In article uwMSf.2261$bu.287@trnddc04, Jeremy wrote:
Thought-provoking comments from Erwin Puts' Website
"But with digital imagery we are in the business of constructing reality and
no longer in the realm of recording reality."
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What a stupid article!

In a recent documentary by Arte, the German-French art TV channel the
revival of the Super 8 film was exposed. Young filmmakers, in particular,
seem to discover the peculiar characteristics of Super 8 in comparison to
the now ubiquitous digital recording with the handycam. This is again proof
of the classical adage that a new medium does not kill the previous one,
just joins it.

Some artists just want to be different. It doesn't have anything to do with
the inherent qualities of the medium. After a couple years, people will
be bored with low quality Super 8 movies and move on.

Today you need to master the digital imagery workflow and without software
tools as Photoshop, Raw Essentials, Noise Ninja you are not able to get a
decent image on screen or on print.

What kind of argument is this? There are plenty of DSLRs that can produce
a decent quality jpeg.

What is happening behind the scenes is a
true revolution. A number of photographers have simply switched from film
emulsion recording to solid state recording and assume that the classical
photographic virtues will continue to be valuable. This is no doubt true to
a certain extent. As in the past it is possible for photographer sto make
pictures that look like paintings and there are painters who make paintings
that look like photographs. It is perfectly valid to make pictures on
solid-state media that resemble the technique of recording an image on film
emulsions. But doing this you are acting like the 19th century photographer
who finds inspiration in the tradition of painting.

The only way to make pictures radically different is to take them into
the realm of graphics arts.

It there anything new? If you take everything that has been done on film and
compare it to what is being done with digital, I strongly doubt that
on average there is anything different.

Photography means writing with light. Without light and an object reflecting
light rays that can be captured by silver halide molecules, there can be no
image. This is the essence of photography. Painting on the other hand can
work from imagination and the painter only needs a brush and some paints to
create whatever image he has in mind (literally speaking). Photography
depends on what exists in front of the lens and freezes a scene in time.
Painting has no sense of the time dimension. A photograph is limited in time
and space. The decisive moment as it has been called is indeed the hallmark
of a photographic image.

This is why there is such a big difference between photography and painting.

The digital image is a strange beast. It is not an image in the photographic
sense: there is no negative to look at. But there is a tendency to refer to
a RAW image is a digital negative. The sensor of the digital camera records
luminance values in a matrix of 3000 by 2000 cells, called pixels. The
numbers may be replaced by whatever size of the sensor you use. A pixel is
dimensionless, whereas a chemical negative has physical dimensions. The meta
data that accompanies every digital file, has information how the colour
pattern is arranged and this info is used by the software to reconstruct the
colour information of the scene. Inherently a digital image (file) is a
semi-manufactured article. Without the meta data the file can not be
interpreted. And without extensive manipulation by the software in the
camera or the Photoshops of this world, the file is useless.

This is extermely silly. Without meta-data, a print film negative is nothing.
You need to know that there is an orange mask, you need to know color balance,
etc.

Without very complicated chemical processing, exposed Kodachrome film is
nothing.

Replacing chemicals with digital circuits is not a revolution in itself.

When I use the digital camera, I am definitely aware that the pictures are
intermediate products, simply files that can be manipulated at will later on
the workflow process. Using the Olympus E-1 as I would use the Leica M7 is
simply a misunderstanding of the technique involved. Pressing the shutter of
the M7 creates a fixed recording of a instant of reality, probably
imperfect, but finalized. Pressing the shutter of the E-1 creates an
intermediate product, a digital file that can be manipulated in many ways.
Look at a Raw conversion program and see the infinite ways of manipulation
of the basic image. There is no hesitation to shoot scores of images at will
and to exploit your creativity from every possible angle and pose. Images
are free and at no cost and every possible mistake can be corrected. As soon
as you understand this, you note that a digital camera is a new tool that
introduces a totally new way of creating images. The digital workflow
supports this new way: as a start you can take pictures with a method that
is essentially what the painter's sketchpad was in the past. You can start
with a low resolution file which allows you take 1000 images on a 2 Gigabyte
CF-card, take images as often and as many as you want (12 per second if you
wish), at every angle and position, review the results immediately and when
the results are what you had on your retina, you can delete the files,
switch to RAW and create the real images. With the Raw processors you can
look at the light table, adjust the relevant parameters, as saturation,
colour, sharpness and dynamic range, and feed the files in into Photoshop
CS2 where you can do additional manipulations, fix the parameters and do a
batch conversion of every number of files you want. You can even superimpose
two pictures, one with highlights corrections and one with shadow
corrections to simulate a much higher dynamic range than can be put on
paper.

