> And digital is perfect? > Actually, in the real world, what rules is the media that the artist > feels most comfortable working with. This may be digital, it may equally > be oil paint or macrame. > > William Robb
What 'digital' has done is put the entire range of the photographic process (capture through final image processing) within reach of the ordinary person. It's opened up the world of artistry to many more people who otherwise were/would have been constrained to mostly 'capture-time photography'. Many, if not most people interested in photography did not have the funds, space, or time to devote to a wet darkroom. The digital darkroom is easily obtainable and justifiable, taking up far less space and costing less money, and it doesn't have the continued consumable expense, aside from paper if/when printing. OK, occasional hardware/software upgrades. Before DSLR's, when I bought Photoshop 3.0 and a film scanner in the mid-90's, a whole new side of photography began to emerge. I wasn't just limited to the locked-in post-capture image on the slide or negative. The combination of digital capture and post-processing has improved my output considerably and I've gone from the belief that my 1st generation slide image was the ultimate, to believing that the ultimate image is achieved through post-capture fine-tuning and adjustment prior to displaying in whatever form. That, in retrospect, while a long journey, has been liberating. (I am woman hear me roar). I don't particularly like sitting in front of a computer adjusting images either (as opposed to being out seeing and capturing images). The learning curve with complex software tools can seem overwhelming at times, but I can imagine I far prefer it to standing in a darkroom for hours on end, messing with smelly chemicals, and suffering the aggravation of irrecoverably destroying a good potential image or having to redo processes over and over because I didn't get it quite right (all the while my eyeballs drying up and scaling over for lack of light). It's akin to the advantages of using a word processing program and spell checker as opposed to a typewriter ribbon, paper, and correcting fluid. I didn't know you like macrame... Tom C. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
