Hi, >> I don't think there *is* a technical advantage any more. You have to >> come to GFM next year and see some of Tom VanVeen's black & white >> prints from digital. They convinced me.
> I don't doubt they are great looking prints (and I'd love to see then in > person) but I think it really does depend a lot on the subject matter. I still > believe that B&W film has the advantage in capture latitude (for a single shot) > and that certain desirable film characteristics are difficult to emulate > digitally. I agree with you here, and I think we have to learn to treat them as different media. I have been to some wonderful exhibitions of digitally-printed black and white, but there are differences between them and 'real' black & white, just as there are between different types of black & white print, and different types of colour print. I think the quality of digital printing now is so good that it is a mistake to talk of better and worse in comparison to traditional prints, they are just different. A couple of years ago I had a chance to see a digital and a traditional print of a Salgado picture side-by-side. Although there was clearly a difference, I could not have said that one was better than the other. At about the same time, I took part in a small exhibition and showed some digital prints from Scala originals. While we were hanging the exhibition one of the other photographers - a real old-fashioned traditionalist - took a long look at one of my prints and said "Look at that quality. They'll never be able to get that in digital". He looked distinctly crestfallen when I broke the bad news <g>. -- Cheers, Bob
