apples, Fomapan 100

[thronobulax]

Motor racing with elliptical slanted wheels ... those were the days. ;-)

Fun fact - back in the time before dinosaurs when I was in High School, I shot sports with a Mamiya Universal Press camera whilst my peers were using SLRs of one stripe or another. Although my kit was larger and heavier, the ability to sync flash at 1/500 was a boon for stopping action (not to mention those monster 9x6 cm negs).

I agree with you about the importance of discussing the aesthetic and intention of a photograph. There are many times when less is indeed more. But, as I said above, I prefer to make that decision in the post production process, not at time of image capture. Of late, though, I've been shooting stuff that does not have a particularly long subject brightness range, but instead a long middle-tone range which is an entirely different way of seeing. After over 40 years of being a silver photographer, I am seeing expressive possibilities open up I never considered in the past. This - for me at least - is really exciting. Maybe you CAN teach old dogs new tricks ...

 

[Marley's Ghost]

Fun fact - back in the time before dinosaurs when I was in High School, I shot sports with a Mamiya Universal Press camera whilst my peers were using SLRs of one stripe or another. Although my kit was larger and heavier, the ability to sync flash at 1/500 was a boon for stopping action (not to mention those monster 9x6 cm negs).

I agree with you about the importance of discussing the aesthetic and intention of a photograph. There are many times when less is indeed more. But, as I said above, I prefer to make that decision in the post production process, not at time of image capture. Of late, though, I've been shooting stuff that does not have a particularly long subject brightness range, but instead a long middle-tone range which is an entirely different way of seeing. After over 40 years of being a silver photographer, I am seeing expressive possibilities open up I never considered in the past. This - for me at least - is really exciting. Maybe you CAN teach old dogs new tricks ...

Photography is about growth ... and it's never too late to grow.
I think my background in photography has been very different: while I too am WAY over 40 years a photographer I decided pretty early on that my photography was going to earn me my living, and the end result was a sale or a publication and thus a pay check. So I gave up silver printing (due to time printing = time not shooting) and paid experts to do it; meaning my vision had - to some extent - to be created in camera. For a long time the wide aperture lens and the motor driven 35mm were my tools of necessity. It had to all be about composition and drama as often with a Nikon propped on a theatre seat back under theatre lighting and 1/15 at f1.4 detail and tonal range were the last thing to worry about!
It was natural that when digital arrived I leapt on the commercial work flow possibilities and to be brutally honest I didn't miss silver at all. After quitting active pro work I taught photography and photoshop ... and again ... didn't really miss 'film'.
What made me wake up and smell the coffee was loosing ten years of digital work to a hard drive issue. I dug out my boxes of 35mm and medium format negatives and realised that as a society we are sleepwalking into a digital dark age. That my fabulous Nikon from 2002 that cost over £2000 was now next to worthless ... and that if I wanted to shoot disposable photos, I have my phone like all the rest of the population. So I picked up a film camera again.

I also like faults and flaws in images - probably why some of my favourite photographs and indeed photographers are the most flawed yet the most human.

 

[David M]

May I make two small points on shadow detail?
Firstly, it does no harm to capture the detail and the mechanics are well understood by almost everyone on this forum. It’s easy enough to lose this raw material in printing if the aesthetics of the print require it. If it’s not there, the choice is gone. It’s not really practical in the field to decide exactly where the boundary between Z 1 and Z2 should lie in the final print. Why else do we make test strips?
I find that there’s a kind of cliff-edge of perception where the dramatic, dark, expressive shadows become a flat uninteresting two-dimensional black patch in the print, the converse of burnt-out highlights.
In this context, it might be worth remembering that the RPS rejected Edward Weston’s prints because of a lack of shadow detail. Some of Mr Weston’s dune pictures do indeed have large ares of solid black. Clearly, opinions and fashions can differ.
My second point is about human perception. As we scan a scene (a real-world scene) our eyes continually adjust themselves to the brightness (and colour temperature too, but that’s another, related issue). So, we gaze at a dark part of the scene; our eyes adjust; we see more detail as we gaze. Then we look at a bright part and the same thing happens again. Initially, we are dazzled, but our eyes adjust in the same way.
As we scan a print, an analogous process must take place. I suggest that a little extra detail in both shadows and highlights helps us to see more realistically (for want of a better word). Obviously, this is an aesthetic decision for the printer.
I’ve not seen this matter of optical accommodation in any discussion of detail in the extremes of brightness. This may simply reflect the narrowness of my reading.

