Sometime in the mid to late 1980's, I was in Ansel's home and he was showing a comparison of two 16x20 prints, one was a typical photographic print, the other was from a digital scan of some sort. I believe it was one of the poster prints. He was pointing out how much greater shadow detail he could get in his poster prints than in his original photographic prints. Given the era, I am assuming he made low contrast photographic prints, then had them scanned for printing, adjusting the contrast prior to printing, but that's only a guess.

Digital scanning was so new at the time, I not only knew nothing about the process, but didn't connect at all with the procedure he was describing. I do remember the remarkable difference in how much better the shadow detail looked in the reproduction than in the photographic print.

Since we have some folks on this forum who were around then, are there any comments on the process, and what does this indicate for those of us wanting to move our work with LF negatives to a digital darkroom.