Single-Serving Photo

That is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to wrangle the proprietary formats of your camera manufacturer, or to take arms against a sea of sidecar files, and by opposing, end them…

But enough pseudo-Shakespeare for one post.

There has been some chatter on the Interwebs lately concerning the DNG format: there are quality and archival concerns, whether it’s worth converting one’s entire library to the format, what the benefits might be, and whether one ought to care. Today, I weigh in. For what it’s worth.

Coincidentally, I’ve used the same post title as Matt Kloskowski did in his take on the subject on Lightroom Killer Tips. Matt didn’t add a pseudo-Hamlet line, though, so I feel like I’ve done the headline proud.

After the break, a complete rundown on DNG; trust me, it’s going to be technical and editorial. (more…)

I generally post articles when I have something very useful to say, which is why my posts have been so sporadic. There are a myriad of sources for photography industry news and I always feel I am doing my readers a disservice by parroting every new equipment release or software upgrade here.

This time, though, a piece of “news” hit my screen that I had to share, and I hope that by reading it here you will receive the whole story and not just 1/3 of it as some people did when they got the information from digg, reddit, or similar.

We’re talking about megapixels, and we’re talking about marketing, and we’re talking about lies. Lies perpetrated by the manufacturers of point-and-shoot cameras with tiny little CCD sensors who keep increasing the megapixel count and marketing it like it’s the end-all be-all of imaging performance.

Not so! Read on… (more…)

A comment was just posted over on my Art Concepts in Photography, Part 1: Texture article, but after I had composed my reply, I realized that it would be better suited to an entire post. Here is the comment:

Though my question has little to do with your most recent article, I find that the expertise you’ve shared since I began following your site to be compelling and hope that you can provide me an answer that will serve my needs. I have seen many digital photos over the years, some pretty dismal and some pretty spectacular. My question was born out of seeing, for the first time, an exhibition comprised of 150 works by Ansel Adams, which were nearly all “Silver Gelatin” prints. My question is (setting aside for the moment the composition, line, form and majestic beauty of many of the locations) can any digital print be made in such a way that a knowledgeable observer would not be able to distinguish it from a print made using the silver gelatin method?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that the comment was posted by my father, who, having a degree in fine art and a gallery of his own, takes a vested interest in some of the topics I discuss. That said, I thought it was a very relevant question and one that many of you might have thought about, too, so here’s what I think.

First, it would depend on how knowledgeable the viewer was and how close they could get to their subject. Second, there are many technologies available, so the short answer is “probably,” but the long answer is more interesting.

So-called “lightjet,” which combines a digital (laser-based) exposure of photographic paper with traditional (chemical) development methods, produces very fine results, especially of full-color images. Upon very close inspection, however, it would be clear that there are many colorful dots making up the print. Still, these prints have fantastic longevity, are often quite lustrous, and are available for a lot less money, comparatively, than other methods. An added benefit is the ability to print on any brand and type of photographic paper available to photographers, from Kodak Endura to Fuji Crystal Archive. There is a certain je ne sais quoi surrounding real photographic papers that may be the strongest argument for lightjet.

Inkjet prints boast a longevity nearly comparable to traditional development and are capable of a much broader range of color than lightjet. The highest-end inkjet printers now deliver between seven and twelve physical inks in picoliter droplets that mix on the paper to create a continuous tone image. The ink droplets are dispensed by a piezoelectric system and can be either dye-based or pigment-based, each having their own archival and color properties. Inkjet printers, however, are much more expensive to run than ordering your prints from a third-party photofinisher (who probably uses lightjet), and if you need the highest quality available, you will have to buy, configure, and operate the setup yourself, which is no small task!

Giclee (zhee-clay or gee-clay) has also held its own against the influx of lower-cost inkjet solutions, boasting the ability to print on materials such as canvas and at resolutions beyond what inkjet or lightjet typically can achieve. Giclee (sometimes called Iris printing because one of the original models was called Iris) is essentially a CMYK inkjet system, meaning that only cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks are used, though I have heard of giclee printers that use six inks. The ink is fired from glass nozzles at one million droplets per second and each drop is electrically charged so it can be directed toward or away from the paper by electromagnetism. The paper itself is affixed to a drum that spins at about 180 inches per second. Giclee is probably one of the most mechanically impressive printing methods around.

Artists have chosen giclee for years because of its faithful color reproduction and ability to print on “artistic” substrates such as canvas. A single giclee print, however, can cost $50, $100, or $200 to produce, not including the calibration and other services required to achieve the results you need. Giclee is more favored by painters than photographers.

Four-color offset lithography, which is how all print publications are produced nowadays, is actually capable of near-giclee quality, however American print shops tend to be too traditionalist to adopt the color management methods necessary to produce fine art prints to an exacting standard. Bill Atkinson, a man absolutely fanatical about color accuracy, collaborated with a Japanese print shop to implement color management methodologies for their four-color presses. In return, they printed his book of rock photographs. That book may be the only example of accurate color reproduction through offset lithography on any American bookshelf. The difference between the capabilities of high-end offset lithography and giclee is entirely due to the willingness of the technical staff involved to use modern digital color management methods.

At the end of the day, can any of these digital solutions deliver a result as austere and striking as a pure black and white gelatin silver print? Probably not, but they can come very close. I am convinced that Ansel Adams himself would be a dedicated and outspoken advocate of digital photography and all of its methods were he still alive today.

