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Erwin Puts On The Fundamental Differences Between Film and Digital Imaging
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." _______________________________________________ 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. When photography was invented, the most famous exclamation was that from this moment one painting is dead. The contrary happened and painting flourished as never before. It just had to re-invent itself and find its true self. At first, the early photographers copied the classical masters and the style of painting. There were no other role models as we would say today. Photography flourished after the practitioners abandoned the approach of the painter and studied the inherent characteristics of the new medium. In fact they found new uses for the medium. The Economist has drawn attention to this fact when they noted that a true revolution is only possible when users find new goals for a medium well beyond the original ideas. This is happening world wide with the cameraphone and every day people find novel ways to employ the tools and the technique. 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 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. 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. 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. Many commentators in the digital scene will claim that there were many darkroom techniques to manipulate the original negative. That is true, but the amount of manipulation was and is limited. The essence of digital imagery is its unlimited potential for manipulation on the pixel level (in photographic terms that would imply addressing every single grain in the negative). I am now using filmbased photographic recording and solid-state imagery in comparison and I find it remarkable how different both approaches are. There is still a widespread but futile attempt to try to demonstrate that filmbased images are better than the solid-state equivalents or the other way around. In a recent issue of the German magazine "Fotomagazin" there was an article that proofs that at the edge of recording performance the film based images have an advantage. This is also my own position: filmbased recording is still better than solid-state recording. Of course we can claim that current digital cameras can record a ten stop brightness contrast, but the current printing equipment cannot cope with this contrast range. And we can claim that resolution of films is still better than what we can get with solid-state imagery. When we are arguing in this direction we miss the point! The convenience and the possibilities of solid-state imagery outweigh the slight losses in absolute image quality. The whole idea of the digital imagery workflow points to a new way of working with images. When I take pictures on film I know the limitations and the possibilities of the material. And above all, I know that I am definitely fixing an image for eternity. Manipulations are limited. Of course I can take hundreds of pictures and hope that one if the images will satisfy my imagination or emotion about the scene in front of me. But the final image is still the fixing of the shadows. 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. 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. 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. 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. It is really significant that in today's digital arena the traditional photographic companies are doing worst of all. Kodak has a new boss and sheds tens of thousands of people again and film sales are dropping not by the projected 10%, but by an alarming 30% a year. We all know where Leica is standing, losing money and changing bosses by the month. It is the stated goal of HP, once a staid engineering company famous for boring but reliable computer hardware, to become the digital equivalent of what Kodak stands for in the 20th century as the leader of chemical photography. Contax/Kyocera is dead; Pentax is struggling, as is Nikon and Konica/Minolta. The big names in digital imagery are Seiko/Epson, Sony, HP and Canon, as one of the very few of the traditional photographic companies who has made the transition from photography to image engineering. And on the horizon we see the names of Nokia, Ericcson, Samsung and others who promote the use of camera-phones as the means of image capture of the future. 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). The digital workflow encompasses the whole range form creating the basic image file, manipulating the data with programs and printing the files to get printed images. The software-programs and the computer are at every stage necessary and an integral part of the flow. Extract the programs from your digital camera and it will do nothing. The more you rely on post-exposure manipulation with Photoshop, the more you are becoming an image engineer. This is fine. I am no Luddite to protest against new inventions. 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. In the end, it may be possible that true chemical photography, at least the BW version of it, will outlast the digital photographer, who will vanish in the world of digital imagery that is mobile, virtual and personal: mobile because you can do it every where you want, virtual, because it only exists in the camera and you can show it to anybody around the globe and personal because you can edit the digital file in any way you wish. Does this sound like a revolution? You bet on it! Some trivia: the first digital SLR was a Kodak DCS-100 in 1991 with a 1.3 Mp sensor and $30.000 tag. In 1997 the Olympus D-6000L had the same size sensor and costs a few thousand bucks. In 1999 the Nikon D1 had a 2.74 MP sensor and a tag of $6000. The Canon EOS-1D from 2001 had a 4.48 Mp sensor and was introduced as the camera tthat set the top for sharpness and resolution. Now Canon has a 16 Mp sensor, but the claims are the same. http://www.imx.nl/photosite/comments/c009.html |
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