Calibrating Your Monitors- Why Hire a Pro?

It’s an honest question.  Why hire someone to come in and calibrate your displays when you can buy a calibration system for short money – often cheaper than one calibration session – and do it yourself?

It’s a simple answer.  When you buy a $125 calibrator, you’re using, well, a $125 calibrator.  When you hire me to calibrate your displays, I’m using the i1 Pro.  Besides being part of a complete system for building every kind of ICC profile, it’s a more accurate measurement device.  It costs more, too.  Think around $800.

The cheap calibrators are colorimeters.  They’re a basic device that measures color based on three filters.  For the cost, it’s an effective solution, but has some limitations.  The i1 Pro is a spectrophotometer.  A spectrophotometer measures light energy at various frequencies across the entire spectrum of visible light.  It’s more accurate.  And more expensive.

Is there a difference?  Yes.  I’ve done some fairly comprehensive testing on many types of displays, and in some cases a colorimeter will get you pretty close to the results of the spectrophotometer.  In some cases, it won’t.

Simple as that.

Is it a good idea to run a cheap colorimeter on your displays periodically?  Certainly, but it’s more of a ” better than nothing” scenario.  Is it a better idea to have your displays calibrated periodically with a spectrophotometer?  Emphatically, yes.

At the very least, it’s a really good idea to calibrate your display with your low-end device, then calibrate it with a good spectrophotometer, then compare the two profiles.  It will be pretty obvious if you can live with what you’re running, or if you need to consider moving up to a spectrophotometer.  You can then make the choice – do you need to buy one, or is it better to have someone come in and do it for you, with their equipment.

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: How to Do It Right) Part 5

Let’s assume we’re in agreement- all this time we’ve been doing it wrong. How do we do it right? Let’s do two things to start out. Let’s set some goals, and let’s break this down into two parts: viewing the painting or print, and making the capture.

Viewing the Art

The lighting used for viewing the original painting, or the final reproduction, is probably the facet of the process that we have the least control over. Once the print leaves our hands (or, for that matter, the painting leaves the hands of the artist) we really don’t have much to say about how it is displayed or lit. Museums and galleries have some very tough challenges lighting work in a practical way. As we’ve seen, this can be critical in how the print is perceived and interpreted. There are, however, a few things we can do to establish attainable goals. Simply, we can reproduce the painting as faithfully as possible, matching the color and contrast to the best of our capabilities and within the limits of our equipment.

One of the keys to achieving that is to view, and match, the original paintings and the proof prints under lighting that is as close to the artist’s studio as possible. If the original was created in a North-light studio we’d prefer to evaluate our prints with lighting that comes as close as possible to the quality and wavelength of North light. Likewise, if the artist works with halogen spots trained on the work, we should view the prints with light that is the same- gallery-style halogen spots. The reasoning behind this is that every pigment or dye reflects light in a characteristic way. Paint will look slightly different than our printer’s ink under quartz lighting and North daylight. It may be dramatic, or subtle, but to get as close as possible to experiencing the vision of the artist, you need to view and match your final print under the same light that the artist used, with the original work lit identically. Only then can you really claim the print is faithful to the original.

Lighting and Capturing the Original

Let’s start with the most difficult goal. Let’s think about how we’d light and capture the painting as the artist saw it. The key to this is to recreate the light in the artist’s studio, down to the last detail. Bear with me… this is far from practical, but it’s a good exercise in understanding what the challenges are.

Assuming the artist worked in a North-light studio, we would have to map out the location and size of the windows in the artist’s studio, and recreate them in the photo studio. This includes size, distance from the painting, height, angle… and would mean we’d either have to create light sources from daylight-balanced continuous, or strobe light sources. Remember, the wavelength, or color, of the light source is critically important to assure we’re reflecting the colors of the original correctly. The background walls are equally important. In Rembrandt’s studio we saw background walls with a warm tone. This will effect our “fill” light- the light that illuminates the shadows in the painting, such as under the brush strokes. The “main” light provides our primary color balance and illumination. The “fill” light provides the background light, illuminating (or contaminating, if you will) the areas not affected by the main light.

In essence, we’d have to build a complete “set”, like a movie or stage, of the artist’s studio with our artificial light.

Suppose, for a minute, that we could simply bring our gear into the artist’s studio and photograph it with the very light the artist used. This is certainly possible, but there’s one technical issue- the intensity of light in a North-light studio. Although sufficient for painting, the level of light a North-light studio is at the very lowest levels necessary for making a good camera exposure. This affects everything from color mapping to resolution. The more we have to amplify the sensitivity of a digital camera, the less we get in terms of resolution and true color fidelity. The actual studio is simply not bright enough.

So let’s scale back our goals a little, and try to simply get closer to what the artist saw than the standard copy practices. We are looking for soft side and top-lighting with an open shadow. Again, we can do this with a very large bank of strobes or continuous daylight balanced lights with diffuser panels (such as soft boxes), approaching the size and position of the original studio. They have to be a fairly good distance from the painting to assure even coverage of the work. If they’re too close, you’ll see variation in the light intensity from one side or another, or from top to bottom. When you move the lights further away you compensate for how fast the intensity drops off over the distance from the closest part of the painting to the furthest. (For more explanation of this, see this link on the Inverse Square Law.) The rub is that, again due to the Inverse Square Law, as you move the lights further away, the intensity drops dramatically. To use large banks of lights at the same distance as the original windows you’re going to have to pump huge amounts of power into those lights.

Nobody said this was going to be easy…

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: You’re Doing it Wrong) Part 1

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: The Importance of Lighting) Part 2

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: Enough Talk) Part 3

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: North Light, You Say?) Part 4

On Fine Art Reproduction: (or, How to Do It Right) Part 5

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: North Light, You Say?) Part 4

Let’s look a little closer at the “North light studio”.  It really holds the key to understanding the vision of the artist, seeing the work as the artist saw it, and interpreting the work as the artist intended it. As with any printer’s craft, the viewing light chosen for evaluating the print is of critical importance.

Here’s a modern-day photograph of the studio of none other than Rembrandt van Rijn.  Rembrandt worked in the mid-1600s, far before any modern lighting was even conceived.

What’s particularly interesting about this photograph is that the curators have obviously added track lighting to the room, shown as pools of warm light on the easel and some of the points of interest.  This serves our discussion really well, because by comparing the color and quality of the artificial lights and the window and skylights, we’re getting a pretty good idea of the differences.

You can see, quite clearly here, that the face of the painting has a distinct blue, or cool, cast.  This cool cast is very characteristic of light from the northern sky, since there’s no direct sunlight (which is significantly warmer) and can even shift to an even cooler cast if the sky in the North is a clear, blue sky.  What we sometimes see, when the artist’s studio has trees nearby, is the addition of a green cast from the light filtering through the leaves.  This makes a profound difference in the way a painting is perceived.

An interesting footnote to keep in mind: the primary purpose of the North light studio was not to light the painting.  It was to light the subject.  The artist is primarily concerned with working in an environment that will yield the quality of light that is needed for the feel of the painting.  The fact that the same light was used to illuminate the work itself, as well as the subject of that work, is more a necessity of environment than a intentional choice.  Landscape painters, too, notably the Hudson River School artists, typically would gather visual information in the field with sketches and preliminary renderings, and then assemble the final work in their (North light) studios.  In this case, their subject’s lighting is completely isolated from the lighting on their work.

Here’s a photograph of one of Rembrandts paintings, Paul the Apostle in Meditation c. 1630, as it’s traditionally shown:

It has an overall amber cast, which would be amplified if lit under typical museum or gallery track lighting.  If you light something with a warm light source, it tends to reflect that same spectrum at the expense of other colors.  Here’s where it get’s interesting.  In this painting the subject seems to almost melt into his environment, since there’s very little tonal or color difference.  Now look at it as Rembrandt may have seen it:

It’s a different feel.  The subject is now in the environment, no longer an intimate part of it, as a result of the cyan and blue tones in the background walls and shadows.   Admittedly, we’re making this change by adjusting the file to illustrate the point, but the validity of the point remains.  You can prove it to yourself by simply viewing any image under gallery lighting conditions with a down-spot, and in North light conditions next to the closest North window in your home.  Depending on the viewing light, a painting or photograph can reflect different color spectrum response.  It can look different.

Is this important?  In the world of Art History, it’s profoundly important.  In an age where we can research, restore and recreate work as it appeared when it was created, new perspectives on the past accepted interpretations of work is changing how we understand the artist, and the time in which the artist worked.  And to coin a phrase, in the world of Art History, “wars have been fought over less…”

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: You’re Doing it Wrong) Part 1

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: The Importance of Lighting) Part 2

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: Enough Talk) Part 3

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: North Light, You Say?) Part 4

On Fine Art Reproduction: (or, How to Do It Right) Part 5

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: Enough Talk) Part 3

Enough talk.  Let’s see some samples.

