[Leica] Daved and confused

[douglas.sharp at gmx.de (Douglas Sharp)]

Dave,

it's even worse, all our pictures are now simply made of numbers :-)

Visualisation IS still important - we now just have a lot more leeway 
for making mistakes - and, fortunately, the opportunity to correct them 
with another shot within seconds of having viewed them on the back of 
the camera.

What we now have is more or less an equivalent of a Polaroid back on a 
film camera.

Admittedly, when comparing shooting Digital SLR and MF on 120 film, I 
notice that I've got very sloppy about checking settings DOF and a whole 
load of other things I used to always try and get right every time.

Digital does make things too easy in many respects, but at least it 
doesn't waste costly film and processing cost/time when you get it wrong.

If you look at it another way, RAW files are just "Exposed Film", what 
comes next is an, albeit different, technique of developing that already 
includes dodging and burning, exposure corrections and all the other 
bits and bobs we did to get a decent negative, slide or print.

On film everything ran smoothly in the lab as long as the exposure was 
right and negatives were neither too thin or dense - the same applies in 
digital  when you get the parameters right first time you have very 
little post-processing to do.

Two really great things about digital: you can't get grubby fingerprints 
or smears on RAW files and you can always go back and start again if you 
get the processing wrong.


The tools have remained the same in essence, they're just now in a 
different toolbox.

Keep up the visualisation - it also pays off in digital photography.

Cheers
Douglas



David Rodgers wrote:
> Perhaps this is too deep a subject for a shallow mind such as mine, but
> when I first learned photography I was taught that visualization -- the
> process of imagining the final print before snapping the shutter -- was
> essential to good photography. It was difficult, but made a little
> easier because your scope of visualization was more narrow. For
> instance, you were pretty much locked into the type of film you were
> using. 
>
> Certainly you could cross over from BW to color using Marshall Oils or
> the opposite direction using Panalure, but how common was it to do so? I
> think I used Marshall Oils one time and I still have leftovers from my
> first and only box of Panalure. 
>
> Now we can switch back and forth -- and I do it often, from color to BW
> and back, at least -- with a mouse click. Since nearly all digital
> begins in color (I'm not diciplined enough to shoot in monochrome mode)
> it's almost like I'm admitting defeat when I determine that an image
> can't make it as a color image so I try and dress it up a little in BW. 
>
> Thus when I shoot digital I feel like I'm a color photographer who uses
> BW -- aka zero saturation -- as a crutch to make bad photos that have
> some compositional merit but are colorly challenged, into mediocre
> photos; sometimes even really good BW photos, if I'm lucky. I can even
> hide unwanted artifacts....even noise.
>
> Has happenstance replaced visualization? Is this even something worth
> discussing? WWAS? (What would Ansel say?) Was visualization merely a
> fancy metaphore for "you're stuck with what's in your camera, so make
> the most of it".
>
> There was a day when I'd have given my eye teeth to have someone come up
> to me and offer a magic film that could be either color or BW at the
> snap of my finger. After all, visualization was a tough thing for me to
> grasp. Sadly, now that I'm an old dog I can't ungrasp it. I'm conflicted
> and confused. What's that old saying? Careful what you wish for..... 
>
> DaveR 
>
>
>
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