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Thread: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

  1. #71

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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by Vaughn View Post
    I'll have to remember that line next time someone asks how long my carbon prints will "last"!
    I bet you are not mixing your carbon pigment with blood and urine like the cave men!!

    Sandy
    For discussion and information about carbon transfer please visit the carbon group at groups.io
    [url]https://groups.io/g/carbon

  2. #72
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Aaaah, now we are finally starting to get somewhere with this discussion - the secret techniques are starting to be revealed! I'll jot it down in my (handwritten) notebook, just in case I have the opportunity to work in carbon. Or maybe Formulary could batch up blood
    and urine in alt photo kits. Never question cave painters. Their work is still the standard
    by which all others are judged.

  3. #73

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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    The response would be interesting if he had proclaimed that he thought inkjet prints were as good as silver. If I recall correctly, there was no shortage of comments here when it came out that Dykinga and Muench were starting to shoot digital. Either way, isn't it healthy for people to question other people's point of view?

  4. #74

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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by rdenney View Post
    I hope you are never asked to write a 100-page report...
    Quote Originally Posted by Steve Smith View Post
    Without a PC? Pen and paper...
    Quote Originally Posted by rdenney View Post
    You are kidding, right?...
    There are very few situations where the substantive information within a "100-page report" couldn't have been just as effectively communicated in 5 pages. Most writing after the executive summary is blah, blah, blah intended to justify the author's value or how much a client is charged for the work.

    With a little refresher practice, I'd bet you could create 5 pages of good penmanship in the same or less time than it takes to type 100 pages.

    Sal "who's railed since elementary school against judging the worth of documents by counting words and who recently ended a long engineering career spent largely churning out useless long reports" Santamaura

  5. #75

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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by Ken Lee View Post
    A vacuum cleaner makes it easier to clean a room, but requires electricity and all the problems that come along with getting it. The net effect of so many household devices may be greater pollution and flabbiness. Advanced medicine may save countless lives (or prolong them at least), but introduces problems of overpopulation. We may send our children to school in a bus instead of making them walk, but we need to set aside hours of exercise for them during the day, lest they become restless and... obese. And while buses may be convenient, providing fuel for them introduces a host of problems.
    Ken, this reminds me of a John Muir quote from his writings:
    When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ...

  6. #76
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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by sanking View Post
    I bet you are not mixing your carbon pigment with blood and urine like the cave men!!

    Sandy
    No, but occasionally a beard hair ends up in the print...

    Either way, isn't it healthy for people to question other people's point of view?
    Definitely!

  7. #77
    Roger Cole's Avatar
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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Barendt View Post
    Oh Jay, if only your thought we're true life would be so much simpler.



    Logic can be persuasive within scientific research, but even there it has to fight emotion.

    In sales emotion wins over logic, in politics too.

    The very reasons most people photograph things is for fun or love, not for logic.

    The story (true or not) we tell about something adds value, without a story things are generic/commoditized/cheap.
    I had started to post earlier, "what on earth does logic have to do with art?" but knew I'd get roasted. Well I've donned my flame proof undies, or else just plain don't care.

    Of course that's inferring something more absolute than I believe too. Any short statement is going to have limits. They're not totally unrelated, but can be very uneasy bedfellows. That's fine with me. I'm a network engineer. I work with iron laws of numbers all the time. My art is for my emotional side, and photography is a good one for me because its technological processes (I'm referring here to analog, but the same would be true of digital) gives my logical mind something to lock on and occupy itself so that it can get out of the way. I prefer analog because I overload on computers and digital anyway. The last thing I want to do is work an all night maintenance shift upgrading our backbone network then come home and use more computers for my art, but that's a personal situation and partial reason for my preference. It doesn't apply to anyone else. Even someone else with the same job might well not feel the same way about it.

    So logic is important to me if I'm deciding whether I should develop a little longer or such. It doesn't really dictate my choice of analog versus digital. That's inherently an emotional choice for me. I do this because I enjoy it, and I use the medium I enjoy working with. Logic, other than that very basic "do the one you like" doesn't really enter into it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Vaughn View Post
    I think people need to realize Bruce's writing is titled "New Thoughts on Digital Photography". Not "An Authoriative Thesis on Digital Photography". That it appeared on his website -- not Scientific American or some peer-reviewed technical or cultural publication. It has not even appeared in Popular Photography (is that still around?)