Digital photography makes it possible for artists to create effects and apply treatments to their work that were once impossible in traditional photography. Is this an advantage that should be compensated for in competition and critique? Do digital photographers and traditional photographers have equal footing? Would the pioneering photographers who led the surge into traditional photography embrace today’s digital technology?

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My opinion is that digital photography is, and should be treated as, entirely comparable and identical to traditional photography. Although the differences in process and technique bear investigation for the ambitious viewer and may play a role in serious competition and critique as parameters for comparison, they have no more bearing on the effect of the work as would the brand of pencils used by an illustrator.

In the field of art, competition and formal review should command the examination of an artist’s basic choice of media and execution. While even the casual viewer can deepen the experience of a piece of art with knowledge of its process, that information is only helpful insofar as it expands appreciation or increases understanding; all artwork is comparable given only the experience of it intended by its creator.

To give an example of what I mean, consider two paintings. Each painting was created with different types of paint and different brushes, one on canvas and the other on paper, one representational and the other abstract, one lacquered and the other not. Can these two works of art be compared objectively as paintings? My gut says they can. The majority of casual viewers would never seek out these differences because the two works can be compared and contrasted, fairly and completely, simply on the basis of their appearance.

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Similarly in photography, two photographs may appear very much the same but may have been created in vastly different ways. In traditional photography alone, a myriad of chemicals and materials are available to the artist. Comparing two photographs, one traditionally printed and the other digitally created, should pose no problem to the viewer; only in formal competition and critique should this piece of information carry any weight, and that is also true for the painting example given above.

Digital photographers find themselves, in many cases, having to defend their work on the basis of its production methods rather than its artistic integrity, and it saddens me. When, in the history of art, have its methods come under such scrutiny? Producing new work in new ways has always been a core value of the field of art as a whole.

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What is saddening is not that a photographer would spend time and energy defending his or her craft, for that seems to me a noble endeavor. What saddens me is that anyone would spend time and energy criticizing digital photography, in particular, on the basis of its process rather than its results. Few other fields of art come under such scrutiny; perhaps because many fields of art are less commercialized or because they occupy areas of the art world not very well traveled by the mainstream. Whatever the reasons may be, I hope that the future brings a greater acceptance of digital photography as a photographic methodology, not to be treated differently than the many ways in which light has been captured and reproduced in the past.

In 1932, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, among others, formed “Group f/64” with the intent to “define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods.”¹ As stated in their manifesto,

Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the “Pictorialist,” on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

Group f/64 was conceived in explicit opposition to the Pictorialist movement, which “subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time.”² Quite to the contrary, Group f/64 believed very strongly that photography “must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.”³ These are two very different viewpoints. One sees photography as a medium through which to create works representative of the predominant aesthetics and style of other types of art at the time, and the other sees photography as a new medium with its own aesthetics and style that should be preserved.

Purists almost by definition, the members of Group f/64 sought to stretch the boundaries of photography through strict adherence to its core methods. They used as few image-altering devices or techniques as possible; no lens filters, no exotic darkroom processes or equipment. Their images aspired to a crisp, infinitely-focused, tonally brilliant standard upon which many future photographers would base their own explorations.

It should be noted that although Ansel Adams used extensive, complicated darkroom techniques on many of his most famous prints, he was both an advocate of smart, precise post-processing as well as maintaining the integrity of the medium by minimizing distortion of the subject, and it was likely for the latter reason that he helped to form Group f/64.

But that was 1932. The “ideological conventions of art and aesthetics” of 1932 have been entirely replaced in the age of the computer. Almost in parallel to the 1932 Pictorialist/pure photography dichotomy, there are those who see digital photography as a mere convenience; a new, faster, and in some ways more inexpensive way to maintain similar aesthetics to photography of the past, and there are those who see digital photography as an entirely new medium.

I believe that both viewpoints are correct. However, digital photography certainly brings with it a veritable cavalcade of new capabilities and equipment, inheriting credibility and respect from its traditional, silver halide forebears, but independent from them in all other ways, both technical and aesthetic.

That being the case, what now embodies the “qualities of technique, composition or idea” specific to “digital photography?” If a new group came about with the same goals as Group f/64, but updated for digital photography, what would its major tenets be? With such extensive editing capabilities in the hands of even the beginner through Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, The Gimp, iPhoto, et. al., it goes without saying that manipulation of the image is going to play a role. Whether it is basic tonal adjustment and sharpening, or more drastic and potentially destructive edits, such changes fall comfortably under the umbrella of digital photography as a medium.

When Ansel Adams stood before the St. Hernandez valley on that day in 1941, he could see in his mind the process that would be used to bring the exposure to life, from development to printing. It is that mastery of craft that has perhaps been forgotten now that the capacity to make hundreds, if not thousands, of exposures is available. This is one impact of the digital revolution. Scarcity encourages innovation; when there is less to work with, more attention is paid to planning and execution to squeeze every drop of that creative juice out of the moment.

Likewise, abundance breeds laziness. It’s too easy to snap 100 exposures of a subject in the hopes that one is in focus when each exposure costs you nothing and with cameras capable of several exposures per second.

This article doesn’t mean to draw conclusions. The ratio between excellent photographers and poor photographers is likely to be much the same today as it was in Ansel’s time (counting only those who consider themselves serious hobbyists and amateur professionals; photography is no longer exclusive to the exceptionally passionate and the exceptionally wealthy.) Still, digital photography raises a lot of interesting questions and only time will tell how it will be treated by the art historians of the future.

1. Wikipedia, Group f/64[back]
2. Wikipedia, Pictorialism[back]
3. ibid. [back]