----- Original Message ----- From: Albano Garcia Subject: Re: Color is So Much Easier
<snippped > I mean, just because you don't give a damn for your color photography, it > doesn't mean it's less serious. It's just as serious and complicated as you > want it to be. The same goes for black and white. Tread gently Albano, for the truth is, colour is a heck of a lot easier than black and white. In essence, there are 3 film families in photography. They are colour negative, colour slide, and black and white. Each of the colour families has 1 process, which are fully standardized, and allow for minimal tweaking. I am ignoring Kodachrome as being statistically insignificant in this discourse. There are certainly a lot of choices in colour film, but there has to be, as this is the only control of film characteristics, because the processes are essentially fixed. This is a severe handicap to colour photography. Now, move to black and white for a moment. Film choice is a bit restricted, compared to colour. I suppose there are less than half the number of black and white films available as compared to colour. However, black and white offers much more process control, with infinite process variation. While the C-41 process alows for very slight process control, black and white offeres a huge number of different developers, each of which have diffeent characteristics based on time, temperature, dilution and agitation. C-41 is pretty much the McDonald's of photographic processing. It doesn't matter where you go in the world, it is pretty much the same, presuming the lab is running a consistent quality control program. E-6 is pretty much the same. There is also a much greater selection of black and white papers available to the photographer. So, for colour, you need to think about which film best suits the subject, and which of a few different papers to use. After that, it is just the mechanics of exposure, which is usually not that terribly daunting of a task. In black and white, there is choosing the film for the subject, just like colour. However, the film also needs to be chosen based on the anticipated processing, and paper it will be printed on. Next, is choosing the correct exposure, which is intertwined with the subject, the anticipated processing, and the paper that the film is expected to be printed on. That is, if the photographer cares to fully explore the medium. William Robb - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
