I've been bowled a googly (look it up) by my genes*, and have been trying to imagine a future which doesn't include large or heavy cameras. Current digiboxes make very nice photographs, but I still hanker for large sheets of film when it comes to subtle colour reproduction. I have always been attracted to LF by tonality rather than resolution, and there has not yet been a digital solution I could ever afford which matched what I see and value in LF film.

This baffles me slightly, as I somehow assumed that everything film does when it records an image could be expressed as a transfer function. This might be non-linear, or involve spatial effects, but I was pretty confident that wide dynamic range capture would allow subsequent processing to get a suitable reproduction. I'm not there yet.

This may just reflect my lack of expertise, but I'm arrogant (and experienced) enough that I don't think that's the real problem. Rather, I think the root cause is the tendency of digital colours to migrate to the corners of their colour space upon almost any manipulation. It is just too easy to saturate channels, or to bump up against the edges of the colour space polygon.

So I'm making lemonade. Trying to find ways of using this effectively. Allowing detail to be lost in areas of saturated colour, in the same way as I routinely allow detail to be lost in areas which I allow to drift out of focus.

Here are three examples.








I don't really want another film vs. digital discussion (not now I've had my say :-) but I would be interested in seeing attempts to use the characteristics of the new medium in a photographic way - that is, to turn bugs into features, and embrace image characteristics that others might regard as problems inherent in digital capture. In my case, that means accepting that blobs of undifferentiated colour can be as expressive in photography as they undoubtedly are in painting or graphic prints, and that being subtle can sometimes involve strong, primary colour.


* I have gout, which sometimes puts me on crutches, but more often has me self-censoring in the hope of avoiding an attack. It's a blow, but my life is pretty good, and there are far worse things to have to work round.