Art photogs. returning to film

[alan davus]

At the Mercedes College ball last night here in Adelaide, I was chatting with an occasional acquaintance on our table whose hobby so it turns out, is buying and selling Australian art. He made an interesting comment that the pro photographers he knows who photogragh paintings, almost to a man, have given up digital and returned to film. In Dougie's words, the resolution is much better in their opinion. Mmmmmm! N.B. This is not being posted to feed the Great debate that I personally find so tiresome. I just thought it was an interesting comment from someone who claims to nothing about cameras or photography.

 

[Ronald M]

Sure if they compare 4x5 film to a "35mm" digi cam no matter how good it is. Most paintings are photographed with large format.

I disagree if we compare similar format cameras.

 

[Socke]

Linhof sells a setup especialy for reproduction, it uses a scanback.

 

[BrianPhotog]

Linhof sells a setup especialy for reproduction, it uses a scanback.

scanback resolution still can't match 4x5, tho. and then there's the cost.

 

[einolu]

yeah, those medium format backs are expensive, but they do resolve as well as large format, from stuff i have seen on the web...

 

[Socke]

Cost is relative. I've seen a photographer reproducing paintings at a local exhibition for posters and a catalogue. They needed files for printing, so they could skip some step in the production workflow with a scanback. They saved on polaroids, too.
As I understood it, the scanback paid for itself.

 

[aad]

Film often loses when compared on a monitor. When one compares a monitor view of a digital file vs. direct view of a transparency the tables are turned.

 

[jlw]

One important consideration that always gets left out of this kind of anecdotal discussion is how the images are are reproduced.

(And we have to assume that the paintings are being photographed for the purpose of reproduction -- nobody's going to send out a stack of original 4 x 5 transparencies for potential buyers to riffle through.)

If photographs of artwork are being used for printed reproduction... well, a printed page forms a color image via patterns of "rosettes" (you can see why they're called this if you look at them with a magnifier.) In good-quality commercial printing, these rosettes will be spaced at about 133 to the inch; very, very expensive high-end printing might get you up to 200 per inch.

You can see that these screenings are relatively coarse compared to the resolution of the input medium, whether that medium is a digitally-captured image, a digitally-scanned analog image, or an analog-screened analog image.

In other words, it's going to need a pretty darn large printed reproduction before the image becomes large enough to see the extra detail in the 4x5 transparency -- especially when you consider that the transparency will go through an extra step of "generational loss" compared to a straight digital capture (subject > image > film > scanner vs. subject > image > imager.)


But then, that's how this kind of discussion gets out of touch with reality: important details aren't included in the initial setup, and yet we get involved arguing about it anyway. All that we really know here is that we've met someone who says he met a man who knows a man who told him that lots of people are saying X. Is there really any point in arguing about X?


There's an amusing parable about this in Peter Bernstein's excellent book Against the Gods: The Amazing Story of Risk. It goes like this: Think about the capital city of Kentucky. Do you say Lou-EE-ville... Lou-IS-ville... or Lou-UH-ville? People may have strong opinions about this, and can get into debates that may become very spirited or even heated... heated enough to obscure the fact that the capital of Kentucky is Frankfort...