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| When Adobe tells you something, it’s just “because”! |
Using a scanner and image editing software, I am able to better prints than I ever could with an enlarger in a darkroom. Furthermore, computer technologies allow me to make custom color prints. I have hardly ever worked in a real color laboratory, because of the time, patience and expense required. And digital photography has to be more gentle on the environment than printing color pictures in a darkroom.
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The owner of Long Photo, one of my favorite photo labs in Belleville, with his daughter. |
The phrase “computer-generated art” implies going beyond the possibilities of photography, drawing and painting and film; mixing images and media, and generating images that are, in the realm of computers, “organic”, having never been touched by the human hand. While I admire these new possibilities, I take advantage of them rarely, only as an artistic diversion. I use computers to distribute my pictures in ways I couldn’t without computers, and to enhance my photographs in ways I never could in a darkroom. You can take a look at a before and after example of how I rescued a picture by editing it with Adobe Photoshop.
Five or six years ago digital cameras had a long way to go before they could match the cost, ease of use and transportability of traditional cameras. Thirty-five millimeter color film could store images with less expense and more efficiency than digital media at that time. I find myself having to rewrite this page every few months: there are now cameras on the market offering 3,000 x 4,000 pixels of resolution or more, at prices I might consider paying. Cameras offering higher resolution than that were previously unavailable at any price, but are now on the market, yet they still cost far more than a good film scanner. Digital photography is coming out of its “adolescent” phase, and digital cameras have become a viable alternative. People who learn about digital photography now will have a great advantage as these techniques come of age over the next decade.
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The Nikon F70, a camera I bought in October 1999, my first that does automatic exposure, which learned to love very quickly. |
For the moment, I’m enjoying the “best of both worlds”. My photography process is a bit of a hybrid: I continue to use traditional film cameras, but I scan my negatives or slides with a Nikon film scanner, the first of which I bought seven years ago. This scanner provides twice as much resolution as digital cameras costing as much, and gives me access to my archives of negatives and slides I have taken over the decades. Once I’ve finished retouching a scan, I send the scan to be printed by a photo lab, or to publishers for insertion in their page layouts.
As it happens, I won a Minolta “DiMage Xt” digital camera in December of 2003, in a contest put on by the magazine «Réponses Photo», and the newspaper «20 Minutes», both of them French publications. My winning picture was one from a series of a burning car on rue de Rivoli, between the musée du Louvre and pont des Arts. This is a pocket camera that offers 1,500x2,000 pixels of resolution, and doesn’t provide much as concerns extensibility: external electronic flash, interchangeable lenses, extended exposure times for night-time photography, and so forth. Oh well, at least I can put it on a tripod.
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David Henry taking pictures of the fontaine «des quatre points cardinaux» in front of Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris, September 18th, 2006. —photo by Linda Schenck. |
At first I considered it as a portable scanner, a “visual notepad”, or as a complement to my Olympus pocket camera, something to use when someone wants pictures right away, and the number of pictures they want won’t finish off a roll of 36 I already have going, etc. After a few months I realized that it served no purpose walking around with this camera (I always head out with a camera of some kind). My pocket 35-mm Olympus XA takes pictures with much more sharpness and resolution.
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| The Nikon F4, Nikon’s top of the line offering from 1986–1996, a camera I bought in July 2006. |
I’ve been teaching photography for a few years now, and about 97% of my students have digital cameras, the Canon EOS 350 and 400d for the most part. Sometimes people send me pictures I’ve taken with their camera, and I’m never impressed. Pictures taken with the Nikon D70, D80, D200, etc, seem sharp enough, but my scanner still gives twice as much resolution, while Canon digital reflexes gives images where the pixels quite frankly have a “children’s finger painting” look.
Digital cameras released in the last 18 months approach the resolution that the Nikon Coolscan IV film scanner I bought six years ago gives: the Canon EOS 400, the Sony Alpha α100, the Pentax K10, and the Nikon D80 and D40x. What remains an open question for me is exposure latitude, being able to hold detail in the highlights and shadows. I sold the film scanner in April 2007, the same day I bought the current version of this scanner which gives 20 megapixel scans.
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| The Nikon Coolscan V, a dream of a film scanner, that gives 20-megapixel scans of my negatives and slides. |
Digital cameras provide access to your images very quickly, which is good for checking composition and exposure. But they don’t give nearly the exposure latitude that color negative film provides. It’s certain that I will have a digital camera within a year or two as they represent the future in photography. I fear being disappointed in getting a twelve-megapixel camera, when one spends thousands of dollars on equipment, it’s supposed to be in order to have better quality, not less as compared to what you already have. When I do get a digital camera, I’ll have to replace my 18 mm wide angle lens, at a cost of $500 extra…
What is a digital camera?
A digital camera is one in which the manufacturer has placed a scanner behind the lens, except that we usually refer to it as a sensor. For the better or worse, my scanner is on my desktop, not inside the camera. For the better because I can make 16 x 20" prints without upsampling, and I can make pictures with detail in the brightest of highlights and darkest of shadows without taking several pictures and resorting to “HDR”.
Helpful Links:
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Why don’t I have digital camera?
The 20 megapixels that my film scanner does might be considered “oversampling”, and perhaps a 12-megapixel camera does indeed capture as much detail as is possible with 35-mm film. Perhaps it’s no longer a matter of quality and resolution, even so, there remains the question of cost. “Going digital” would mean an investment of 1,500 euros/dollars; film and developing costs 20 euros per roll of 36 exposures, at the average rate of one roll per week, I spend 1,000 euros per year. Each year a new generation of digital cameras arrives on the market, with more resolution, I read the reviews and say to myself, “Oh that’s nice, I think I’ll wait another year.” Certainly if I was a beginning in photography these days, I would buy a digital camera.
A few years ago people would write asking if I had a digital camera, I’d write back saying, “No, I just know Photoshop pretty well.” I haven’t had these kinds of questions for a long time now, people probably just assume I have a digital camera now.
My opinions of the Internet and the World Wide Web are strong and divergent. Many web sites are full of gratuitous special effects and advertising. There is a lot of silly stuff out there. There’s not much preventing people from publishing good, creative work on the Web. The Web allows me to have a permanent exhibition space which I can update as my work evolves. The Web offers another kind of democratization for publishing, as the advent of desktop publishing in the late-1980s offered.