 

[Ian Grant]

thronobulax made a comment on the lack of shadow detail in the left hand tree in the image of cannon balls in the moat of Rhodos castle. on looking closely there's detail in the original also in the doorway which is deep in shadow. Whatb is noticeable is that JPEG cmpression compromised the detail, and probably so did re-sizing the original digital version of the image.



The shadow details are sbtle in the print but there, they can easily get lostn on a screen when an image is small.

On the subjectbof re-sizing, the image is around 12 years old (in this form), it would have been resized in the editing software rather than using a Third party plugin/ programme like Ben Vista PhotoZoom Pro which makes a huge difference.

Ian

 

[Marley's Ghost]

May I make two small points on shadow detail?
Firstly, it does no harm to capture the detail and the mechanics are well understood by almost everyone on this forum. It’s easy enough to lose this raw material in printing if the aesthetics of the print require it. If it’s not there, the choice is gone. It’s not really practical in the field to decide exactly where the boundary between Z 1 and Z2 should lie in the final print. Why else do we make test strips?
I find that there’s a kind of cliff-edge of perception where the dramatic, dark, expressive shadows become a flat uninteresting two-dimensional black patch in the print, the converse of burnt-out highlights.
In this context, it might be worth remembering that the RPS rejected Edward Weston’s prints because of a lack of shadow detail. Some of Mr Weston’s dune pictures do indeed have large ares of solid black. Clearly, opinions and fashions can differ.
My second point is about human perception. As we scan a scene (a real-world scene) our eyes continually adjust themselves to the brightness (and colour temperature too, but that’s another, related issue). So, we gaze at a dark part of the scene; our eyes adjust; we see more detail as we gaze. Then we look at a bright part and the same thing happens again. Initially, we are dazzled, but our eyes adjust in the same way.
As we scan a print, an analogous process must take place. I suggest that a little extra detail in both shadows and highlights helps us to see more realistically (for want of a better word). Obviously, this is an aesthetic decision for the printer.
I’ve not seen this matter of optical accommodation in any discussion of detail in the extremes of brightness. This may simply reflect the narrowness of my reading.

Received and understood ... my apologies for rocking the boat.

 

[thronobulax]

thronobulax made a comment on the lack of shadow detail in the left hand tree in the image of cannon balls in the moat of Rhodos castle. on looking closely there's detail in the original also in the doorway which is deep in shadow. Whatb is noticeable is that JPEG cmpression compromised the detail, and probably so did re-sizing the original digital version of the image.

View attachment 2817

The shadow details are sbtle in the print but there, they can easily get lostn on a screen when an image is small.

On the subjectbof re-sizing, the image is around 12 years old (in this form), it would have been resized in the editing software rather than using a Third party plugin/ programme like Ben Vista PhotoZoom Pro which makes a huge difference.

Ian

Yes, this is why I asked whether this was an aesthetic choice or a reproduction artefact. I hope no one read this as a criticism of the work, as it was not so intended.

 

[thronobulax]

Received and understood ... my apologies for rocking the boat.

I didn't read it that way. One of the lovely things about this forum is that it is pretty low conflict and opposing viewpoints are well tolerated. (There WAS a recent attendee who joined claiming they were tired of the endless conflict of other internet photo venues ... and then proceeded to raise the conflict level himself. He has departed our midst as best as I can determine.)

 

[David M]

I’m a bit puzzled. There’s no boat and it wasn’t rocked. No need for any kind of apologies. My own apologies if I’ve seemed to suggest it.