Traditional fine art reproduction standards use lights mounted at a 45 degree angle from the baseboard, generally a high-intensity light aimed so that the work on the board is lit as evenly as possible.  Whether the light is a studio strobe, an HID (high intensity discharge) bulb, or a continuous-spectrum florescent, the light source, including the reflector and diffusers (if used), is relatively small, compared to the work.  Here’s what it will typically look like:

You’re essentially lighting the painting from two sides, evenly.  This creates a shadow on both sides of any part of the painting that has any depth- generally brush strokes.  It’s a basic principle of studio lighting…  for every light source you add, you’re adding another shadow.  Here’s what a detail of that type of lighting produces:

The impression of the image is that the brush strokes are confused- they’re hard to read, and hard to gauge the depth and direction of each stroke.  The contrast is relatively high, and the color saturation is also high, as we’ve discussed, but primarily due to the small diameter of the light source relative to the textures being lit.

When viewing the painting, almost any gallery, museum or other display will have quartz down-spots lighting the piece.  A typical museum will have a combination of soft ceiling-wide lights in a mock-skylight and quartz or HID downspots trained on the painting.  This gives you a significantly different sense of the work, since each brush stroke is lit from the top, with a shadow below it.  It’s easy to read, it is clear what the depth and texture of the painting has, and it contributes to an good interpretation of what the artist intended.  Using similar lighting, we can reproduce that painting with the same feel of a museum viewing experience.  Here’s an example of that:

This is a significantly different interpretation of the painting.  First, the surface of the painting has modeling.  We can see where the top and bottom of a stroke is, and we can literally feel the depth of the paint on the canvas.  Second, the contrast and color are significantly more subtle, largely due to the relative size of the light source we’ve used – a larger, more diffuse but even lighting producing a softer edged, more open shadow.

The result is a viewing experience that’s far closer to viewing the actual painting in a carefully lit environment.  There is simply no case where you will see any painting lit in the standard copy-reproduction lighting formula-  from both sides by harsh, direct lighting.  This traditional wisdom dictating fine art lighting is simply wrong.  It’s a completely artificial method of lighting artwork, devised from a technical standpoint of lighting work evenly within the limitations of the tools which were available, but not at all considering the experiential considerations of the reproduction process.

That is, traditional fine-art lighting completely ignores how the photographic process will change the viewers experience of the subject.

This can be taken one step further.  Consider the light under which the artist created the work.

Historically, painters worked in what’s known as the “north-light studio”, or, a studio lit primarily by a bank of large windows on the north wall of the studio and a north-facing skylight.  Since this prevents direct sun from entering the studio it yields a large, soft, even light source, relatively consistent throughout the day, and was by far the most common environment for painters even well into the mid-20th century.  This is even true for landscape painters, who would typically make their research sketches in the field, then return to their studios to create the final painting.

This large, soft and predominantly “cool” light source gave a significantly different impression to a painting than what we’re familiar with.  Here’s a simulation of what that would look like, captured with the Cruse camera with the softest lighting possible:

This is probably what the artist saw when creating the painting…  or as near as we can recreate it in a fine-art reproduction environment.  It’s a significantly different experience, and it’s entirely due to the lighting used to capture the work.

Reproducing art work is far more than a simple, traditional copy/repro technique.  Because the original painting is not flat, and an important part of the feel and intent of the work is so dependent on that dimensionality, creating faithful reproductions of original art is much more than a reprographic process.

It’s a photographic process.

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: You’re Doing it Wrong) Part 1

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: The Importance of Lighting) Part 2

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: Enough Talk) Part 3

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: North Light, You Say?) Part 4

On Fine Art Reproduction: (or, How to Do It Right) Part 5

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: The Importance of Lighting) Part 2

So, no painting created in a north-light studio has been reproduced, or for that matter displayed, as the artist saw it. What exactly does this mean?

There’s one key to understanding lighting.  That is learning the difference, and the effects, of hard and soft light.  Everything else about describing light is either a combination of, or degree between these two.