Two rather strange ideas are combined in this paragraph.

First, I looks like the author never heard of scanners. For my workflow,
there hardly any difference between film and direct digital. Of course
film needs to be developed and scanned, and a digital image may need
raw conversion. But after that, it is just digital processing. There is
nothing inherently fixed in a film negative, that isn't just as fixed in
RAW.

The second argument is that you can take as many pictures as you like.
Well, you can do that with film as well.

With video, there is lots of experience with cheap recording media.
Unfortunately, without vision, recording more video doesn't help.

The samething applies to digital photography. Taking more picture mostly
results in more boring pictures.

The options are indeed limitless and go far beyond what the chemical
darkroom can offer. Ansel Adams coined the term pre-visualisation to
indicate that it is photographer's job to think about an image and to start
searching for one. Henri Cartier-Bresson had a theory that you cannot create
an image but have to wait for reality to evolve into a meaningful pattern
that you can only capture at the right moment in time and place.

I guess Erwin Puts didn't bother to visit the HCB exposition that is
currently in Amsterdam.

HCB's pictures show that you have be in right place at the right time and
press the shutter at the right moment. Many of his pictures are unique.

I guess that even with landscapes, there is only a very small window of
time when the light, clouds, etc. are optimal.

I wonder if he read "the negative". Small digital cameras are just as
limited as (or even more limited than) the print film Ansel Adams used.
Deciding what record when the subject contrast exceeds the capabilities
of the medium is just as important today as it was when AA was writing
his books.

Yes, digital does give a bit more feedback. But if have any idea what the
final image is supposed to look like, you will not get good results.

The emergence of the workflow approach in digital imagery makes these
visions obsolete and this can only be applauded. It means that the
traditional style of taking photographs is not appropriate for digital
imagery. As long as we assume that digital imagery is photography with a
solid-state sensor , we are like the photographer who tries to emulate the
process of painting. The often-praised approach of hybrid photography
(mixing film based photography with solid-state imagery) is as futile as
trying to mix painting with photography.

And a million monkeys will eventually come up with the works of Shakespear.

If you want random images, you can do that with film as well. There is
nothing new in this respect.

Photography flourished as soon as the practitioners shrugged off the
heritage of painting and started to use the new medium as a new tool with
its own laws and possibilities. Digital imagery or even engineering will
start to flourish when and if the practitioners shed off their heritage of
photography and start to use the medium as a new instrument for a new
language for visual expression.

Photography does not have anything in common with painting. But, most
photography is not really that different from painting upto the invention
of photography. Some paitings were pure imagination. But a lot of paintings
tried to show what the artist saw as the reality. Not really any different
from a lot of photography today.

Using DoF to isolate subjects is just about the only thing that is more
or less impossible with painting.

It was the painters who had to re-invent themselves.

It is quite possible in a digital world, artists working with film will have
to re-invent themselves as well.

Some of the best-known names in
fashion photography (Nick Knight is one of them) have abandoned the
classical gear fully to concentrate on the images possible with the
camera-phone ( 3 million pixels really suffice for full spread magazine
images).

Ones again an example where artists just need something that looks different.

But with digital imagery we are in the business of constructing
reality and no longer in the realm of recording reality. There will be
hardcore traditionalists who insist on using the digital camera as a
convenient means of doing traditional photography, but they will be soon
outnumbered if not buried by the masses of persons who see digital imagery
as one of the many instances of an integrated digital entertainment network.

Yes, photography can be combined with graphics arts. However, that doesn't
have anything to do with digital capture.

Graphics arts can be combined with photography. For example, you can
try to combine Escher-style patterns with photographic elements.

However, that is no longer photography. And I sort of doubt that the
people who feel a desire express themselves using photography will embrace
image construction using graphics arts techniques.

As long as the goal is to produce a photograph, direct digital is just a more
convenient way of doing what was also possible with (scanned) film based
photography.

There is nothing new. Just like most movies (whether recorded on film, or
using a video camera) are not really that different from what was done a
100 years ago.

Are cameras in mobile phones going to have much impact? They are going have
an impact on recording important events that were not often recorded
before. For any kind of news, it is much likely that there will also be
some images.

But other than that, snapshots tend not to have any photographic qualities.
Even worse, there is good chance that many snapshots will not be preserved.
Just like in the past people used to write each other lots letters and, more
importantly, used to archive those letters. There is of course no records
of most telephone calls (at least officially). With e-mail, some people
archive their e-mail, other people don't.


--
That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it
could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.
-- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency