how much of it is the dslr and how much is in the ps skill?

[peter_n]

much like some of the great "film" images we have seen over the ages. the camera's weren't just spitting out these masterpieces. it took a lot of time in a darkroom or a very well developed relationship with a printer combined with good, dependable gear, a good eye for composition, a firm understanding of good exposure... you get the point.

Exactly. When you see the negative that created HCB's famous shot of the man jumping over the puddle behind the railway station, you realize how much HCB owed his printer, who I think was Pierre Gassmann.

 

[sojournerphoto]

This is a 1Ds3 at iso800 equivalent - At 10 by 8 there is nothing more than a slight texture. In colour it still prints very nicely at that size.

Mike

 

[jwhitley]

As someone who came to photography only well into the digital age, this is a prime reason that I've found the film classes taught at PCNW to be fantastic for me. In short, I now deeply understand that it's misleading to expect a fine art image to spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus^H^H^H^H^H^H er.. the DSLR of Canon (or Nikon, or whomever).

This is still true for digital cameras. Others have explained some of the reasons, but suffice it to say that there's considerable technical and creative skill to be learned in each of three areas:

1. The initial capture: Seeing the light, composition, timing, exposure, and such.
2. "Printing" (even if just for the web): Understanding the properties of the source media (film, digital), understanding the limitations of the end media (paper, screen), basic-to-advanced techniques for adjusting the image (dodging, burning, contrast control, color correction, color enhancement, cropping, etc.)
3. Learning to join the above areas, and grasp the possibilities of a finished print when presented only with the original scene. This is called "previsualization" in some arenas.

All of this applies to "traditional" media (film and photo paper) as well as digital media. Naturally, the time and energy one puts into a work varies depending on the need and vision. Art Wolfe is a professional fine art nature photographer, so you can expect that he's spent plenty of time refining his skills and vision in all of the above areas and more. Other professional photography disciplines will vary in how much time and energy they desire and can afford to put into each image.

Here's a relevant quote from Pascal Dangin (from this article) that I found quite insightful:

Dangin’s latest invention is a proprietary software package called Photoshoot. (He employs six full-time programmers at Box.) Its aim is to imbue digital photography with a specific sensibility—an opinion about the way pictures should look—of the sort that film once offered. “I am doing this because of necessity, because I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”

 

[peterm1]

"As someone who came to photography only well into the digital age, this is a prime reason that I've found the film classes taught at PCNW to be fantastic for me. In short, I now deeply understand that it's misleading to expect a fine art image to spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus^H^H^H^H^H^H er.. the DSLR of Canon (or Nikon, or whomever)."

Absolutely true. Spot on!

Its odd that in the past I have had people say to me that digital post processing is somehow "not proper". I have been forced to put this down mainly to ignorance, as such people often don't understand that its just the digital equivalent of what happens in the photo lab / darkroom / printing shop.

What's changed is availability. Anyone who can afford a PC or laptop and a copy of Photoshop or equivlent plus the time and inclination to learn to use them properly can now have a fully blown digital darkroom that adds immeasurably to the qualtiy of their results.

As you say or as the article you advert to suugests. Good photography is not just about capturing a technically perfect image. Its about capturing an emotion - or creating one. Thats where the REAL art of post processing mostly comes in.

 

[dfoo]

Exactly. When you see the negative that created HCB's famous shot of the man jumping over the puddle behind the railway station, you realize how much HCB owed his printer, who I think was Pierre Gassmann.

Where did you see the negative?

 

[Jason808]

What's changed is availability. Anyone who can afford a PC or laptop and a copy of Photoshop or equivlent plus the time and inclination to learn to use them properly can now have a fully blown digital darkroom that adds immeasurably to the qualtiy of their results.

Exactly. And you can't un-ring the bell

 

[aad]

Those are beautiful pictures, for sure, but the single most important element, the only one unique, is where the photographer was, and when. Oh, yeah, and knowing where to point the camera!

The rest is techno stuff, you can learn that.

 

[sojournerphoto]

Those are beautiful pictures, for sure, but the single most important element, the only one unique, is where the photographer was, and when. Oh, yeah, and knowing where to point the camera!

The rest is techno stuff, you can learn that.

