Digital photography is such a wonderful concept. The instant feedback and low production cost of the images is an outstanding benefit to a photographer. We can shoot and chimp and shoot and chimp some more without wasting film and stacking up high developing costs. We know right away if our exposure and composition was good. We can go out with a couple gigabytes of memory cards and shoot thousands of photos in a day’s time. We download them to our computers when we get home, scan through them all, weed out the garbage, and save the good ones for further processing. After we have picked out the keepers, we spend some time perfecting them in photoshop, and then save the finished image. At this point we can as many prints of each image as we want, and the results will be almost identical from print to print as long as we don’t change printers, inks, or papers that we use. All of this is extremely beneficial for most commercial work such as weddings, portraits, and product photography. Once all the work is done, we can produce prints or digital image files for a customer on demand. What could possibly be wrong with this?
In the world of art, photography is still rather weak when it comes to value and longevity. Photographic prints from some of the classical masters are worth quite a bit of money on the auction blocks and in galleries. Most of this valuable photographic work is also produced by hand and with film or other means that don’t include digital imaging. Some of the greats like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston would spend hours producing a single print in the dark room. Some of these prints sell for thousands of dollars. Where are the digital images that sell for thousands of dollars? I have done a little research and don’t seem to find many digital image prints that command a very high price in the world of art. Why?
Maybe digital photographers haven’t been around long enough to establish themselves in the art world. Maybe the art world isn’t accepting digital work as art. A digital photographer can create prints that are truly amazing. In fact, you can’t really tell the difference between a digital and film print just by looking at them in many cases. Does it matter? Who cares how the print was made as long as you like what you see?
Let’s consider an oil painting for a moment. Everything you see when you look at an amazing oil painting was hand crafted by the painter. Each stroke of the brush was a labor of love by the artist. It’s an original work. You may see a price tag on that painting that will simply make your jaw hit the floor. Highly recognized painters get a lot of money for an original work. You might be able to buy a print of the original for a lot less money. You might even be able to buy a limited edition signed and numbered print for a fraction of the cost of the original. That limited edition print may still cost you several hundred dollars, but it’s a lot less than the several thousand or tens of thousands that might be required to own the original painting. The original painting is a one-of-a-kind. There won’t be another original.
In photography, there can be lots of originals. A classical photographer can make print after print from his original negative. Each of these prints is an original of sorts because there will be slight differences in each print made due to the nature of darkroom printing. The may all look very similar, but they will have their differences. A digital photographer has the original digital image file that was captured by the camera. In order for a digital photographer to mimic the work of a classical photographer, he must re-edit the original image each time he wants to make a print. If he does this, there may be noticeable differences from print to print, but if he just re-prints an image that has already been edited and finished, it’s like producing one of the prints of the original oil painting. It will be just like every other print in the set with the possible exception of a different number in a limited edition series. The only way a photographer can have a one-of-a-kind image is if the negative or original image file is destroyed after the first print is made, and that sort of defeats the purpose of photography. This medium is designed to allow us to reproduce prints on demand, whether it be by hand or digitally.
I don’t have a lot of experience in the photographic dark room, but it’s something I intend to get more involved with in the future. I want to learn the process of making prints by hand. It may sound odd, but I would rather spend a day shooting 10 to 15 photographs and then spend a couple days processing that film and making prints in the darkroom rather than spending a day shooting 500 images and editing in photoshop and then printing them on my photo printer. As a digital photographer, I have already come around to the point where I don’t shoot that many images when I go out on a photo shoot. I tend to spend more time looking at my available shots and then deciding what to shoot rather than just shooting everything I see and then sorting it out when I get home. In essence, I shoot more like a film photographer when I am out shooting personal stuff.
I have been looking around to see what it would cost to get started in large format film photography, and it’s something I will probably do within the next two years or so. My first objective is to start shooting 4×5 film and learn how to make contact prints. I probably won’t spend a lot of money on a view camera until I learn how to process the film and make the prints with reasonable success.
If any of you out there have equipment that I will need that is just collecting dust, I’m accepting donations :)
Art Photography
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