Grouchy

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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No question - digital has changed photography, but has it made it better? Somehow that strikes me as an overly broad question that often produces a frenzy of emotion laden conflict between normally friendly photographers. Let’s ask a more restricted version of the question. Can digital produce better prints than film? In the all wet darkroom you have contrast and brightness controls along with burning, dodging and, in the case of black-and-white, bleaching. If you shoot film, but scan it and print digitally, you add a variety of additional controls along with some “special effects” that are difficult to execute in the wet darkroom. If you start with digital, the raw file can provide more extreme adjustment opportunities along with adjustment opportunities that don’t exist if you start with film. And a 35mm film camera at any given ISO may not produce the same level of fine detail as a modern, top of the line digital with a full frame sensor.

Like most news photographers, I moved to digital. I can shoot at high ISO’s at many frames per second and still capture a broad tonal range. And I have many more tools to control the image that will be printed on my inkjet printer than I had in my wet darkroom days. But only rarely are the prints better than the ones that came out of my wet darkroom. I can make more prints more easily, and that’s nice. But that’s the change I see between film and digital. Where I see an improvement in printing with digital is the flexibility of interpretation of a digital raw file more than an increase in print quality. What I see most often is an increase in quantity, not quality. I guess it goes back to that first question - “has digital made photography better.” I think it has the potential for that. But for now, it has just made it easier to make more of it.

How’s that for a grouchy old person even if he is a big fan of digital? Your thoughts?
 
For me, digital is about convenience, Shoot, come home and have an 11 x 14 print on the wall in a half an hour or less. I've done very little wet printing and that was eons ago so I really can't speak to quality difference as I was even then a terrible photographer.
 
"What I see most often is an increase in quantity, not quality."

I think it always has been the case that there is a lot of **** photography out there but there is no doubt that digital photography and social media has democratized even more than previously, the production of "*****" photography. Let's face it, most people with a camera are not really capable of using it for anything more than selfies and cat photos (I am guilty of the second but not the first).
I guess my point is that the technology is not the limiting factor in producing good images, it is the technical and artistic skill of the human operator. (Even the technical skill is not much of a limiting factor these days given the "smarts" built in to cameras).
Which kind of reminds me of the old joke that the difference between robots and humans is that robots can only be made by highly skilled persons (or highly skilled robots). People can be made by idiots. And perhaps too often are.

Now, how's THAT for being grouchy? :)
 
It seems rare (or impossible?) to find a inkjet black and white print that rivals the luxurious tones of a good silver print.
However, in color, film/wet has either less of an advantage or no advantage whatsoever over digitally recorded images.
Complicating factor: For the self-funding practitioner with limited $$, good color via film/wet was not practicable. Digi-cam plus inkjet fixed that.
On the camera end, the old saw about not enlarging the negative/original past the point where it "falls apart" holds as true with digital as it did with film.
 
Bill Pierce said:
... digital has changed photography, but has it made it better?
Click to expand...

Digital has made my photography better.
Because of availability and convenience.
Over the years I have got shots a wouldn´t have had with film for a lot of different reasons regarding the above terms.


And I can still "produce Kodachrome" if I want ;)
 
Digital for me is easy. I raise my phone and shoot away. When I want a photo that matters my chosen media is Mono Film. That is "MY" choice, as in I choose that medium for my artistic vision. I try harder with film as it is a finite roll and very often I shoot something good just in finishing the last few frames. I did so the other day and got some.great shots of my spousal unit in window light. I had 4 frames to use and nailed it on all 4. When did someone last take a few shots to fill an SD card ?
 
On the whole, photography has not improved due to digital. But my personal photography has definitely improved.

I was not a great darkroom printer but I was adequate. Today my prints are excellent. But that's no distinction because anyone and everyone can make excellent inkjet prints.

And digital cameras and smartphone cameras are capable of such good quality with such convenience more people are subjecting us to their slide shows than ever before. By that I refer to film shooting history of the visit to the neighbor's home after their trip to the Grand Canyon so they can show us several hundred chromes projected on a wrinkled bedsheet that makes that lovely place look like an underexposed hole in the pavement. We get more good photos but they are stuck in with a massive amount of bad photos.

I'm kinda grouchy too.
 
Digital allows anyone to make more images, faster. That's pretty much it. What makes a good photograph, or a "better" photograph, has little to do with how fast or how many images one can produce.

So good photographers will make good images with digital or film. And so-so photographers will make lots more so-so images with digital, at a faster rate, than they could have with film, but lots more at a faster rate isn't going to make them "better".

Best,
-Tim
 
Digital has made photography more accessible. Everyone has a camera in their phone. Ordering prints online is easy. Inkjet printing at home is accessible to more people than darkroom printing was. Perhpas this allows more talented individuals to find their passion? I don't know, but can imagine that increased accessibility can be considered an improvement.

Did the image itself improve? Only if you equate technical image quality with aesthetic image quality. Yet again, high technical quality imaging has become more accessible.

Another effect digital has had is to blur the lines between photography and illustration by allowing image manipulation with relative ease. I don't know if this is an improvement, or even when and if I'd consider it photography, but it allows more creative freedom.

-N.
 