The easiest way to imagine hard light is to think of a bright, sunny, cloudless day.  Your light is coming from an intense, very small source- the sun.  Shadows are deep, and sharp-edged.  Colors are bright and rich- saturated, to put it in the painter’s terms.  Contrast- the brightness of whites compared to the depth of blacks- is extreme, to put it in photographic terms.  This is “hard” lighting.  Because of the sharpness of the shadow line and the depth of contrast, texture is enhanced.

Now visualize the other extreme, an overcast, cloudy day.  There are no shadows, colors seem pale.  Shadows are open, there’s no shadow line.  Your light is coming evenly from the entire sky, thus your light source is the entire sky, and extremely large.  There’s very little contrast- it’s a “gray day”.  This is “soft” lighting.  Textures are not enhanced, they’re downplayed. Subtlety and nuance trump drama and volume.

This is precisely the same comparison between standard copy and reprographic lighting and a north-light studio.  Copy lights are relatively small, intense light sources.  They produce hard-edged shadows that are deep black.  They produce high contrast between blacks and whites, and very saturated colors.  A north-light studio is a large, soft light source.  The shadows it produces are soft-edged, and open- not deep black.  Colors are subtle, and contrast is low.

Standard copy lighting evolved from reprographic work- reproduction of flat art and photographs.  It’s technically accurate, designed to be even, color correct, and efficient.  It is workable for reflective art without texture or depth, but as soon as you add dimension, it fails.  Dimension creates shadows and highlights, and lighting a dimensional piece from either side creates shadows and highlights that are opposing and horizontal…  completely unnatural to any typical way of viewing artwork.  Reprographic lighting is designed to enhance saturation and contrast to give a color range and contrast range that fits within the range of a film.  Not to create a visual effect that is somehow similar to viewing the original piece.

As soon as you move to a dimensional subject, you have moved into the realm of Photography.  You now have to think in terms of using the medium to express the experience of the original artwork.  Once you move into Photography, you have to reconsider lighting.

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: You’re Doing it Wrong) Part 1

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: The Importance of Lighting) Part 2

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: Enough Talk) Part 3

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: North Light, You Say?) Part 4

On Fine Art Reproduction: (or, How to Do It Right) Part 5

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: You’re Doing it Wrong) Part 1

Recently I did some work for a very dear friend, and highly respected oil painter, scanning his work on the Cruse camera and reproducing it with one of my large-format printers.  He wasn’t happy with it, and had a very hard time verbalizing exactly what seemed wrong.  He was, though, emphatic, and the way he did finally put it into words was that the reproduction was “doing violence” to the intention of his painting.

What he meant was, it felt like it was tearing it apart – he was seeing things which were not intended to be seen, and not seeing what he worked so hard to show.  It was as if the painting was being dissected…quite literally.

After a long series of conversations, it became very clear to me what was happening.  The lighting I had used to scan his painting was significantly different that the lighting in his studio.  He was seeing the painting as if it was in an entirely new location, with entirely different lighting.  From his perspective, the wrong lighting.

His studio has a large, north-facing window, but the primary lighting on his work comes from a bank of halogen down-spots which have been carefully aimed and balanced over his large canvasses.  This produces a very specific rendering of the work.  He can see highlights from his brush strokes, and details, tones and values as the painting would appear lit in almost any gallery or museum environment.  When I lit the piece from both sides, with the standard copy-board lighting (the standard method of virtually any fine-art reproduction, used by every museum, photographer or reproduction service working at any acceptable level of quality standards), I was lighting textures that he simply never saw, nor intended the viewer to see.

If the intention of the artist has any value at all, it was simply the wrong lighting.

We tried an experiment.  I went into his studio and photographed his work under exactly the same lighting that he used to create the painting.  We then took it a step further…  I printed the image right there.  We, together, evaluated the lighting, the tones and colors in the print, again, lit by exactly the same light, next to the original painting (obviously, still under the same lights).  He was happy with the final print.  It met, to the degree that any reproduction could, his intentions of the original work.

Why is this?  It has to do with the basic principles of the quality and characteristics of light.  The lights used in copy photography are completely different than the lighting used in a painters studio.  Most studios are lit with light that is a substantially different color than copy lights- that is, they’re working with a different spectrum, which will reflect colors differently.  The angle of the lighting in a copy setup is simply never used in an artist’s studio, nor in a gallery or museum.

In an effort to be technically accurate, the practices adopted in fine art copy photography have forgotten what the purpose of the process is – to represent the work as the artist intended it.

