Questions regarding George DeWolfe in View Camera mag

[chris jordan]

Jorge, your comment about people trying to ride the coat tails of Ansel's name is a good one (and, George DeWolfe is a shameless Ansel-coat-tail rider), but in this context I think you're incorrect. Ansel was still alive when Photoshop came into existence, and Ansel foresaw digital printing and made a comment about it. I don't have the exact quote handy, but it was somthing about having more control and being able to exercise greater artistic choice than ever before, and he lamented that he would not get to use the digital process during his lifetime. So, I suspect that if he were still alive, he'd be whailin away on Photoshop (but probably still making silver gelatin prints, likely from 20x24" digitally-generated negs).

~chris jordan

[Michael Feldman]

I agree with Chris' observation about Ansel Adams, except that since next year is the 100th anniversary of his birth, if he were still alive, he might not be doing any photography.

[Mike Kravit]

Folks,

First, let me say that until you have seen a well made quadtone piezo print all the nonsense about injkjet prints not coming close to the tonal range of silver or platinum is in the words of a great American president hooey!

Down here at the Palm Beach Photographic Workshops I have seen and handles Goerge DeWolfe's prints first hand. They are truly spectacular. The tonal range (at least visually) is as good if not better than Platinum and far exceeds silver images (Fiber or otherwise).

As a Platinum/Palladium printer I was also hesitant about the Cone Piezography system. Well the truth is with my Epson 7000 and drum scans my 20x24 images have a tonal range that I believe exceeds platinum.

With all dues respect to Dan Smith, he obviously has not seen first hand and compared well made Piezography images. Right now we are having a show in the Palm Beach Photographic Centre's Museum that contains silver, platinum and Piezo images. I would challenge anyone to look at the show and tell me that the Piezo images do not exceed the quality of traditional silver.

This of course is highly dependent on the image, the exposure, the scan and the artists skills. Just as a fine silver or platinum print is. With that in mind, the images in the Museum will be open to the public begining on Friday evening at 6pm and will run through the end of August.

Mike

Michael J. Kravit Palm Beach Photographic Centre A Not-For-Profit Organization Board Of Directors

[Michael Feldman]

The only problem is that a drum scanner, the Epson 7000, and the Piezography24 system for the 7000, will set you back about 20-25K.

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Michael, Opportunity for what? Is the fact that is digital will make it better and/or more beautiful? No! So really, the only opportunity I see is that it might make it "easier" for some people who do not wish to spend time in a darkroom. In the end they will spend the time learning how to use photoshop, either way it will require effort and "taste" to produce something worthwhile. According to De Wolfe piezography gave him better control of the shadows etc, that maybe so, but if anything I have learned working with photography is that there comes a time when is best to you leave the image well enough alone! any additional tweaking will only make it worse. My question is how much more control do you need? If a person who is now doing photography is not able to control their medium, I don't care how many gizmos and gadgets you give him/her, they still will not be able to create something beautifull. Look, I an neither against or for digital and/or piezography. My point is I don't care wether you make a beautiful image with a $7000 mac,coupled to a $50000 dollar film recorder and printed on a $2000 printer, or you made it in your bathroom with a besler printmaker 35 jumping on one foot and chanting voodoo prayers, if the image is beautiful I will buy it or at least say it is beautiful. I just wish people in the digital area would stop saying "As good as....", "better than...." let the technology stand on its own and people will make a descision. If it truly is a better mouse trap then soon Kodak will stop making film and I will have to get a ten pound digital back for my 8x10. Until that happens I will stay in my darkroom because I enjoy it no matter what the digital advances are.

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Chris, I think you are correct, I now remember he did make a comment like that. You are probably right he might have been working on photoshop now!

[Michael Feldman]

Jorge,

Obviously you don't agree, but some photographers would like to have more control over the image, as opposed to simply accepting what "is there" when the film is exposed. But this is really a philosophical argument about the nature of art and expression and not a technical one.

There are actually two starting points to digital Piezography printing: 1) high quality scanning of traditional film, and 2) digital cameras (or digital film backs). Right now even $3K digital cameras cannot yield the kind of detail (or digital file size) that can be obtained with a drum scan of a 6x7 negative. Not even in the same ballpark. Obviously. it gets worse with LF. So don't plan on giving up on film anytime soon, even if you did try (God forbid) digital printing. But as I have mentioned in my previous posts, the very highest quality Piezography process that others have been raving about (drum scans, Epson 7000, etc.) is still extremely expensive.

