traditional vs. digital

External Since: Sep 13, 2003 Posts: 11

I was directed to an interesting article by Bruce Barnbaum on
traditional vs. digital fine art photography: on his website at
www.barnbaum.com, followed by "Thoughts on digital photography". I am
interested in reaction to his final statement in this article: "Nothing
has the radiance of a finely crafted silver print. Nothing."
I'm not asking for a critique of BB's work, but rather for a comparison
of a fine traditional black and white 16x20 print with the same size
generated digitally. I saw such a digital print about four years ago
and did not find it as "radiant" as a darkroom print, but that's a long
time ago in the digital world. Where does this comparison stand today?
Art

External Since: Feb 08, 2005 Posts: 722

Art Reitsch wrote:
> I was directed to an interesting article by Bruce Barnbaum on
> traditional vs. digital fine art photography: on his website at
> <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.barnbaum.com," target="_blank">www.barnbaum.com,</a> followed by "Thoughts on digital photography". I
am
> interested in reaction to his final statement in this article:
"Nothing
> has the radiance of a finely crafted silver print. Nothing."
> I'm not asking for a critique of BB's work, but rather for a
comparison
> of a fine traditional black and white 16x20 print with the same size
> generated digitally. I saw such a digital print about four years ago

> and did not find it as "radiant" as a darkroom print, but that's a
long
> time ago in the digital world. Where does this comparison stand
today?
> Art

Currently I don't believe there is a digital camera that can match a
really good film print at 16 x 20. This is not to say that the digital
print will not look good but a print from a 4 x 5 camera printed at 16
x 20 will look better. Some of the scanning backs are getting close
but to really look sharp a digital photo needs to be printed at 300
dpi, this would require almost 30 MP from a digital camera.

Now if we scan that same 4 x 5 film the question become can it match a
print made from an enlarger. This is not an easy question since the
papers used for digital printing and optical printing are very
different. There are a wide array of printing paper available, some at
a very high cost, that will give a wide range of effects. I have heard
that the prints made of some of the metal like papers can be very
stunning, but would not look like a optical print. But as to which one
was more "radiant", I doubt you could ever get good agreement on this.

>From reading his piece I do think Barnbaum made some pretty odd
statements. He seemed pretty upset about the idea that when using
Photoshop you can work on a photo as you have time. He tried to make
it sound like this was a bad thing, that no great work of art could be
done at ones convenience, Michelangelo seems to have done pretty good
even though he took his time.

Scott