p.1 #1 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
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Secondly, I came to realize that I really can’t tell where Salgado made the move from film to digital. He did so after airport X-Ray fogged his negatives.
p.1 #3 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
AFAIK he switched from film to digital while working on (shooting for) Genesis. But the team that put the book together managed to "normalize" the pictures is such a way that one can't tell which is film and which is digital.
p.1 #4 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
I read a bunch of interviews with him in which he talked about the switch, which indeed was after losing something like 70 rolls to x-ray fogging when coming back from a documentary project. He said his assistants managed to find a way to replicate the grain of his beloved Tri-X and then he was okay with digital. He used a lot of zoom lenses, at least in his later years.
It was unclear how he felt about Salt of the Earth; when it came out he made no mention of it on his website for years...was he unhappy with it? Did he and Wenders have a falling out? Or was he just being modest?
p.1 #5 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
Norm Shapiro wrote:
I don’t understand how your question relates to these books. Is one done with film cameras and the other digital?
Also, when you look at the images, they are so amazing that the question of film, or digital is irrelevant. I believe that he worked in 35mm and later transitioned to a Pentax 645. He started shooting mainly primes and later moved mostly to zoom lenses and Canon digital, but again the images are so strong that format and the analog/digital question becomes secondary. Amazing images.. I would love to see them in exhibition.
p.1 #6 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
I discovered Salgado's work in a gallery in LA back in 2021. The same place that had done large prints for Roger Deakins's first book had some of Salgado's work printed large in their gallery and I was floored. I couldn't believe I wasn't familiar with this work already, and the tonality of the prints was extraordinary. Great way to be introduced to an artist's work.
p.1 #8 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
Regarding “Salt of the Earth”
Wow, Salgado was an incredible man, who witnessed, by choice, some of the real evils of this world and to do this, he gave up his life with his family. His wife, must be a very strong woman. I think that he just wore out after documenting so many true genocides. His project, Genesis, seems to have been a work to regain his sense of wonder, rather than his sense of distrust and revulsion.
Well worth watching, but at the same time, it isn’t a documentary to reinforce your sense of the goodness of mankind. It is a bit of a tough watch, but I think that it provides a needed background, setting the stage for his images.
I thought the comparitively uncompressed BluRay vs streaming was the best option. This optical disc is readily available.
p.1 #9 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
bjhurley wrote:
I read a bunch of interviews with him in which he talked about the switch, which indeed was after losing something like 70 rolls to x-ray fogging when coming back from a documentary project. He said his assistants managed to find a way to replicate the grain of his beloved Tri-X and then he was okay with digital.
Do you recall how Tri-X simulation was achieved? Is it mostly about post-processing? I've been wondering about this. Panasonic and Nikon's ZF have in-camera film grain simulation, which might work for this purpose.
p.1 #10 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
Rainbow Chaser wrote:
Do you recall how Tri-X simulation was achieved? Is it mostly about post-processing? I've been wondering about this. Panasonic and Nikon's ZF have in-camera film grain simulation, which might work for this purpose.
In his case it would have all been in post. Most post-processing software offers the option of adding film grain. Most of it isn't realistic as it applies grain uniformly over the image, which is not how grain generally appears in film images; usually it's more obvious in the lighter areas of the image than in the shadows unless you're shooting Ilford XP2, which is the opposite (and I think that applies to grain in colour negative films as well; XP2 is a chromogenic B&W film).
I use Capture One for post-processing and it has a range of grain styles and sizes you can apply: you can choose cubic, tabular, harsh, soft, etc., and you can adjust the granularity and "impact" (how apparent the grain appears in the image). I also have the RNI film emulation plugin, which has emulations for many films (though I don't think they actually look like those films, they just look nice). It has a couple of emulations for Tri-X and I like how they look even if they don't look like my Tri-X shots.
I'd much rather shoot actual film than try to make digital images look exactly like they were shot on film; I don't think Saldago was trying to fool anyone, he was just trying to make his digital images look as appealing to him as his film images did.
The Tri-X look is added with DXO FilmPack. His studio then creates a physical negative from the digital file. The negative is then printed in a darkroom using traditional methods.
p.1 #13 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
If anything Salgado shows is that gear has nothing to do with IQ as he used 35mm and 120mm in his film days and shot Leica, Pentax and Canon over time. But he was extremely focused on the processing and - later - digital processing and used one of the best printers around. Like many pros at the highest levels, he did the shooting and made the decisions, but he didn’t process his files by himself.
p.1 #14 · Salgado: Two Amazing Books/ Any Review of “Workers”?
I saw Salgado's Amazonia exhibit in Barcelona last year and have to say it was the most amazing photography exhibit I've ever seen. Huge backlit B/W prints in an equally huge dark space with background music, an immersive score of sounds of the jungle, by Jean-Michelle Jarre