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Michael, Actually I think we agree, If you want to "add" or "substract" something from the image you capture and doing it digitally is easier, great! As a matter of fact the master of this genere, Jerry Uelsmann I think is doing some of his compositions digitally now. As to the price it does not really matter, eventually the prices for all the gizmos will come down. A perfect example of my objections is Mr. Kravit's post, in it he throws down the gauntlet and dares all of us to go and examine the prints and how much better they are than traditional silver prints. Of course he never mentions not only the price of the gizmos, which as I said before is irrelevant since they will come down, but all the time he has spent learning photoshop and all the process required to create these prints. It is this obsession digital printers have of trying to make people beleive that digital is the magic bullet that will make everybody with a lap top a master photographer that I find insulting. Of course right at the end comes the disclamer....all depends on the operator, etc! well like I have been trying to say in all these post, No s**t Sherlock! wether it is piezography or traditional the outcome depends on the operator, and a crappy piezography print will be crappy no matter how wonderful the process is, so...why worry? In any case enought of the soap box, in answer to Jim's question, no I have not seen them, and no, I dont know if they are any better than traditional prints. (Although I doubt they are)lol....could not ressist the last dig....

[Jonathan Brewer]

The learning curve for Photoshop is steep because the manuals for photoshop will sometimes leave out a step or procesure that must be done before achieving an effect the manual is trying to explain. It should also be said that most of what the Photoshop manual explains is easier to do than how they describe it, so a lot of the inherent difficulty in learning Photoshop is not learning Photoshop but figuring out the manual. I taught myself Photoshop starting with Photoshop 3 around 6 years ago, and if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't do it that way.

The first 6 mos, I had my head stuck in the manual trying to figure it all out with endless calls to Adobe for whatever. I got comfortable w/Photoshop in the next couple of years, and now I'm at the point where I can do anything I want. You begin to learn to use tools in different ways than they were inteded, and you begin to create your own procedures and effects and then your ability to create anything you want in Photoshop becomes almost infinite.

Looking back on it now, I honestly wasted quite a bit of time teaching myself Photoshop, and think it's a better deal for someone starting out in Photoshop to go the Class/mentor/tutor route. My brother tutors people in Photoshop, and I am contually amazed at the speed at which they pick up various aspects of Photoshop.

One related issue to this that is amazing to me is the work of some folks out there that are obviously good with Photoshop but didn't take the time to learn composition and/or some of the other basics, and they many times, come up with spectacular ideas which are poorly executed. I get the feeling some folks out there feel like, 'I'm smart, I'll learn photoshop, and start producing fine art'.

My point is that if you need to go over the basics, you should reading some good artbooks/auditing art classes/auditing Photography classes while you're tackling that Photoshop manual. The fact also remains that a lot of what makes up Photoshop is taken from traditional or straight photography and Photoshop like a lot of what is called digital is really an offshoot of Photography and not something separate.

I recently moved up to 8x10 to contact print with POP paper and maybe later experiment with some of the other alternative processes, and no matter how good digital gets, I'm still going to try this as opposed to giving up or selling the 8x10. Digital isn't going to replace the other things that people want to get into and these predictions of what digital is going to wipe out have been going on for years with a lot of what is straight photography still here. Digital is the wave of the future in how it changes Photography and not how it replaces it.

The shame is the influence that the hype for marketing purposes, has on the folks who gain the wrong perception and expectations of digital(it doesn't have to be one or the other), as opposed to what they could pursue with Photography as a serious hobbyist/advance amatuer/professional. Learning straight photography, or at least the basics of it, gives you a foundation that carries over to your digital work.

[Jim Chinn]

Thanks for the discussion. Since I brought up the issues i would like to clarify where stand. i will probably migrate to digital but not untill I can afford to do it with the quality equal to the best silver and platinum prints I have seen. But "cost to quality ratio" is going to have to approach that of Large Format when I started. What i mean by that is if the only way to get the quality results that I wanted required I buy a $3000 camera, a pair of new lenses for $3000 and a variable contrast head 4x5 enlarger for $3000 i would still be playing around exclusively with 35mm. But I was able to accumulate the equivalent in used gear for about $2500 to start out. Im not suggesting we will be buying used scanners and printers, but there will be a time when the bottom rungs of the technology will provide the tools to produce the prints we want at comparable costs to the wet darkroom. As far as the comment about some people just not wanting to spend the effort in the darkroom, I love the time I spend there, but with two small children and trying to balance photography, work and family, it becomes difficult to find more than a few hours a week get in there. It just seems very appealing that once you have processed and scanned the neg, you can spend your time creating the print, not mixing chemicals, testing chemicals, throwing out used chemicals, testing papers, trying to make identical prints with complicated printing designs etc etc.