Ah, something photographic to discuss. Thanks Schnozz!
I'm certainly with you about 4x6 prints. They can be sooo misleading
about what's on the film
Sharpness/detail: C.H. points out that there may be more detail there
than you think - but I don't want to view my images a little bit at a
time through a loupe. And there is still way more detail there than is
on the film. Take a look at
<http://home.attbi.com/0.000000E+00dreammoose/wsb/html/view.cgi-photos.html-MerchantID-50215-Publish-t-makestatic-true-skip-15.html>
where I compared print and film scans of the same image.
Tonal range/contrast: In the same test scans, you can see the loss in
tonal graduation in the print vs. the film scan. Also, the film has a
broader range of brightness info than the print can produce. The machine
makes it's own decision what to do with contrast and whether to blow out
highlights and/or bury shadow detail. I just prepared an image for the
web for a friend who was wise to bring along the negs as well as the
prints. The sky in the background was just blank white on the print. The
final result from a film scan has blue sky with distant hills and some
close in plant detail where that white blob was on the print. I've had
similar experiences where most of the detail I shot for ends up lost in
shadow on the print, but is all there on the film.
Color/saturation: Take film to the drug store Kodak processing and I get
these BRIGHT prints with lots of contrast and wild oversaturation.
Eyecatching, but hardly related to what the subject looked like.On the
other hand, take Portra 160NC in for Kodak Royal or Fuji Professional
processing and the world looks gray and subdued in the prints. This
shot
<http://home.attbi.com/0.000000E+00dreammoose/wsb/html/view.cgi-photo.html--SiteID-197925.html>
, taken under low clouds on a rainy afternoon on Supra 800 came out on
the print looking soft, gray, blah, the kind it's easy to skip by as a
failure. The shot isn't the failure, at least I'm proud of it, but the
print sure was. Take a pic of a range of wonderful, subtle shades of
green foliage, the machine tries for something like neutral overall
color balance for the print, and colors never seen in nature appear on
the print.
If you rely on 4x6s, you are missing out on much of the images you
capture, and may never know it. And it fails worst for me on some of the
very types of images I am most interested in making. They even skipped
printing one image on my last roll, presumeably thinking it was a wasted
shot. It was an intentional shot, but red-orange sunset light coming
through leaves and a window and throwing the shadow of an old fashioned
broom against the wall, with much of the frame just black, didn't look
much like a 'picture' to the processor, I guess. I basically look at
4x6s as proofs. I'm starting to get reasonably good at seeing from the
print what potential likely lies in the negative. I'd certainly like a
better means of proofing. I've tried PictureCD, but wasn't very impressed.
The other problem for those of us on the net, is the limitations of
reasonably sized image files. With a lot of web images, it's really
impossible to tell much about the full quality of the original. At least
you can get color, contrast, etc. right. Apparent sharpness is often
more a measure of the skill with which the down sampling/sharpening was
done than the sharpness of the original image. And those JPEGed skies, ugh!
Certainly, 4x6s let a lot of the capability of the OM system go to waste.
Moose
AG Schnozz wrote:
Are 4x6 prints the real standard for comparision? Have we
reduced ourselved to this point?
<snip>
If you limit your "world", anything will do. If you're happy
with what you are currently getting, you are not expecting
enough from yourself or your photography.
Ask yourself this question: Are you "Zuiko-worthy?"
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