> >At 06:06 PM 960916 +1000, Jonathan Anderson wrote:
> >
> >>Not all of us have a powerful enough computer,
> >>or a scanner, or the software, or a suitable output facility, or enough
> >>money to pay someone else to do it all for us for every image we would like
> >>to tinker with! This is not a flippant remark, it is meant in all
> >>seriousness. I would love all of the above, but my bank would not.....
> >It is always one's decision which way to go, and we don't always make the
> >correct decision......
> >
> >Sil Horwitz, FPSA
> >Technical Editor, PSA Journal
> >silh@iag.net
>
> ....and it IS a difficult decision! The temptations of the electronic
> pathway are great! At present, however, the decision has been taken for me
> by those who cotrol my finances (or lack of them).... I'm not trying to
> launch anti-electronic hate mail.. far from it! All I wanted to do was
> point out that te electronic pathway remains at present expensive. We await
> further price falls and new equipment! :-)
OK, hold the phone. This -- and the deliberations Jack Fulton describes,
not to mention about 20 books on scanning, printing, digital negatives,
rewiring the living room to take the equipment, the cataracts from the
CRT and the carpal tunnel from the keyboard, etc. etc. etc.-- is an
excessive response to the wish to make a hand or shirt collar or some
other detail in a negative just a bit denser, which is done in about 10
seconds with dyene, or a smear of pencil, or a patch of sky a bit lighter
which you could, Carson says, do with Kodak Abrasive Reducer, or a
*very* simple mask, among other methods.
But aside from the expense and the learning curve and the space for new
equipment, and the servicing the equipment when the motherboard goes or
the chip is bad, or the company goes out of business while they have your
printer for repair (which happened to Dan Burckholder), the operation
itself will take MUCH longer than simple negative retouching,
exponentially longer if you include trips to the service bureau and back,
and you'd better have a good relationship with the folks at the machine,
but maybe not because next time you go they'll be back in school or moved
to Pasadena & you'll have your art in hands of a stranger again, not to
mention the effect on the environment of all that extra driving your
landrover to Laredo or wherever they set up...
I agree with Bob that Adobe Photo Shop is fun, in fact I can't imagine how
anyone would bother with video games when they could have all those spray
guns & colors & masks & edge effects. But what does it do for "art"? So
far, I have seen *very* few images done with Adobe photo shop that I found
conceptually and/or esthetically equal or superior to manual film. So you
can seemlessly put a girl's head on a cow's body, pixel by pixel. Oh boy.
And you could blend two negatives of heads -- William Wegman did it in the
70s by double exposure.
I have also listened to panels of digital photographers point out that not
only is it *very* time consuming, it ups the level of finish demanded (at
least in advertising art & I suspect across the board) -- since you *can*
do it you're expected to -- often past the point of diminishing returns.
Every image now has got to be tweaked & twacked to a faretheewell. I find
the look unpleasant...
Which is not to say that graphic effects of computer-derived images can't
be smashing (I think of Todd Walker's cactus composites), but that to go
digital for negative retouching is a snare & delusion, or getting an atom
bomb to kill a fly.
I had, BTW, written the above before reading Rae's post about being in
thrall to the machines & in hock to Computer Warehouse. Rae, don't bother
them with the facts.The toy-value is too intense. The "temptations" of
this equipment are artfully designed to make you ever-poorer & Bill Gates
(or whoever) ever-richer, in fact I daresay they plan the temptations and
the obsolescence by computer.
Judy