Excuse the following rant; I'm not quite as much of an apologist as I seem to be. All photographic media have their adherents and their advantages / disadvantages. This is just my take on things, though I respect yours as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Shields
Walter, have you tried some of the newer papers that are supposed to be a lot closer to traditional wet prints? There's a particular paper (I can't recall the name but it begins 'Fiba...') that has a lot of traditional printers thinking it's as good as they ever got in the darkroom.
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I've seen fantastic output from the higher end inkjets on fine art papers. But it's not the look of wet prints I'm interested in reproducing; it's the tangible fact of them. There is more to it than looks. For example, in a single exposure I can capture way more dynamic range on B&W film as I can with digital. This opens up the possibility of photographing insane high contrast lighting scenarios that I wouldn't go near with a 20 foot pole on digital. Then there's the option of doing altered development to deal with enormous ranges of scene brightness (granted in digital you can do HDR merges and the likes, but that's not always possible if you've got things like trees moving in the wind, or moving objects like animals in a field, or rapidly changing lighting). I know that often as photographers we strive for the most flattering, soft light possible, shooting at dawn or sunset, and so on, and that's a dogma that I've been experimenting with breaking. B&W film with its enormous capture range makes this possible - for better or worse ;)
Then I can print directly from negatives with mind-blowing resolution and see details in my large prints that I wouldn't get without at least a 6 frame merge from my digital SLR. 4x5 negatives have up to 200 megapixels with a good quality digital drum scan (and I can get close to that with my consumer flatbed), and with a direct non-digital print you're losing nothing but what your darkroom technique makes you lose - in my case I've got a very high end printing lens that I picked up for almost nothing thanks to digital. Razor sharp bleeding-edge hairline details on a 16x20 is something I've never gotten from my DSLR (and I have top end canon "L" lenses and good tripod & focusing / DOF / diffraction avoidance technique FYI :)). Here's a scanned image:
And here's a detailed look from close to the center of the image:
This is just from my consumer flatbed scanned at a lower resolution than it is actually capable of. A better scan and/or higher end scanner would pick out more.
But resolution isn't everything. I also enjoy the process of working in the darkroom and working slowly. I like the fact that I can print really big for very little expense (granted the fact that I have about 100 sheets of 16x20 paper that I got for free helps ;)). I can barely think about affording a printer that will do 20x24, but in my darkroom it's just a matter of lowering my table and buying the big paper (already have drums, etc, which I got dirt cheap).
And all of those benefits are just talking about plain silver printing. There are other, more intriguing options, that have no digital analogue. You can look at many of them here at
alternativephotography.com, but remember that the look of an on-screen scan is something you could reproduce in photoshop easily but the look and tactility of the actual print is something entirely different.
There are a ton of alternative printing processes that I'm going to be exploring with 8x10 and larger formats (I'm building a 12x20" camera, and I also plan to try enlarging onto ortho-lith film to make big contact negatives from smaller formats). These have no digital analogue because there are issues of paper texture, the particular look of the dyes and pigments used, the tonal scales available, etc, that aren't really reproducible because they are unique to the different media. It's like saying that you can just print an oil painting from your inkjet - well, okay, with a painting program you could make something that looks like an oil painting, but you won't have 3D brushstrokes that you can touch and see coming out of the canvas. You won't have exactly the same pigments or texture or tactility. The same principles apply to some of the more interesting photographic printing processes. You can't get van dyke brown silver prints to come out of an inkjet. You can't get the soft rich tones of platinum printing nor their phenomenal permanance out of an inkjet. You can't get prussian blue (the cyanotype dye) out of an inkjet. You can't print a bromoil based on hand-inking with lithographic printing inks with an inkjet. You can try to reproduce them and probably do a reasonable job on some fronts, but ultimately they will look and feel different because the media are different. (What you can do is print a digital file to overhead transparency materials and then do these alternative process prints from those - in that case the process is Digital Capture -> Digital output -> Photochemical print. This is a great option for someone who wants the final output but not the bother of messing with film in the darkroom).
One other issue is that you can't get camera movements on a digital small or medium format SLR without a lot of monkey business (e.g. attaching to a view camera with an adapter). There are expensive tilt-shift lenses, sure, but they don't give you the range of movement you can get with a view camera. Most of them have a single shift axis and a single tilt axis, and I often use more complex movements to get the right perspective, composition, and focus.
Having said that, I scan all my colour film stuff (and I use my digital SLR for anything requiring less than 4x5" resolution, like photojournalistic type stuff or wildlife). For landscapes nothing beats a true 4x5 negative or transparency (though I'll concede that the detail from the $30,000+ hasselblad / phase backs is pretty amazing - but leagues out of my price range, and you still don't get camera movements ;)). You can pick out hairs on leaves on bushes, individual strands of spiderwebs in doorways, needles on trees, letters on distant signs, etc, with a 4x5 transparency. All of this is almost irrelevant if you're talking about web display or small prints, but once you get into 11x14 and higher you can start to see the difference.
Pictures within pictures:
About the Large Format Camera : Mountain Photography by Jack Brauer
One last note: I'm not coming at this from the perspective of some old stalwart who refuses to move on with the times and "go digital". I became seriously interested in photography about three years ago with my digital rebel XT. But then I just sort of went insane, stretched out and started exploring some of the older processes as well, and I absolutely love working with them. I'm proficient in photoshop, but photoshop seems like "work" (partly I guess because I work in front of a computer all day). Darkroom seems like play. Film & darkroom work is lower throughput for me, but that makes me enjoy each individual image more than I do with digital.