> > And folks, let's not fool ourselves. The treasured photographs of the > human race are of kids playing soccer and not Weston's moonlight vistas.
Quite. And in that arena, there's a case to be made that the prevalence of digital cameras could actually help fight off the spread of mediocrity. As those of us who have worked in the photo-finishing trade point out, the average consumer film print is price-driven; it goes through a cheap automated printing machine (usually with very agressive cropping to take care of possible positioning errors) that is set up and operated by some employee being paid as little as the store can get away with. It has always been possible, with sufficient dedication, to do it yourself; there were home colour film processors even before the days of accurate- to-less-than-a-degree temperature-controlled waterbaths. But suddenly, with the spread of digital cameras, this level of control is available to just about anyone with a home computer. And most of the cheap-and-cheerful print manipulation packages offer far more control than even a well-operated auto-printer (which has little more than white balance). Even if all that is done is red-eye removal and a bit of cropping that's an improvement over the prints from the one-hour lab. But there's a lot more than that being done - or at least I'd assume so, given the competition in the low-cost image manipulation software field. People who wouldn't pay an extra 5c for a better print will happily sit in front of their computer for an hour or two, tweaking the image. Does an ink-jet print from a consumer digital camera compare with the best chemical print from a large-format negative? Of course not. But by now the quality level compares very favourably with anything that comes out of a typical home darkroom. And while that's settling for "good enough" - that's what we all do, all the time. If we didn't then no-one would use 35mm roll film, or print on regular photo paper.
