A "perfectly good negative" is just the 'biomass' from which a fine print can be produced. How you choose to produce that print is up to you. There's no such thing as "producing a print directly" from the negative. Whether you prefer to live in a world of noxious, smelly, chemistry and use a second camera to turn it into a print vs working in a hard edged world of silicon dioxide based machines and render it in numbers and ink, you are duplicating the data encapsulated on that bit of plastic/gelatin/silver halide onto paper and putting it through a variety of transformations. How well you achieve that is a measure of your skill.
I chose to invest in learning digital scanning and processing when I still operated a traditional B&W darkroom process. I found I obtained better results, even with the new process in its infancy, and it was much more practical for me than the darkroom, so I stopped doing darkroom work. I have no animosity towards darkroom work.
Godfrey
On May 15, 2005, at 9:35 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
This has nothing to do with a film v digital debate. My comment was in
response to Bob's and pointed out something I find rather odd which deals,
not with digital, but with film. Lighten up, Godfrey ... ;-)) Doesn't it
seem odd to you that someone would take a perfectly good negative and
reduce its quality by running it through a scanner and photo editing
software when a perfectly fine print could be made directly from the
original negative? Or are you so enmeshed in the digital workflow that the
concept of working directly with a negative is little more than a vague
memory?
Sure, there are any number of reasons why someone may want to convert a neg
to a digital file in order to make a print (damaged neg, need for digital
file for professional reasons, making major adjustments that can't or which
would be very difficult to do otherwise), but there are those that just do
such a conversion of perfectly good negs as a matter of course, and for the
life of me I cannot figure out why that may be in some circumstances.
Shel
[Original Message] From: Godfrey DiGiorgi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <pentax-discuss@pdml.net> Date: 5/15/2005 9:15:42 AM Subject: Re: Leica digital back no longer vapourware
Is there some reason that you are trying to draw out yet another idiotic "film versus digital" debate?
Godfrey
On May 15, 2005, at 8:59 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
A couple of days ago a friend and I were talking about the rather
convoluted workflow some of us go through at times. We buy good
quality
cameras, the highest quality lenses we can afford, test and retest film
looking for that which gives the finest grain and highest resolution
and
detail, and then scan the film using, at best, mediocre scanners
(sometimes
at rather low resolution), run the mess through photo editing software
to
correct and enhance lost color and sharpness, destroying even more of
the
original negative, and then print the mess on an inkjet printer
(sometimes
purchased with low price paramount to highest quality) or send it to a
lab
somewhere that'll make a print cheaply - sometimes even via FTP or
email -
where the techs have no idea what the final result is supposed to look
like, and, bada-bing, we have the modern photograph. What's wrong with
this picture? <LOL>
Shel
[Original Message] From: Bob Blakely
Ain't film wonderful! the grain is entirely random! No anti-aliasingfilterrequired! FYI, anti-aliasing filters are not like the ubiquitous UVfilter.By their nature, they must add minor, shall we say, distortions toperformAnseltheir function.
Regards, Bob... ------------------------------------------------ "A picture is worth a thousand words, but it uses up three thousand times the memory."
From: "Rob Studdert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On 14 May 2005 at 8:21, Bob W wrote:
AA filter? Does that prevent Leica photographers taking photos likeAdams?
If not, what actually is an AA filter?
Anti-Aliasing
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/a/an/anti- aliasing.htm
