Before and After, or, Destroying the Magic
A few of you have asked why it takes so much longer for me to get through the black and white shots than the color shots. Since I've also wanted to have an example online to show what I do to a negative in the darkroom (wet or digital), I figured I'd post a before-and-after of a typical image.
The original scan (top) is a little washed out -- none of the blacks are maximum black -- and it's a little gray overall.
In the finished (or nearly finished) one, I've increased the contrast in certain areas, darkened others, and I've brought the boy's face up a bit to focus the viewer's attention on him a little more. Overall the edited one has more of the luminous quality that I'm looking for in a good photo.
Rambling commentary:
There's constant (and largely boring) debate in the photographic community now that comes down to "how much manipulation is too much?" The thesis some traditional photographers is that you can "just take a photo into photoshop" and (here's where it gets sloppy) either it's way too easy to make a great photo, or it's way too easy to make a vivisected horror.
On the first point (and despite the fact that this has been hashed out again and again) I'd say that it takes just as much craft to make a great image digitally as it does traditionally -- but it's different skills. It's certainly much easier for me to adjust very detailed areas. For example, if I wanted to brighten up the whites of someone's eyes in the digital darkroom, I can just zoom in until their eyes fill my screen and I have plenty of control over fine details. In the wet darkroom, I could use a dilute potassium ferricyanide solution and a 0000 brush, but I'd be working 1:1 with no "undo"... so I'd probably just skip it.
On the other hand, there are a pile of things I don't have to think about in the traditional darkroom, like image resolution, bit depth, and contrast curves, which may alienate traditional photographers but is inarguably another set of skills that require a high level of craft to apply usefully.
This is why I've long argued that neither digital nor traditional photography are better than the other -- they're just different brushes, or different tools. No, a print from my Piezography inkjet system doesn't look like one of my selenium-toned silver gelatin prints on Ilford Multigrade or Agfa Classic -- but it doesn't look worse than them, either, just different.
Where traditional and digital come together is in the artist's eye, making decisions about what kind of look they want to end up with, what kind of manipulation to do, and how much is enough -- and this is where we get back to that issue with the vivisected images. Instead of getting pointlessly specific, I'll just say that photography now is where the Design profession was 20 years ago when new digital tools made it possible for anyone to format their headline type with bold+italic+underline+shadow. A small minority used the new tools with taste, delicacy, and grace, and another small minority is doing the same thing now with digital photography.
My personal aesthetic is to only do what I would have done anyway in a traditional darkroom. I never had much interest in changing the reality of my photos, either by blending two photos together or by using elaborate gradient filters, or fog filters, etc. etc... but not because any of those are Wrong: they're just not my aesthetic.
And even then, there are exceptions where I'll use a combination of highly manipulative techniques on a photo because... I want to.
It's an artistic decision.
Andrew Sundstrom, on Monday, January 3, 2005 at 11:58 AM:
I've heard Ansel Adams quoted as saying something like: "If the negative is the musical composition, then the processes in the darkroom play the individual symphonic performance."
Any thoughts on this metaphor?
David Adam Edelstein, on Monday, January 3, 2005 at 4:53 PM:
I absolutely agree with it. A negative contains the content of the photo, but the person printing it can "play" it more quietly, or more loudly, and more subtly, or more clumsily.
A good printer can print a negative and make it glow (that luminescent quality I talk about, above). The scene may even feel 3-d, like you could walk into it. A bad printer can print the same negative and it will fall completely flat.
Ansel's prints are instructive: I once had the opportunity to see two prints of Clearing Winter Storm on the same wall, one from the late 30's, and one from the early 70's. Although obviously the same image, and though they were both beautiful, the earlier one was much "louder" -- you could say he had a much more aggressive "attack". The later one was more subtle, but ultimately (I felt) more moving.
Andrew Sundstrom, on Thursday, January 13, 2005 at 1:45 PM:
It's been a long time since I've been in the darkroom -- high-school. I recall the process of printmaking involves hands, hand-manipulated instruments, paper, chemicals, air, light, and time. The factors are physical and so have varying implicit degrees of uncertainty, which can be amplified with or without intention by the degree of human skill brought to the task. It seems to me that even a master printmaker, who has a deep understanding of, and navigatory prowess within, that vast parameter space can get lost -- and this is not always undesirable. Control is incomplete. The physical vagaries can push the artist into spaces he would not have intention to explore. The whole act is therefore more of a dance than an execution of a plan. The printmaker has to witness and experience surprise and frustration to grow. My drawing teacher encourages us to use instruments and materials we cannot (yet) control for these reasons. To what extent do such matters live in the art of digital photograph manipulation? In its present form, the latter strikes me as an art that is rationally front-loaded: one brings to the task intentions that, given software constraints, must be logically, in fact grammatically, specified -- menu systems and the like.
What about the experience of playing the symphony, or making the print? Each performance, each artifact, is singular, not the next. One comes to the performance knowing this, with an appreciation of the preciousness of what may result, of the experience's, and alas the artifact's, ephemeral nature. And its high risks and irreversible consequences. There is something here that smacks of a biological, as compared with a physical, appreciation of the art. Variance of the image (by way of certain randomness) is as much the object of the art as the image's potential.
Enough for now.