Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/04/06

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Subject: Re: [Leica] re: Resurgence of B&W
From: telyt@compuserve.com
Date: 6 Apr 2000 08:19:42 -0700

On Thu, 06 April 2000, "Michael Darnton" wrote:

> 
> I'm finding this whole topic entertaining, because three months ago I had 
> the sudden realization why I hadn't taken anything but vacation pix since I 
> quit $$$ photography 20 years ago. The problem was the very unsatisfying 
> combination of slr cameras and the darkroom. So I gave away the darkroom, 
> put the slrs in mothballs, bought an M4-2 and a bunch of lenses and have 
> been having a great time--with inkjet printing.
> 
> The precipitating events were two: on the camera side, borrowing my wife's 
> Oly Stylus VF camera; on the darkroom issue, going to a museum exhibition 
> where the best prints on the walls were B&W, from inkjet printers. Smart 
> Blur and Unsharp Mask are fun toys (which I rarely use), but the real tool 
> of photoshop is Curves. The learning curve is steep. I started with color, 
> printing on a Fujix printer, and there's simply NO way to equal those 
> results with color in the darkroom if you understand and properly use 
> curves, and with color, some of the specific color tools. Once I got the 
> color thing straightened out, moving back to B&W I found that my whole 
> approach to printing is different, and for me, at least, the results were 
> several orders of magnitude better than anything I'd ever been able to do in 
> B&W (and I WAS a good B&W printer, long ago). At this point, inkjets lack 
> only sharpness at the level of observation that no one but photogeeks 
> notices (most of the people who look at my pictures will never pull out a 
> loupe to check the structure of the image :-), but I'm sure that's going to 
> happen soon enough.
> 
> Silver's not dead, but silver paper may be.
> 
> --Michael Darnton

Most of what Michael has written here applies for me as well.  I lost my passion for about 10 years when I was using only auto-exposure cameras and a wet darkroom.  The AE camera gave (and continues to give) good results but I lost the degree of control and personal involvement that can make the difference between a good photo and one with passion; the wet color darkroom never had the degree of control nessesary to transfer the passion from the slide (or neg) to a print.  The SL and digital printing are my optimum combination, but IMHO silver paper is not dead.  I've yet to see an inkjet print that can compare favorably to a LightJet print from the same digital image file.

I've yet to do much B&W work in Photoshop but the possibilities are as mind-boggling as for color photos.


Doug Herr
Sacramento
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/telyt
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