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

russianRF said:
I would just like to point out how shocked and amazed I am at the extreme political correctness demanded by the analogue/"wet" zealots in this forum. My original post was not meant to disparage analogue processes; indeed I *praised* it. I also implied that if one wishes to learn how to make great digital pictures, from a digital camera especially, then one must devote time and learning to the digital darkroom process with the same fervor, reverence, and general open-mindedness that one approaches analogue photography with.

But apparently, even implying that there are any advantages, or possible reasons to enjoy -- if not prefer -- digital photography is unacceptable to the zealot luddites in this forum.

I was told last year, in APUG, that I really should learn the wet darkroom process, that I was missing out by staying "digital only." I didn't throw my hands up in the air and start a film vs. digital debate. No, I went and took a class. After that experience, I can honestly say that I prefer a good fiber-based darkroom print to most all digital print outs.

However, that class also focused on digital photography, and for our final projects some of the students decided to go the digital route. They had high-end dedicated film scanners, used special archival ink on expensive calibrated Epson printers, and likewise used special archival ink jet paper to produce the prints. And indeed, we had to be TOLD which projects were made digitally to know the difference between those carefully crafted digital works and the traditional prints.

Another thing I learned from the class was, despite the romance of the analogue process, I simply can't stand making contact sheets. For my personal workflow, at least, I much prefer scanning my film, reviewing it side-by-side in Photoshop, sending web-sized copies to my friends, getting their feedback, etc. Only when I am finished with the -- to my mind easier -- digital "contact sheet" process am I able to confidently select which frames make the cut for a wet darkroom printing.

I certainly hope that when I am as old as some of the zealots on this forum (and indeed most all of them seem to be older), I will not be as inflexible, as blind to new ways and new technologies. I hope I will still be able to both embrace the new and celebrate the old at the same time.
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your finishing line encapsulates it perfectly... because it's a "noble craft" or whatever doesn't not exclude one from being close minded. it's a shame really as each and every medium has some very distinct advantages.
 
FallisPhoto said:
There is the fact that with film, you have hundreds of films to choose from, while with digital stuff you're stuck with one sensor.
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And I think this alone would be a great reason for a digital shooter to spend time working wioth film also. Working with different films opens up your eyes to new ways of rendering colour and tonality that can helpdevelop your vision in digital work as well as being a delight in themsleves.

Being 'stuck with one sensor' is a bit of a misleading statement as, although there may well be differences in spectral response, one of the keys in raw conversion is to be able to render the demosaiced sensor output into a known colur space. This colour rendering is variable and so can be modified to give lots of 'films' or looks as you prefer (the principle in part behind DXo's film pack).

So really it's the processing of the raw file that determines the final look.

I've not really used plugins as they largely seem to be expensive, quick black box approaches to achieving what I can do any way, and I like to understand what's happening - as I used to in the wet darkroom years ago. There again I work slowly and don't make many pictures really - either film or digital.

I should declare that I use both film and digital cameras, but process digitally.

Mike
 
Al Kaplan said:
I get sick of the "digital can make ten prints EXACTLY the same as one another". Digital prints posters. Posters all look alike. Fine Art prints, whether hand done serigraphs, lithographs, or one of the intaglio methods? The hand inking of the plate for each impression, how much ink, how much was wiped off, the amount of pressure applied to the paper on the plate, all these things make it impossible to make even two prints exactly the same. You make a bunch of prints. You pick the ones that meet your standards and sign them. You destroy those that don't. That's why a print made by the photographer using traditional methods will be priced a lot higher in a gallery than an ink jet. Is that really such a difficult concept to understand?

I have a modest collection of artwork hanging in my house. Oil and watercolor paintings, pen & ink drawings, charcoal drawings, photographs, etc. Some have become quite valuable over the years as the various artists' fame have grown. Others I still like but they're not very valuable. Had they all been computer generated prints none of them would be of much value compared to an original piece in some conventional medium.