Yep, and you can learn it wet or dry

Mike

 

[peterm1]

Those are beautiful pictures, for sure, but the single most important element, the only one unique, is where the photographer was, and when. Oh, yeah, and knowing where to point the camera!

The rest is techno stuff, you can learn that.

I am sorry but I do not wholly agree or to be precise agree only in part. There is a "techno" component in the same sense that there is a techno component to using a camera (especially an old fully manual rangefinder with no light meter, perhaps.) But the REAL skill in post-processing is artistic - every bit as much as this is a key skill in composing and picking the moment to take the photo.

There is a technical component to it - sharpening, denoising etc are essential "technical" "mechanical" or foundation things you need to do to pretty well every image and like the foundations of a building are never seen and seldom thought about if done correctly.

The artistic stuff is where the real choices are made - color or monochrome; if monochrome then black and white or sepia or perhaps some other combination of tones; how dark or light should the image be; how saturated or desaturated should the colors be; which bits do I emphasise or highlight by dodging or burning; should I crop the photo to emphasise some element of it and exclude others. These are exmples of the choices made in post processing and all are essentially artistic not technical choices and are determined by what emotions the image maker wishes to convey int he final product.

Sorry but I think that anyone who thinks of post processing as being just technical does not fully comprehend how much this stage adds to the final product.

 

[sojournerphoto]

I am sorry but I do not wholly agree or to be precise agree only in part. There is a "techno" component in the same sense that there is a techno component to using a camera (especially an old fully manual rangefinder with no light meter, perhaps.) But the REAL skill in post-processing is artistic - every bit as much as this is a key skill in composing and picking the moment to take the photo.

There is a technical component to it - sharpening, denoising etc are essential "technical" "mechanical" or foundation things you need to do to pretty well every image and like the foundations of a building are never seen and seldom thought about if done correctly.

The artistic stuff is where the real choices are made - color or monochrome; if monochrome then black and white or sepia or perhaps some other combination of tones; how dark or light should the image be; how saturated or desaturated should the colors be; which bits do I emphasise or highlight by dodging or burning; should I crop the photo to emphasise some element of it and exclude others. These are exmples of the choices made in post processing and all are essentially artistic not technical choices and are determined by what emotions the image maker wishes to convey int he final product.

Sorry but I think that anyone who thinks of post processing as being just technical does not fully comprehend how much this stage adds to the final product.

I agree completely that the post processing choices that are made are entirely artistic, but learning the process(es) to achieve your intent is technical. There needs to be an understanding of what will achieve what before you can execute your vision for an image. Of course, sometimes the vision will change as you try diferent approaches and you may even make more than one final print from the same negative or raw file. Even such basic elements as sharpening are artistic choices. The choice to shoot (35mm) film with it's very different resolution characteristics and noise compared to digital is also an artistice choice.

Mike

 

[aad]

Yes, what he said. I don't dismiss the post processing at all, but the techniques to achieve a look are teachable and repeatable.

 

[peter_n]

In NYC...

In NYC...

Where did you see the negative?

At the Scrapbook exhibit in the ICP in April, 2007. In the exhibition catalog, you can see what got made and the original as a positive in pictures 20a and 20 on pages 86 and 87 respectively. I was not particularly impressed with the exhibit, and I'm an HCB fan. Josef Koudelka was aghast at the pictures that were shown and vowed that he would never allow such a thing to happen to his legacy. I have to say that I came away from the thing with the feeling that Pierre Gassmann was a genius. It wasn't just the cropping, it was the way Gassmann rescued other attributes of the negative, which apart from the fantastic capture of the leaping man, was really quite poor.

Below is a pic of the neg.

 

[mh2000]

just like you can train an ape to point a camera in standard ways as well... it's all technical, but how you do it and how you manage the subtleties is where the art comes in... both in shooting and processing.

How many people take their film to Walgreens, get enlargements and hang 'em in a gallery? Most people at least work with the pro lab... just like many pro digi-geeks hire people to do their post processing... I think artists using either medium tend do most of the work themselves....

Also, I've owned L-lenses, nice and all, but nothing magical... well, maybe if you are coming from crap zooms it will be a night and day difference...

Yes, what he said. I don't dismiss the post processing at all, but the techniques to achieve a look are teachable and repeatable.

