Alex Wilson
05-14-2008, 01:21 PM
This topic came up in this thread (http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?t=704) but I thought It might be worth its own discussion.
Normally I am loathe to get into any type of film vs. digital debate: I'm much more concerned with whether the final image is good, and exactly how you got there is only a matter of process, not merit.
I don't do the convert the colour photo to B&W route because it is not I how I believe you shoot B&W.
I'm not sure I buy that. There has always been an element of translation between what you see and what the camera captures. The closest you can get to "seeing" in B&W with the camera would be to compose with a colour filter over the lens, but even then, what is captured would be changed by the response curve of the film to different wavelengths.
If you shoot digital as colour and convert to B&W, all you are doing is gaining the flexibility of essentially picking your colour filter after taking the shot. It's much like being able to take multiple film captures of the same shot, each with a different colour filter, and then picking the best negative to use for printing.
Since you don't see in B&W, and even if you did, film would not capture it exactly as you see it, I don't think there's any real distinction between a film or digital camera. Digital gives you more flexibility, if you want it. But no-one is making you use it.
That said if you put the effort in you can do very good B&W with a DSLR, just takes time to learn, but that goes with any aspect of photography. And you need to look through the view finder with a different out look.
I agree with that, but I don't think there is really a distinction between film and digital. You look through the camera the same way. With either, what you see isn't going to be exactly what is captured -- but it's the experience that adds up so a good photographers knows what they are going to get even though it is different than what they see.
Serious black and white is also dead. I have seen very little black and white of any quality anywhere on the net in any photographic forum. Beginners do not seem to realize that black and white requires considerably more work behind the camera and in postprocessing than colour and produce really poor quality work. Bottom line is if you do not do the detailed work necessary for a quality black and white shot, then you are just producing garbage.
I think it's more a signal-to-noise ration problem than anything else. With so many people shooting digital, and shooting so much, there is just a huge volume of colour images out there. A lot of amateurs will play around with B&W with mixed (but often poor) results, so there's a lot of chaff to sift through. I don't think serious B&W is dead, it's just harder to see the tree for the forest.
But when you consider the added flexibility of digital:
-colour capture, being able to weigh the colour channels when post-processing
-more advanced B&W conversion techniques, including masking and selective mixing of channels
-much more sophisticated abilities to re-contrast an image (more precise dodge/burning, shadow/highlights, HDR, etc.)
then I think that the future of B&W art photography gives its photographers a lot more to work with.
Does digital mean there's going to be more crap B&W? Sure. But I think it also means the good stuff is better (and is going to get even more) than it ever could with film.
Normally I am loathe to get into any type of film vs. digital debate: I'm much more concerned with whether the final image is good, and exactly how you got there is only a matter of process, not merit.
I don't do the convert the colour photo to B&W route because it is not I how I believe you shoot B&W.
I'm not sure I buy that. There has always been an element of translation between what you see and what the camera captures. The closest you can get to "seeing" in B&W with the camera would be to compose with a colour filter over the lens, but even then, what is captured would be changed by the response curve of the film to different wavelengths.
If you shoot digital as colour and convert to B&W, all you are doing is gaining the flexibility of essentially picking your colour filter after taking the shot. It's much like being able to take multiple film captures of the same shot, each with a different colour filter, and then picking the best negative to use for printing.
Since you don't see in B&W, and even if you did, film would not capture it exactly as you see it, I don't think there's any real distinction between a film or digital camera. Digital gives you more flexibility, if you want it. But no-one is making you use it.
That said if you put the effort in you can do very good B&W with a DSLR, just takes time to learn, but that goes with any aspect of photography. And you need to look through the view finder with a different out look.
I agree with that, but I don't think there is really a distinction between film and digital. You look through the camera the same way. With either, what you see isn't going to be exactly what is captured -- but it's the experience that adds up so a good photographers knows what they are going to get even though it is different than what they see.
Serious black and white is also dead. I have seen very little black and white of any quality anywhere on the net in any photographic forum. Beginners do not seem to realize that black and white requires considerably more work behind the camera and in postprocessing than colour and produce really poor quality work. Bottom line is if you do not do the detailed work necessary for a quality black and white shot, then you are just producing garbage.
I think it's more a signal-to-noise ration problem than anything else. With so many people shooting digital, and shooting so much, there is just a huge volume of colour images out there. A lot of amateurs will play around with B&W with mixed (but often poor) results, so there's a lot of chaff to sift through. I don't think serious B&W is dead, it's just harder to see the tree for the forest.
But when you consider the added flexibility of digital:
-colour capture, being able to weigh the colour channels when post-processing
-more advanced B&W conversion techniques, including masking and selective mixing of channels
-much more sophisticated abilities to re-contrast an image (more precise dodge/burning, shadow/highlights, HDR, etc.)
then I think that the future of B&W art photography gives its photographers a lot more to work with.
Does digital mean there's going to be more crap B&W? Sure. But I think it also means the good stuff is better (and is going to get even more) than it ever could with film.