I don't make the rules, the gallery owners don't make the rules, and you don't make the rules either. The collectors ready to write a check? They make the rules.
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Al, I have a lot of sympathy for this view, and have considered doing similar work digitally - having a basic file and then doing the dodging and burning anew for each print. If a gallery had an interest in this I would be happy to do it. On the other hand, presumably the variations in each print, whilst being a hallmark of something handmade, are also departures from the perfect print aimed for?

In all this, I should also say that if I make a print now and then am asked to make another in 6 months it's actually quite likely that I'll open the file and decide to rework some or all of it to make it fit my developed vision as it is then. Things aren't static.

Mike
 
FallisPhoto said:
I didn't intend to use the word "Photoshopped" in a negative sense. I do fine art, not documentary photography and, personally, I think the more creativity that comes into art photography the better. That said, I do most of my really off-the-wall stuff in the darkroom. It is just that there was no such thing as photoshop when I was learning how to do it and now that I have learned, what's the point of learning a whole new system just to do stuff I can do without it? Anyway, I'm coming from an art background and the word photoshopped has no negative connotations to me. To me, if you use photoshop, all your photos post-processed there are photoshopped.
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how much is skill and how much is kodachrome saturation?
the art of photography comes from man and machine almost composing a single entity.
the famous Feininger pic of a man w/a leica as his eyes is a powerfull metaphor for what phtography is about..
 
Al Kaplan said:
I get sick of the "digital can make ten prints EXACTLY the same as one another". Digital prints posters. Posters all look alike. Fine Art prints, whether hand done serigraphs, lithographs, or one of the intaglio methods? The hand inking of the plate for each impression, how much ink, how much was wiped off, the amount of pressure applied to the paper on the plate, all these things make it impossible to make even two prints exactly the same. You make a bunch of prints. You pick the ones that meet your standards and sign them. You destroy those that don't. That's why a print made by the photographer using traditional methods will be priced a lot higher in a gallery than an ink jet. Is that really such a difficult concept to understand?

I have a modest collection of artwork hanging in my house. Oil and watercolor paintings, pen & ink drawings, charcoal drawings, photographs, etc. Some have become quite valuable over the years as the various artists' fame have grown. Others I still like but they're not very valuable. Had they all been computer generated prints none of them would be of much value compared to an original piece in some conventional medium.

I don't make the rules, the gallery owners don't make the rules, and you don't make the rules either. The collectors ready to write a check? They make the rules.
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That's not entirely true. Heavyweight expensive art can be as industrial and serialized as a digital print. see how Warhol or Jeff Koons work: most of the time they didn't even touch their product.
art is a conceptual, mental thing. the idea counts than artisanship.
 
sojournerphoto said:
Being 'stuck with one sensor' is a bit of a misleading statement as, although there may well be differences in spectral response, one of the keys in raw conversion is to be able to render the demosaiced sensor output into a known colur space. This colour rendering is variable and so can be modified to give lots of 'films' or looks as you prefer (the principle in part behind DXo's film pack).

So really it's the processing of the raw file that determines the final look.
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That's kind of true, but with film you have hundreds of different starting points and hundreds of different ways to go from there. There are not only hundreds of different films, but hundreds of different developing agents, all of which have different effects, and yet more hundreds of ways to go from there. http://www.digitaltruth.com/devchart.html With digital photography you are always starting from the same few points. I think that's why digital photography has almost completely overwhelmed the world of commercial, journalistic and documentary photography, but film is still hanging on very firmly in the fine art world.
 
colker said:
art is a conceptual, mental thing. the idea counts (for more) than artisanship.
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So these are as valuable as the original then?

different-versions-of-the-mona-lisa.jpg
 
Equipment is the least important factor, IMHO, in taking a quality photo. I've seen inspired and wonderful images taken with a Brownie Hawkeye. Besides, I also believe that within a format and with any reasonable camera (within that format) the camera has never 'made' a picture. Sorry, it's what I believe.
 