 

[FallisPhoto]

Ah, but aren't there great film photographers who chose not to work in the darkroom? And thus their finished prints could be seen as a collaboration with their printer?

Well, you just stole my fire with the last sentence. Yes it could be seen as a collaboration.

 

[FallisPhoto]

Because there are things you can do in the digital darkroom that are much easier than doing traditionally; indeed there are things you can do digitally that you can't do traditionally at all. Photoshop is a photographic tool, and like all photographic tools you get out of it what you put into it.

You started this thread asking how such gorgeous images could come from a DSLR, and how much Photoshop was involved. If someone started a thread asking how a gorgeous analogue/wet print was made, and then everyone told that person that a lot of darkroom work went into the print, how would you feel if that person's response was "well, I learned everything on Photoshop, so why bother learning the wet darkroom process?"

If you are satisfied with your wet darkroom results, then by all means continue as you have been; there is a lot to be said for wet darkroom magic. But if you want to open up an entirely new horizon in your photography (including your scanned negatives), then you need to learn Photoshop.

Actually, I believe you have that backward. There is almost nothing you can do in photoshop that you can't do in a traditional darkroom (pretty much all of the photoshop stuff is based on tried and true darkroom techniques), but there are many things that you can do in a traditional darkroom that you can't do digitally. The only advantages I can think of, off hand, that digital post processing has is that it is a little easier and it has an undo button.

 

[iridium7777]

so the discussion is going much more towards post processing than equipment and the consensus seems that a lot of what makes those images stand out like that, besides being at the right time and at the right place with a good eye, is that they looked nothing like it coming out in a raw file.

so, assume for a second, that the last two pictures (i'm picking them because they don't seem like they require super zooms like the first one), the guy was using his 24-70mm and i stood right next to him, with my d50 with my kit lens, copied all his settings and we both shot next to eachother off our tripods. then i give him the raw file that came out of the d50, would he make the final pictures look the same?

what i'm getting it here is that you always see equipment wars. in dslr, you always see nikon vs. canon, in rf, there's plenty of leica vs. zeiss vs whatever.

some of the classical photographers that we so admire had at their disposal tools that can considered fairly primitive today, yet their images are still here with us today, still with high regard.

in todays world where you have all this equipment, how much of the image can actually be attributed to it?

 

[sojournerphoto]

in todays world where you have all this equipment, how much of the image can actually be attributed to it?

There's not really much, if any, visible difference between the output of high end dslrs after skilled processing. They all prvide a suitable starting point for working on. Certainly less difference than skilful post processing makes (or poor for that matter). Less than the difference between Portra NC and VC.

A 21Mp image looks better than a 12Mp image in mid to large prints, but the 12Mp image may have a high iso advantage in smaller prints. But it's all pretty moot for most work (except where you need the higher resolution for print size).

Photorapher's skills do matter.

Mike

 

[BillBingham2]

This sort of photography is a combination of deep knowledge of location, lighting, culture, people, your equipment, weather and a bit of luck. Having help, but it in the darkroom or on a computer helps the photographer focus elsewhere.

B2 (;->

 

[peterm1]

Here is an example of what I have been talking about (regarding the value of post processing to ordinary bums like me.) This is no great work of art but believe me it is much much different to the basic boring and ordinary color photo that it started out as. I have converted to black and white, carefully recovered some of the highlights while allowing others to blow a little for effect, dodged and burned to my hearts content to bring out some shadow details and suppress others and added a touch of grain, flare and even a little sepia tone to provide a little photographic interest. Like I say, no great work of art but at least its now something I can present and call MY workwith some satisfaction. OK, I took the photo because I was able to ssee something that made me think the image had potential. I also chose the framing and the moment. The camera captured the image competently. But the final image was only realised after a few hours of work in front of a PC and not a little trial and error before arriving at the final product that had something of what I envisaged when I first pressed the shutter buitton.

But there are still things I could do to further improve it and probably will. Now that the shadow detail has been pulled out a bit, I can see the need to correct the perspective on the right hand side. Again this is a snap to achieve in post production.

 

[aad]

Interesting! I like it.

When I did a wedding 2 weeks ago, I spent a lot of time removing "EXIT" signs and candle flames from scenes where they seemed to grow out of the subject's head, plus some dodging and burning in oddly lit scenes. This looks more creative!