Are Photographer's Obsessed With Sharpness, but blind to the bigger picture?

[Alan Gales]

But you can take a sharp 20x24 negative and make thousands of prints of portions of the image that ARE important and ignore the rubbish

Or you could just move in closer and/or use a longer lens on the camera you are using. Of course this will not be the same as the painting.

Good photography isn't easy. I used to draw and paint and in some ways drawing and painting have their advantages. They are not better. Just different.

[Dan Fromm]

I just looked at this thread's title, saw a play on words. Sharpness in the negative matters most when we want to make the bigger print. This is why I won't have my best 35 mm Kodachromes (ISO 25, not that fast stuff) printed larger than 8x10. Bigger prints won't stand close scrutiny.

[joselsgil]

I look at it this way.

You can always make a fuzzy photograph with a sharp lens, but you can't make a sharp photograph with a fuzzy lens.

I leave the fuzzy lenses for portraits.

[Alan Gales]

I just looked at this thread's title, saw a play on words. Sharpness in the negative matters most when we want to make the bigger print. This is why I won't have my best 35 mm Kodachromes (ISO 25, not that fast stuff) printed larger than 8x10. Bigger prints won't stand close scrutiny.

Dan, you think like I do. I have taken a few of my Kodachrome 25 images up to 11X14 and gotten away with it but for the most part an 8x10 is the largest I would want to take 35mm.

[h2oman]

This is an interesting question. I have a friend who was completely obsessed with sharpness. The first thing he would do with any print is hold it up to his nose to see if it was sharp enough for his taste. Ironically, he now (at 86) can't seem to see very distracting lack of sharpness in some of his own images when looked at from a couple feet!

I had the pleasure of seeing an exhibit by William Clift in Santa Fe that got a fair amount of discussion here, and I purchased the accompanying book. If you were to ask whether the images were particularly sharp the answer would be no, but the answer would also be no if you were to ask if the images were lacking sharpness. The level of sharpness was such that it was not a distraction in either way. Also, many of the images of Shiprock have a lot of grass in the foreground, and the lack of extreme sharpness effectively eliminates detail there that would be distracting. This seems to be one way in which we can follow the lead of the painter who leaves out detail.

I also purchased a book called "The Villas of Palladio," by Philip Trager after seeing his work in Black and White magazine. The images feel to me like a sort of modern version of Frederick Evans' work. I later discovered an interview with him in View Camera. He commented that "...the photographs are not always super sharp - there is a subtle softness that is deliberate and that perhaps contributes to their timelessness and stillness."

That got me to thinking about how I love Frederick Evans' images of cathedral interiors, but similar images by Bruce Barnbaum don't do much for me. In retrospect, that could be due to in part to the fact that Barnbaum's images tend to be sharper than Evans', at least in the reproductions in books on which I am basing this observation.

All that said, if I were to be making Clyde Butcher or Christopher Burkett sized prints, I would strive for all the sharpness I could get!

[Mark Sawyer]

On this forum, one could ask with equal validity, "Are photographer's obsessed with softness, but blind to the bigger picture?"

Sharpness is fairly often discussed (I think) because it's easily definable and recognizable, and with the f/64 aesthetic still very popular in lf, a very important element to many people here. I don't think too many are blind to other aspects of photography (composition, form, light, etc.), but sharpness is something that people can easily discuss and resolve problems with. Composition, qualities of light, and other similar aspects are usually discussed only when critiquing an individual image. Not much of this goes on here beyond a few compliments of posted images, I suspect because people are worried about offending each other, and because there isn't as clear a set of standards like line pairs per millimeter. But I agree with Bernice that we should be more aware of such things, and discuss them more often and more deeply. It's our loss...

[mdarnton]

I took this question much more metaphorically than most respondents, I see. I didn't take the original post as being exactly about sharpness, but as a gearhead vs art query. In that sense, the gearheads have proven the answer!

[Ari]

As my friend Tony would say: "Sharpness is overrated!"

[h2oman]

Composition, qualities of light, and other similar aspects are usually discussed only when critiquing an individual image. Not much of this goes on here beyond a few compliments of posted images, I suspect because people are worried about offending each other, and because there isn't as clear a set of standards like line pairs per millimeter. But I agree with Bernice that we should be more aware of such things, and discuss them more often and more deeply. It's our loss...

Well, it is clearly stated at the top of the Image Sharing thread that "Critiques should only be offered if requested by the original poster."

But there is an "Images for Critique" thread there! (And I am in agreement with your last statement - you've motivated me to post something in that thread!)

[ScottPhotoCo]

I guess I would say that the answer would depend on who you are making your photographs for. This is a personal answer for me as I am lucky enough to make images that make me happy. There is really no one else that I have to please. That would bring and entire new issue to my work and one that I really don't want to deal with.

Sometimes my perspective is sharp and sometimes it is not. My goal is to make an image that stirs some type of emotion in me and hopefully any other viewer as well. My images are really an interpretation of how I see the world and I really don't expect everyone else to see it the same way. If we all interpreted the world the same way this would be a really boring existence and quite an uninteresting forum.


Tim
www.ScottPhoto.co