It seems there's nothing like having an opinion

It seems there's nothing like having an opinion

to set off the alarm bells for the truly devoted....

iridium7777 said:
there's an ass for every seat, or in this case, a wall for every picture.

wolfe wouldn't be here if people weren't interested in what he produces, he wouldn't have a show and wouldn't publish books that won't sell. so if we're talking about the test of time being the span of his career, i think it has been withstood.

equally, i am sure that someone looking at wolfe's pictures would look a the one you praised and say "wtf is wrong with this?". i don't like blanket generalizations like this, but i hope you see my point here. as a landscape/wildlife photographer, or whatever his actual label is, he markets and appeals to a completely different persona, never mind the dslr/rf argument.

from the discussion, though, it seems that being proficient in any type of post processing is mandatory to achieve good photographs, but it also doesn't hurt to have some of the best equipement to get you to that pre-ps step.
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I know, Thorstein Veblen coined the term at the beginning of the last century 'conspicuous consumption' and that is what we are talking about. There is nothing wrong with it, egos have to be helped along (we have 500 of them in Washington, DC that have to be helped along), but I still have never seen a photograph (that was really moving and worth paying for) that was equipment sensitive. As for your students have them go on the Polaroid color and B&W sites on Flickr (no big money, or new equipment there) and tell them to come up with something that matches that.
 
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I already have well over 100,000 B&W 35mm negatives, complete with contact sheets numbered to match the negative sleeves, and ??? color transparencies on file. Then there are the 120 negatives, the 4x5 negatives, all with contact sheets. I know conventional B&W printing inside out and backwards. I'm 66 years old. At this stage of the game which would make best use of my time? Making conventional silver gelatin prints or investing the time to learn digital post processing inside out and backwards. What would be the most sensible thing to do with my money? Upgrade my computer equipment and buy a top end printer or just continue to use my Omega B-22XL and Kodak Precision enlargers? At least to me the answer is obvious. Probably to a lot of others as well, including many younger photographers who, right now, are listening to Cream, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, etc. on analog vinyl. But of course they're all crazy because CD's are so much cheaper...

And then there are the professional film makers who are still shooting film, or have returned to shooting film, running it through their cameras at 18 inches per second because they prefer the look. Kodak must be nuts. They just came out with several new motion picture films. Fuji too, I'm told. American nuts and Japanese nuts.

Why did Kodak waste all those millions of dollars inventing tabular grain films? Why did Ilford invest so much money on their line of Delta films. British nuts?

I guess it was just to stimulate the economy in anticipation of Obama being elected president. After all, we all know that digital is the future. And the future is here!
 
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The lens he was using are the best that Canon has, and while a cheap lens and really good lens can have the same resolution, the better lens usually have much higher contrast, which helps the picture quality.
Some of this will be shortly overcome with software correction of the MTF to regain some of the last contrast, but that will only get the poor lens to approach a really good lens.
Perhaps his lenses are helping a bit with the overall result.
If not, then is the whole L-glass thing a load of marketing?

Equipment can help - but in the end the photographer has the most input on the picture quality, much is the same way that ABS won't tell you to put the brakes on, only help you if you have put them on a bit too much - and usually a bit too late.
 
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we get it al, you like film. real rock died with cream and the machines are going to rise up against us all one day.
 
The machines will have risen again when you try to find a new servo-motor for the autofocus ten years from now. They arose when Leitz went through three different cam systems on Leicaflex/Leica R optics. The gremlins were at work when Leitz chose 39mm filter thread, but Canon opted for 40mm, and Nikon chose 40.5 for LTM lenses. With SLR lenses Canon liked 55mm and Nikon 52. All three settled on 48mm for some of their LTM lenses but the various brands of SLR lenses I had required 49. Don't forget the not-quite 39mm thread on Leica CL lenses, or the unique flash synch socket on the M cameras until the M4 came along with a variation of the PC socket.

In the movie industry film and processing cost is such a miniscule pecentage of overall production cost compared to talent, studio rental, location expenses, equipment rental, etc. that the general consensus in the industry is that film still has some life left in it.
 
