...and a little white.

I've read it a couple of times in the past, but today re-read this interview with Ralph Gibson.

But anyway, the big emphasis in digital photography is how many more million pixels this new model has than the competitor’s model. It’s about resolution, resolution, resolution, as though that were going to provide us with a picture that harbored more content, more emotional power. Well in fact. It’s very good for a certain kind of graphic thing in color but I don’t necessarily do that kind of photograph.

Sounds much like what I wrote about computers a couple of days ago — and Gibson is a big fan of digital. Surely his comments were a subconcious influence on my thinking.

At one time, I used an 85mm lens for nearly everything. Now it (and my Zeiss 90mm) sit at the bottom of the bag, largely unused. Tried forcing myself to use the 90 today — if only, as Duchamp said, "to avoid conforming to my own taste."
Comments on "Black"

Thanks for pointing out the Gibson interview.
What he says about agitation is cool and I use Fuji 400 too, no one else seems to, so I thought that was cool, too.

That quote from DuChamp about conforming to one's own taste is useful. Could keep you from getting in a rut.


As far as megapixels and bit depth goes, besides the max enlargable size, there's also the post-processing modifications you make like increasing
the contrast and saturation and the degradation it causes to the image (spiky histogram).
I assume with increased bit depth and resolution, the effect is less noticeable? I haven't tried editing RAW files yet. Since you're actually modifying the camera readings
here is there degradation?

Posted by: Jon Fernquest at July 5, 2003 09:41 PM

Using PhotoShop adjustment layers instead of "straight" manipulations can help with the histogram, since they'll be "collated" at a higher precision (16-bit) before being re-quantized at the final eight bits for output.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I too was in the Neopan camp for a while — but switched back to Delta. Currently I'm doing a little comparison testing on the new Tri-X too, which I expect to be very similar to the Neopan 400.,

Posted by: bjorke at July 20, 2003 08:37 PM