gdanmitchell
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 Re: which lens has the most 3D POP? | |
ruthenium wrote:
gdanmitchell wrote:
I’m totally in the camp that regards photography done with digital tools and processes to be just as valid as photography done with optical/chemical tools and processes.
There is one difference however, though it probably doesn’t make a difference to most in this forum. A darkroom print is a singular object, and each one is subtly unique. That generally* isn’t the case with digital prints from digital files. (If we reevaluate and further adjust our image for each print we might claim something similar with digital images, but that’s not too common.)
At the same time, there’s also another similarity. The “process” that good photographers apply to with digital images is no less substantial that than applied by film practitioners. Yes, you can just crank out something in five minutes, but that’s not how the best photographers do it, no matter what media they work with. They typically pre-visualize just like film photographers, anticipating at the time of exposure what processes they intend to apply in post. They often work in the best images over very long periods of time. Frequently they make test prints and live with them for a few days before reevaluating and continuing to refine the images.
The fact that it is possible to forego that kind of thoughtful and careful work (as it was to a lesser extent with film, too) does not mean that today’s best photography is done that way.
That’s one (among several) reasons that “darkroom prints” by great photographers still command the highest sale prices.
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Oh, and we’re no closer to resolving the “which lens has the most pop” question, are we? If there was convincing photographic evidence of some lens being the “best” at this, we would have seen it by now. And another 80 pages of this will not produce that either. If only we could let that one go, but I’m not optimistic.
Dan, regarding "A darkroom print is a singular object, and each one is subtly unique. That generally* isn’t the case with digital prints from digital files" - let's not overlook the fact that there is (theoretically) an infinite multitude of color profiles that give the starting point for digital processing from raw. The product, corrected image, is greatly influenced by the choice of a color profile, to begin with. I confidently expect a photo expertly processed by a highly skilled photographer in DxO Photolab to look different from the same processed in Lightroom or in Capture One, or in some other application.
My points are that (a) the available processing tools are not equivalent, and also that (b) there is no "standard" processing routine - every professional processing from raw is uniquely personal.
Post a raw file and ask 10 good photographers to return their jpegs, and I expect you should receive 10+ distinctly unique interpretations of the image. In other words, the products of digital photography can be, and should be considered to be as "subtly unique" as the prints. Even the appearance of a digital image on my display is not going to be the same as this image would look on your display (if we don't have equivalent displays, calibrated with the same calibration device).
I may have been unclear — since that wasn’t necessarily my main point in the post — so let me clarify.
When the photographer (or his/her printer in the case of some folks like HCB) makes a print from film, they virtually always engage in some darkroom post-processing. Let’s use dodging and burning as an example. (Perhaps some have seen the extensive mark-ups on test images that record how to do this in specific photos.) Because all of this is done manually by doing things like waving shadow-creating tools (and/or hands!) over the paper under the enlarger, it is impossible to do it the same way twice in a row, and there are inevitable differences between two copies of the same print. And that’s not the only source — it is virtually impossible to get every print out of and into the next bath with perfectly identical timing, etc.
(This is different than the evolution of the photographer’s interpretation of the print over time. There are some remarkable examples of how that changes over the decades, but I digress…)
Consequently, at the high end of the print market, it isn’t enough to own, say, _any_ print of “Moonrise, Hernandez…,” but people actually value specific iterations of the print more than others. And if you were to look at them side by side, you’d see the differences, too.
That is not to say that when we run 20 copies of a print on or inkjet printers that there are literally no differences among them. However, I’m positive that if I took them out in a particular order, shuffled them, and then asked someone to put them back in order based on the differences that it would be impossible unless there was a printer failure or similar. I know that I couldn’t tell by looking at a series of m own prints and I know them better than anyone. (In fact, I’d say that these differences are even smaller than the theoretical differences between the results from using the “best pop” lens and using the second-best pop lens…. ;-)
Make sense?
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