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#74, there are some photographers that would not like to have a high contrast lens in their stable. It really depends on your style. And if your style isn't super sharp high contrast stark images, you go for something that compliments your vision. As this:

2699267033_e7e9df630a.jpg


#75, Al feels like I do. Not about rock or film. Just when you have gotten good at something you continue to try all your life to improve on it. He like me just doesn't have a rapport with digital. Many people do and will continue to, but some of us don't. This is a flipped Brownie Hawkeye lens image which I made by mounting it on my Pentax 67. I tried to duplicate with a RAW image (from a DSLR) and software. I couldn't do it.

3047041280_1c79d4dcb3.jpg
 
Generally, the "hybrid" people, the people who appreciate both digital and film, are not the ones who turn threads into digital vs. film debates. Generally, we hesitate to make sweeping statements like declaring film dead.

This thread is about DSLRs. It was posted in the "Evil SLR" forum. A poster came in here asking about the workflow of *digital* images. Because I and a couple other people failed to genuflect at the alter of film enough, this became a film vs. digital thread. What was originally a question about the nature and extent of post-processing in *digital* photography devolved into philosophical treatises on the "mystique" of film; all of this in spite of the fact that no one was attacking film to begin with! Us 'hybrid' people were just pointing out that the digital process requires as much skill and careful attention to get good results as, well, the film process.

That was it.

No one was demanding that film users switch to digital. No one was posting Kodak's stock prices to proclaim the end of film as we know it.

I do think that I can speak for most hybrid people when I say that I'm flabbergasted at how film zealots insinuate themselves into these threads. Sure, you get a digital gadfly like BMattock sometimes (though sometimes he makes really good points).

How many times do I have to point out that I shoot lots of B&W film? How many times must we agree that darkroom 'wet' techniques have advantages? When will we be allowed to discuss the occasional advantage of a digital workflow? When will we be allowed to have a discussion about a digital workflow in a DSLR thread in the RangeFinderForum ghetto ("Evil SLRs")?

I'm tired of trying to "refute" these pro-film arguements, in part because I partially agree with them. I'm tired of being made to feel as though I've choosen a side. I'm tired of rising to the bate whenever a film zealot craps all over a digital-focused thread. Okay, to an extent that's my own fault.

The original question: how much is DSLR and how much is post processing? Well, much like WET PROCESS, it's a combination of skills in both. ALWAYS. If you hate Photoshop, you can send your RAW files off to a Photoshop pro, much like you can send negatives to a printer. If you want true mastery of your craft, though, you must learn the full range of it, from camera to enlarger in the film world, or from camera to .jpg in the digital one. If you enjoy working with scanned negatives, the workflow is different, though no less rigorous. And still, you can send your negatives off to be scanned, Photoshopped, etc.

I guess what I'm asking is for the film-only people to sit on their hands and be quiet, when a digital thread comes along. The hybrid people don't crap up every discussion of film emulsions with "DIGITAL FOREVAR!!!" posts, so please return the favor.
 
russianRF, you are right; this thread drifted. My answer is the DSLR RAW file (for me) is much less than a negative (properly developed to your specific needs), therefore, if you want to put some of your own into the image you have to use an editing program. I don't think you want to hear my digital workflow so I won't bore you with it.
 
Al Kaplan said:
I'm still trying to figure out what SLR's have to do with a rangefinder forum.
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Then stay out of the "Evil SLR" forum. If you don't agree with it on principal, then don't contribute to it by participating in it. If the forum owners scrap this whole forum within the larger website, I certainly won't complain. Until then, they see fit to leave it here. If you don't like it, you're certainly free to start your own rangefinder forum website.

Why do you even post here at all? I mean, there are DIGITAL (*gasp!*) rangefinders in existence, so the world is already fallen in your eyes, right? Why don't you just spend all of your time at APUG? It seems you'd be genuinely happier there.

No one is going to take away your film. No jack-booted thugs are visiting your house in the middle of the night, forcing you at gunpoint to switch to digital.

You know what, I'm actually glad for your contributions to analogue discussions. I shoot lots of film, and can appreciate someone with lots of experience. But please, stay out of the clearly digital-focused threads. You obviously have nothing to contribute to them but grumpy contrarian views.
 
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