Brush painting
This doesn't really show well at this size online -- it looks fantastic at 12 x 18 inches -- but it gives me something to hang this thought on.
After I printed this photo, the afternoon of the day I shot it, I wrote this in the Photography conference on the WELL:
All right, I've had the 5d for a week, shooting a lot (the last shot of today was photo #458 with the camera) but I hadn't printed anything yet.So I converted one of today's images to black and white, fussed with it a bit, and now it's slowly spooling out on the piezo printer at 12" x 18".
I'm a pretty good printer in the darkroom. My first photo teacher had been an assistant at the Ansel Adams workshops, and she was definitely all about the craft.
I've used a lot of great lenses and fine grained film, carefully shot (middle apertures for maximum sharpness) and developed (calibrated tmax 100 in some fine grained developers).
I say all of this to give some weight to this statement: I have *never* gotten prints like this from another 35mm form factor camera. Incredibly fine branches on this tree are crystal clear. The usual piezography quality of lots of detail in shadows and highlights are in full force here. Edges are crisp. The whole thing is grain free at 12 x 18.
And it was so easy to do. I shot this photo around 10:00 this morning. I downloaded it to the computer this afternoon. I printed a couple of proofs on smaller paper, had dinner, came back and looked at them. Then I kicked the final print off on nice German rag paper.
I'm not sure what all of this means. I doubt I'll use the 5d to shoot on the street (it's still too big for me to feel comfortable using it that way, and I still love the texture of tri-x for that work). But for anything else... I think I've crossed over completely, now.