> > I know that that knowledge can help some people > make better photographs, technically ... but so what. What good is a technically > perfect photograph that tells no story, that shares no interest, that fails to > incite or provoke, that gives no rise to thoughts and ideas, or that doesn't > share happiness, joy, pleasure, or any of the many emotions and hundred of > experiences we share.
That's not the point, really. The capture of the image doesn't end when you trip the shutter; that's almost only the start of the process. So, given the latent image on the film (or in the memory), how can one best complete the visualisation? Better photographers than I have invested a great deal of effort to get the best transfer from emusion to paper; I'm just doing the same in the digital world. If all that mattered was the non-technical stuff nobody would bother to choose lenses because of their sharpness, or warmth, or field of view, let alone more controversial factors such as bokeh. > And John, I do have in interest in digital photography ... have been impressed by > the quality that can be gotten from some Epson printers (2200 and 9600 are the > ones I've used). My interest is strong enough that I work with a printer in > Berkeley who has shown me a few things to improve the quality of my "digital > output" and helps me extract the best possible prints made by my little Sony or > scanned slides or negatives. But from my standpoint that's merely a superficial understanding. You look at a JPEG from the *ist-D, and fault it for excessive mosaic artifacts in my beard, say. For you that's practically the end of the matter. For me that's just the beginning of an investigation as to where those artifacts were introduced. If the tools at hand don't help me enough, I'll create my own tools. And if I find that I can lay the blame for these artifacts firmly at the feet of one particular step in the process, I'll see if I can create my own replacement for that step. Conversion from a RAW image buffer to a JPEG (or even TIFF) is not a deterministic operation; there are many decision points along the way. But in order to make the best choice at any particular decision point it *is* necessary to understand just what a Bayer matrix is, what a cosine transform does, and which artifacts can be introduced (or removed) by which numerical operations. And to locate and respect the choices the photographer made before he took that final step I do need to know just where the camera stores that information in the file. > The truth is that on this list, and other lists, there are a great number of > people for whom all this technical stuff is important. It's their job, it's part > of their life, it's something that gets their blood flowing. But as for me, and > for quite a few others out there, all those details get in the way of making a > photograph. I guess it's a left brain right brain kind of thing. I forget what > side of the brain I use when looking through the viewfinder - but then, I don't > care about that either. I just want to see what's on the paper, whether inkjet or > fiber-based silver. And if it ain't right, I don't need to know all the minutia > about what went into the software, or the optical formula of a given enlarging > lens, or any of that. I just need to know if more/less exposure would be better > (oversimplification, I know, but it really ain't much more complicated than that). A gross oversimplification, if you ask me. Should you use a different grade of paper? Given the effect you were looking for, did you make the right choice of developer? (That's one nice thing about digital; if you make the wrong choice it's not an irrevocable step; you can just go back and start over). How about the enlarger? there are different types, which produce different image artifacts. And that's not even beginning to talk about colour correction filters, etc. Not that I'm trying to convert you - I'm just attempting to explain my view. I want to do the best job I can in getting that image from the buffer to paper. If I'm not prepared to do the best that I can there, I'm devaluing the effort I put into making the exposure in the first place.
