything as if I had a camera in my hands, to look for imaging opportunities 24/7, just to stay open-minded… Of course that is not enough, and I have to keep on shooting if I want to see any improvement in my images… My daily advice : keep on shooting !
Or : A rose by any other name would be an oil print… Ok, I feel like I’m already cheating on my new year’s resolution by putting up an old image as first for my picture-a-week. So I’m giving you this oilprint to make up for it. Oilprints are very very simple, in theory. They are based on the simple capacity of bichromate to harden gelatin when exposed to light. So basically to give a sheet of watercolor paper a coat of gelatin, soak it in bichromate, and put a negative on it. You leave it out in the sun for a while, and you rince the bichromate out of the unhardened gelatin. What you get is a matrix of free-gelatin and bichromate-hardened gelatin that won’t take up water at the same rate. So by soaking the paper in water, the un-hardened gelatin takes up water and swells. The next step sound simple : you take an oil based-pigment, and you apply it to the wet print. The hardened areas take the pigment, the water-soaked areas don’t. Simple isn’t it ?
The image you see here is my 6th attempt at this same image, the first two ended up in the rubbish, no questions asked, I then had to change paper, and I’ll have to change pigment for my next attempt. I’m still far from what can be achieved with the process, I’ll try to post my next attempts with the same image so you can see how far this process goes… To see more oilprints, and other bichromate techniques, take a look here at Philippe Berger’s website. He’s a Belgian photographer who creates guidebooks for different alternative processes, with one distinctive characteristic : he includes a finished print with the printed guide so a newbie can have a starting “aiming” point. Good, now I feel better about my first PAW week…
The Picture-a-Week concept (well, as far as I know) seem to originate from Kyle Cassidy, a photographer who had his hands on an expensive machine, namely a Leica rangefinder camera and joined the LUG (leica user group). Facing camera-fondlers (people who have cameras and just enjoy saying how great they are and not take any images…), an number of photographer of the LUG decided to take a picture every week so they could put their Leica to good use (and prove that Leicas are the bestest cameras in the whole universe (that part was added by me…)). On the first week that they were supposed to do it, Kyle was the only one standing with an image, and kept going every week, for now four whole years. Many other leicaists have started doing their own picture-a-week project, and that’s a good thing (read it in a Martha Stewartesque way…). Now, LF is not like a Leica, i agree, but many arguments going around in LF forums seem along the lines of “LF is the bestest way to get the bestest image quality”, so I decided to go out and make pictures, every week, and post the results here (plus it gives me an extra incentive to take my LF equipment around…). If you’d like to start a LF PAW for yourself, don’t forget to tell me so I can link to you…
As I was designing the new Mamut Photo website, i kept looking through m images to find a suitable front page photograph, and I kept coming back to the Nails that were on the front page of the ULF webpage. And I think that it’s because it has some symbolic importance to me as it is my first “successful” LF photograph. I had exposed and developped sheets of film before that one, but it is the first one that made me say “wow, that’s it, that’s why I’m into LF photography…”. It’s a rather simple image, it won’t win any prizes, but it allowed me to stay focused on LF work because I knew that I was able to create a successful image. So, here it is, for my first picture-a-week, an old image from last year, but an important milestone in my photographic process (plus I still have to get my hands on a scanner in the next few days so I can show you my more recent work…).