Is this important?  I would argue, yes, it’s vitally important.

Keep something in mind.  Almost every painting created in the mid – 20th century and before was painted in the traditional “north-light studio”- a studio lit solely by a large, north-facing window and usually a large, north-facing skylight.  There really couldn’t be a more profound difference between the quality of light in this kind of studio- soft, very cool (blue, rather than amber), and coming from one direction with a “fill” light reflected from a surrounding room), and the light used by a fine art reproduction process- warm, to neutral white, from multiple sources with varying degrees of “softening” applied to the reflectors.

You can quite confidently state that no painting created in a north-light studio has been reproduced, or for that matter displayed, as the artist saw it.  You have never really seen, not as the artist has, the work.

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: You’re Doing it Wrong) Part 1

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: The Importance of Lighting) Part 2

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: Enough Talk) Part 3

On Fine Art Reproduction… (or: North Light, You Say?) Part 4

On Fine Art Reproduction: (or, How to Do It Right) Part 5

Telemarketing. FAIL.

I once asked someone who fancied himself a Sales Manager for a little script…  just an idea of what he thought a good cold call would sound like.  This is what I got.

OK, I’m being a bitch.

But, honestly, I don’t even know where to start on how wrong this is, and why.  Why?  Because, basically, I feel like, when you interrupt someone from their work to pitch them on you and your company, it’s a good first step to try to actually have a conversation with them?  Maybe?  Sales, as Talking to People?

I know…  crazy idea.

‘Course, I only did it when I had my studio and schlepped my portfolio for a couple of decades.  What do I know?

So, to be a little more constructive, let’s Google “How to have a conversation”, shall we?  Here’s the first hit, on WikiHow.  It’s perfect.

Let’s distill it down to the basic steps, but it boils down to making a cold call not cold:

• Find out about the person you’ll be talking to. (This is my favorite.  If you do a little research beyond dialing a phone number on a list, you’d be surprised how much you can learn about your new friend.)
• Ask questions.
• Listen. (Such an important skill…  SO neglected in Sales.)
• Consider your response before disagreeing.
• Do not panic over lulls.
• Remember that sometimes if a conversation isn’t going well, it might not be your fault.
• Know when the conversation is over.

 

 

Museum and Art Reproduction Standards (links)

I just got this great information from my friend who’s the Head of Photography at a Very Prestigious Museum. (You know how coy those museum-types are…  )

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works

RIT School of Print Media

National Preservation Office (UK, pdf d/l)

ImageMuse.org

CDINY site

Phase One Lens Tool blog

Interesting stuff…  of course, there’s the UPDIG site, too.

 

How PR Works: The Cobbler’s Shoes, Mousetraps, and Other Tales

Sit down, have a cuppa, and look through these links.  All this PR talk, I decided to do a piece on myself, just for fun.  Here’s the release I wrote, here, on  PRWeb

If I do say so myself, it’s a damn fine piece of work.  Why?  Because it gives an editor a story line…  several, in fact.  I’m a hack builder with no budget and barely a clue, but there’s enough there, and every bit of it’s true, that it makes an interesting read.

So, you pump it out on a PR service, and it goes out on the interwebs.

There are enough keywords in there to get picked up by the EV, alternative energy and Green tech feeds, which are basically robots, but rip the story and regurgitate it on their own pages.  Here’s an example, Yahoo News.

Then, the big surprise, DealerNews picks it up.  (DealerNews is a huge motorsports news service that everybody reads.)  They like the book angle, so they do a piece focusing on that, here: DealerNews.

I start getting emails from buddies in the biz, saying congrats.

A few more days go by, and I see this, on EV World.

They, in their Photo Album piece, post this, with me appearing just under Chip’s Pikes Peak news.  So I get to be next to Chip.  My yellow bike is prettier than his yellow bike, by the way.

EarthTechling picked it up and actually wrote an original story from it, with a little different twist, here: EarthTechling

I just noticed that story got picked up by UK Reuters…  once it gets into the official news services, it’s no-holds-barred.  If it’s a good story (which mine ain’t) it can go what feels like viral, like Tony Coiro and his solar bike at Purdue.