I still like to see a Silver print, if you ever go to Carmel, CA find a gallery that has an Ansel Adams print which were probably printed by John Sexton so look for his photographs too. They are both stunning and depressing as you realize that you would never get one like that.

Yesterday, my friends were making fun of a photo one of them took of another of our friends. This other friend has a large nose so by using a cell phone it made his nose look very large and as it was taken at a pasta dinner in a Italian social club there was very mixed lighting and the other friend had a very red face. So optical distortion and incorrect color balance got a big laugh. That could have happened with film too, but doesn't happen often now.

My favorite use of my digital FF camera is with flash: shoot one, check, adjust then shoot a good one. Just like Mr. Pierce says RAW gives you lots of adjustment potential.

https://www.google.com/search?q=joh...UuSzABHapJDD8Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1280&bih=881
 
The tools have gotten better and have expanded the photographer's range of options: Shooting in near darkness in color, for example. But while my camera is a 4th-gen model, my own creativity is still somewhere around Version 1.5, and updates to the latter are gradual and incremental.
 
There is no one definition of "better". There are as many definitions as there are photographers who think seriously about their work and their medium. I'm speaking here in the context of personal, rather than commercial work, of course.
I gave digital a very serious effort for over three years, acquiring very good equipment and immersing myself in the technical aspects of the digital approach, and shot no film during that time. I found digital to be an incredibly powerful medium that allowed me to get shots I could not have made with film equipment, and allowed me a sureness in my shooting (via live view) that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced with film. That was the positive. The negative was that I detested the shoddy feel and complexity of the equipment, the time in front of the computer, the bizarre and inescapable sense that my images didn't really "exist" anywhere, that there was no physical object that represented my efforts.
This last was the overwhelming reason I gave up digital and returned to film. I am more than willing to accept (in fact, I embrace) the uncertainties of the shooting process. I realize that I can't, for example, hand-hold my camera in near darkness and shoot at high shutter speeds and small apertures. I enjoy the wait until my film is processed and I get my first glimpse of my many failures and few successes. And I love the simple, straightforward elegance of my old rangefinder Nikons, my Leicas, and my Hasselblads.
So "better" for me is about something beyond resolution, tonal range, print appearance, etc. It's about the total physical experience of making an image. All these aspects of the process and product are important, of course, and for different photographer, they will have different weight in deciding which process to use, and when. For me, at this point in my photographic journey, the film process and product is "better". My reasons may seem irrational, but I'm used to appearing a bit crazy to most people. So be it; my work is done for myself first, others second.
 
It is time to grow up and get over it. :) Here is no "better", but different.

I like film for grain, deep tones range. I like digital for clean look with more details.

Darkroom prints are cool and crafty, but they are such a waste of time. money and water to get. But with good darkroom print lack of the content is well compensated by the print itself. :) . Everyone with darkroom is eligible to be called as an "artist" these days. :) .
 
I wonder about the commentary about "Kaka" photography proliferating due to digital is somewhat misplaced in that we never saw the millions of film prints delivered by the local drug stores everywhere.
 
I have mixed feelings about this--like Bill I use digital exclusively for my commercial work since using film just doesn't make economic sense and it does allow better results under difficult lighting conditions that film just can't match. But for B&W I still prefer wet darkroom prints. I still recall an exhibit I saw at Eastman House 11 years ago that was put together by Graham Nash of photography from the 1960's. While all of the prints were as good as could be expected from the film shot at the time, the prints that had a sense of depth to them turned out to be darkroom prints, not inkjet. I've had the same experience a few more times since then, so I don't think this was a fluke. I realize that this is a pretty subjective thing and others might prefer inkjet.
 
Let's face it, the "Kaka" is the overwhelming majority of what gets produced, whether photography, other visual arts, music, literature, etc. Mediocrity has always been the norm, now, in classical Greece, the High Renaissance, whatever. Eventually most of the dross gets abandoned and discarded, if we're lucky, and we wind up with the best of human efforts. Anne Geddes will not be remembered in 200 years, or, at least, I sincerely hope so.
 
Bill Pierce said:
Your thoughts?
Click to expand...

Given the technical expertise and equipment required to produce high-quality color prints from film, I think it's more most digital prints are more likely to be superior.

Black and white prints are another story. The digital print doesn't have to be better. It only has to be as good as an analog print. A digital print's MTF50 is determined by the all the steps that affect MTF50 These include lens optics, motion blur, focus, sensor properties, sensor aliasing, analog data signal-to-nose ratio, JPEG or raw, post-production rendering algorithms, post-production rendering parameters, printer assembly language algorithms, printer paper properties and several others I left out. The printing step probably limits the MTF50 most often.


As far a quality vs quantity goes, I suggest the ratio is similar for film and digital because the human beings have the greatest impact on aesthetic quality. The problem is the increase in quantity makes it more difficult to curate the quality. There are exceptions to this of course. Still the problem is real. Think about the days when FLICKR was popular. It was impossible to know you found the highest quality work for a given photographic genre or style simply because there was so much total work to review.
 
Back in August of last year you were ‘mostly grouchy’ about aperture priority, shutter priority and program. Now it seems that you’re ‘grouchy’ about, I think, digital in general even though you’re a big fan of it. Am I understanding you correctly?

Just trying to keep track of which stage of ‘grouchy’ you’re in :)
 
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