    His website, for cripe's sake! He forced no one to read it, he makes no claim of it being the "last word" on the subject.

    We are a silly bunch of people...
    I think this sums up what I was trying to say with my comments that I doubt Bruce cares if some people don't agree etc. Even that got turned into criticism of him. That man couldn't say "a cloud in the sky is almost always located somewhere above the ground" without producing controversy. I also don't see him saying "I'm right because I'm Bruce Barnbaum." If there's argument by authority it's inferred by the reader. He may not treat his students as complete people but, if so, I can't tell from this. He's focusing on a few areas that he says he sees repeatedly, or even always, and I have no particular reason to doubt his observations. He doesn't claim they are the sum total of all his observations and opinions.

    It's almost as if once someone reaches a certain level of notoriety they can't express an opinion without being piled on for it, or else it better be iron-clad logical. Bah.

    Ultimately, they're just his opinions and his observations, posted on his own web site. Like them, hate them, agree or disagree, whatever.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ken Lee View Post
    Yes, I thought it might generate some insightful discussion, or at least help a few members consider the issues.

    Personally, I don't think that we can ever reach a judgement about any aspect of technology, because "progress" is inherently paradoxical, like the proverbial double-edged sword.

    A vacuum cleaner makes it easier to clean a room, but requires electricity and all the problems that come along with getting it. The net effect of so many household devices may be greater pollution and flabbiness. Advanced medicine may save countless lives (or prolong them at least), but introduces problems of overpopulation. We may send our children to school in a bus instead of making them wal, but we need to set aside hours of exercise for them during the day, lest they become restless and... obese. And while buses may be convenient, providing fuel for them introduces a host of problems. In the casino, the house always comes out ahead, because the game is rigged. By analogy, scientists observe something called Entropy.

    Those cave-painters depicted in the cartoon, may have been right all along. They were perhaps the first "Carbon printers", and some of their works have lasted 35,000 years.
    Most labor saving appliances and technologies don't end up doing anything of the sort. If they make us more efficient we don't work less, we just get more done or else they shift our work to other areas. Microwave ovens didn't make us work less, they just made us work at other things more and cook less.

    I'm not sure where there may be an analogy to digital photography here, unless it's that I don't see people spending less time on post processing and more on shooting. Rather I see them shooting large numbers of nearly identical images then spending as much time chimping a day's shooting as I would spend in the darkroom. They just sort through many times more (often nearly identical) images when doing it.

    Yes yes, not everyone does this, and one can certainly shoot deliberately with digital, and I'm sure many pros do so.

    Quote Originally Posted by sanking View Post
    I bet you are not mixing your carbon pigment with blood and urine like the cave men!!

    Sandy
    Interesting aside - I attended and art show opening that included work by my wife's best friend. Among the other art displayed there was a series of paintings in what looked like a dull red pigment but was actually HIV+ blood done by an HIV+ artist. The medium was part of the message. So even painting with blood isn't totally gone. I don't know of anyone including urine in their pigments, but they may well be out there.

  8. #78

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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay DeFehr View Post
    mark,

    I think I might have confused you.
    No confusion for me.

    I truly believe that emotion drives the buying decisions of anything that must be sold. It's all about whom we trust first and then what we know.

    Take margarine/Oleo for example. There was a point in my life where I believed fully it was better for me than butter.

    There were a few other people that believed that too, we were afraid of butter. Uncle Sam and a few others sold us on that fear.

    Turns out we were wrong. Eggs, same basic thing.
    You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain

  9. #79

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    Re: "New Thoughts on Digital Photography" by Bruce Barnbaum

    Quote Originally Posted by Jerry Bodine View Post
    Ken, this reminds me of a John Muir quote from his writings:
    When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe ...
    Beautiful

    I suspect we're connecting to the same basic tradition of thinking.

  10. #80
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sal Santamaura View Post
    With a little refresher practice, I'd bet you could create 5 pages of good penmanship in the same or less time than it takes to type 100 pages.
    I'll do you the respect of the assumption of innocence in trying to extrapolate a grade-school lesson to a world where complex designs and processes can't be described in five pages. Systems are far more complicated than they used to be, and far more multidisciplinary. It takes a lot words to explain things clearly enough to prevent failures, and most engineering failures can be traced to inadequate documentation, not a surfeit of it.

    Rick "whose penmanship is not at issue" Denney

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