I’ve done a lot to leverage it, to fan the flames.  One thing was to seek out the writers or editors on Twitter and thank them in a re-Tweet, which gets them more attention and gets me lovin’.   I pasted it all over the Facebook, etc. and I sent out an email blast you may have seen doing a little “Look at ME Mom!” piece.  That’s here, and went out to 500 addresses: MailChimp

As a result of all this, I got the highest traffic to my site ever, for one day, and gave it a huge bump for the month.  I’ve got a bunch of emails, new follows on Twitter, stuff like that.

Imagine what I could have done with a story like, Dedham Man Builds Electric Motorcycle From Scrap, Breaks 100mph Using RC Helicopter Batteries, (which is next) or, Backyard Builder Races Vintage Yamaha Against Vintage Norton at Laguna…

As I told a friend, the problem with doing something like this is you’re so wrapped up in how cool it all is, you actually believe that you’ve build a better mousetrap and the world will, in fact, beat a path to your door without ever telling anyone about it.  Even me…  and I “get” it.  (The cobbler’s shoes?)

Rethinking Film, Digital Photography and the Profession

Back when digital photography was catching on, I heard more than a few professional photographers say that they thought this was another nail in the coffin of professional photography, because now, “anybody can take a good picture with their digital camera”.

I thought this was flat wrong.  Now, I’m beginning to wonder.

One of my past students has decided he’s going to start learning how to shoot film.  It’s astounding how a photographer of his remarkable, professional-level ability suddenly looks like any high school kid in the darkroom for the first time.  The exposures are horrible.  The processing is completely wrong, the printing is inconsistent and sloppy.  Of course, because film is now considered an “alternative process”, these mistakes are now called “Art”.   I can only imagine what a client would call them, back in 1995, but anything resembling “acceptable” is pretty much out of the question.

Maybe there’s more to this film thing than I remembered…

Now, thinking back, it took me years… no, decades to learn to process and print film.  I remember being frustrated at a particularly bad session in the darkroom in college, and suddenly realizing Ansel Adams was in his 50s before he was recognized as a master printer…  at the tender age of 20, I figured I still had some time left, in spite of working at it for all of about 7 years.  By the time I started my studio and set up my commercial darkroom the process was reflex – a process I could do in my sleep, even today, and produce professional-quality prints.  But that was after over ten years of work trying to master it.

My father always said that the difference between a professional photographer and an amateur was that a pro will go into any assignment and come back with photographs.  This was a hell of a lot harder shooting film.  There’s a whole other level of things that can go slightly, or even horribly wrong.  Suddenly, the frustration and dismay I feel at hearing students’ lame excuses at not being able to do digital photography assignments on time, for whatever reason, is starting to make more sense.  These guys have no idea how hard it can be, and I kind of took that all for granted.

I’ve always figured what made a pro was the photograph.  The image.  I’m beginning to understand that I think this way because I have the discipline of film photography in my foundation of skills. I take it for granted.  In recent years I’ve been dismayed at the complete lack of professionalism in photography, and I’ve joked that photographers should have to serve an apprenticeship like other trades…  but the fact is, it’s just not that hard to come back from an assignment with decent shots, with a good image.  It’s only a little more difficult to come back with great shots.

I think those old guys were right, now.  Shooting film added a level of skill that simply isn’t necessary with digital photography.  It was the mystique that made us a desired commodity…  the ability to translate our vision into an exceptional image.  The magic of the darkroom, the vision of the artist.  I’ve always looked at digital photography from the perspective of that basic discipline, not understanding that it simply is not needed to make a photograph today.

What are some of these things we used to have to do?  Shoot backup- film, not data- that is, figure out some way to shoot that “once in a lifetime” photograph twice – at least – in case we, or the lab, destroyed one negative.  Bracket exposures- because even good film was incredibly narrow in what it needed to give good tones.  Standardize processing, so we knew what a good exposure would yield for a negative…  and a one-stop-under, or one-stop-over, as well.  And how to process an under, or over-exposure to yield good density.

We used to go into the darkroom and shut the door.  There were no distractions, yet still we’d screw stuff up.  We’d be over-the-top retentive about dust and disorganization, because dust can damage film, and a disorganized and dirty darkroom could destroy countless rolls in processing.

And most of the time we’d come back with amazing photographs.

Why are people simply unwilling to pay for professional photography?  Simply because it’s not that hard anymore.  I’ve seen tons of great photography from students and amateurs using digital cameras.  If they had to learn how to shoot with film, they’d be back in the very baby-steps of their learning process.

But they don’t.

.

.