Digital Pioneer Slams Film...

[Alex]

US World & News Report has a special feature (it's an ad couched as a news story-page 72) in the March 24th, 2003 issue.

Accompanying this pro-digital slant article is a more indepth article about the lack of permanance found in todays digital revolution.

The U.S. World and News Report article is careful to point out that Kodak was also guilty of bad archival print quality in the 60's and was "forced" to improve their quality.

The obvious inference being that this is normal for the digital evolution to go through.

I can't really comment on the story because the person who wrote about the photographer Steven Johnson and his digital landscape camera left out key information.

What film format were they comparing their digital results to? 35mm or 4 by 5?

Is the new digital camera really nothing more than slit scan technology? The article gave a confusing description as to how the camera worked. (to me anyway)

Slit Scan technology was a technology never developed for 35mm still cameras but one that easily could have been. Slit Scan Technology was primarily used for special effects and used motion control technology and was usually done in a motion control/in-studio set-up.

I wonder if the article is touting this as a digital "invention" when it has been around for the last 30 years.

If you look purchase the magazine article and the picture of the photographer, Steven Johnson, notice the very big digital camera, and the even bigger power supply that runs it.

Frankly, the one picture they showed as an "example" of the digital landscape is hideous and doesn't come close to what I have seen in
National Geographic Magazine. (are those digital or film pictures I see in National Geographic?)

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ March 23, 2003 02:52 AM: Message edited by: Super-8mm in the DigitalAge ]</font>

[Alex]

The scary thing about this link is that some of the sentences appear to have been borrowed and used in the U.S World and News Report article.

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/2961.html

March 22, 2003





Dialog Box: Stephen Johnson Preaches the Gospel of Digital Photography

By Frith Breitzer
Saturday, October 9, 1999
View More In:
Stock Photography

Portrait by Mary Ford


Landscape photographer Stephen Johnson may sound like something of a digital-camera evangelist, but his sparsely elegant, ethereal photographs speak for themselves - and for the medium. A native of Merced, California, Johnson has been a photographer for more than 25 years. A teacher, consultant, and book designer, he was also one of the pioneers of digital bookmaking; his 1993 work, Making a Digital Book, sold 11,000 copies. He is hoping to publish With a New Eye, an exploration of U.S. national parks. Johnson talked about the implications of digital landscape photography, digital imaging versus traditional film, and his current project.

PUBLISH: What made you decide to try digital imaging?

STEPHEN JOHNSON: Primarily, a need to control the reproduction of my work. When we were getting ready to publish The Great Central Valley Project [by author Gerald Has-lam and photographers Stephen Johnson and Robert Dawson, 1993], the University of California Press asked me to mock up a chapter. I learned PageMaker and printed out the chapter; they were so blown away, they asked me to design the whole book. That book became sort of a baptism of fire in digital desktop publishing. It was tremendous to have control over such a complex book in terms of design, -typography, placements, sequencing, and ultimately the color, luminosity, and accuracy of the scans.

PUBLISH: When did you decide that digital-camera technology had become advanced enough for you to use in your own work?

SJ: In January 1994 Michael Collette, who had designed what would later become the Dicomed scanning camera, showed me a prototype that made it abundantly clear that digital originals could be spectacular. We decided to hit every clich?d spot we could think of in San Francisco - the Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Coit Tower - and we also brought along one [film] camera and a couple of lenses. I shot color negative film, black-and-white negative film, and color slides. What I saw at the end of the day blew me away. When we started looking at the film after it came back from the processor, it was so bad compared with the scans from Mike's digital camera, I was completely disenchanted. That was the last day I shot with film.

PUBLISH: What differences did you see between the results of your film camera and his digital one?

SJ: The differences were dramatic. We shot one photograph from Coit Tower looking toward the bridge. There was a record store at Bay and Columbus that had large replicas of album covers on the side. I zoomed in on the digital file, and there was Linda Ronstadt. When I looked at the same spot on the picture taken with film, I couldn't tell what it was. It was so drowned in grain, you couldn't see anything. But the digital file was pristine and clear. I could see the detail in the shadows and highlights, the dynamic range of the images. And there was no color correction to do once I opened the scans.


Image title: Volcanic Steam, Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii. 1996.
Copyright: Photograph Copyright ?1999 by Stephen Johnson.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

PUBLISH: What equipment do you typically bring into the field, and what do you use to make your prints?

SJ: I usually take a modified Dicomed Field Pro digital scanning camera and a PowerBook G3. I use the Gretag Spectro-Scan to make color profiles, and I usually output the photos on an Iris Realist 5030, although lately I've started using the Epson Stylus Pro 9000.

PUBLISH: How have your subjects reacted to your more interactive style of taking digital portraits, which allows them to have input into the final images?

SJ: Oh, it's been great. I've always made portraits, and I've always enjoyed it. There's something wonderful about people being able to see themselves immediately. They react, and sometimes they perform, and sometimes they become more conservative, but it really turns into an interaction. The portrait becomes kind of a coproduction between me as an outside eye and [the subject's] own internal eye. It's magical. Photography is always magical, but watching people, that's just fascinating.

PUBLISH: How do you respond to critics who say that digital landscape photography is a contradiction in terms because the computer removes you from the natural environment?

SJ: Photography has always been about the highest technology of its time. Even if you're still dealing with film, computers are all around you. Isolating the photographic process and saying, "Well, it's going to remain pure" doesn't make much sense. In fact, silver as a means of recording light is anything but pure. It's toxic, its manufacture is toxic, its processing is toxic, its durability is marginal - and then there are the darkroom fumes.

PUBLISH: What inspired you to take on your current project, With a New Eye, and what do you hope to accomplish?

SJ: I had to respond to what I had seen in January 1994. I couldn't see film completely fall away without my saying, "Now what do I do about it?" So when I began With a New Eye in 1994, my first goal was to see if the digital technology was real. I think I've now completely put that to rest. The second was to see what these capabilities might do to my own sense of beauty and aesthetics. National parks have been photographed endlessly, but I don't think they really are that well known.

At the Grand Canyon I heard a couple say, "It doesn't look as good as the postcards." We expect places to look like their photographs rather than see their intrinsic value as real experiences. Maybe what digital photography can offer is not a step away from the experience of a place but a step closer to it.

Stephen Johnson can be reached at www.sjphoto.com.

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<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ March 23, 2003 02:35 AM: Message edited by: Super-8mm in the DigitalAge ]</font>

[Alex]

Hey, I found the article!

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/0...4photos.b1.htm


Science & Technology 3/24/03
Artist
For one photographer, a powerful digital camera and its clarity are the key to capturing landscapes as art

Few things offend landscape photographer Stephen Johnson more than a typical national park postcard. The oversaturated colors and hackneyed "classic" views, he complains, do little to capture the essence of wild places. Johnson allows that it's not entirely the photographers' fault. Then what else is to blame? Film. "Color accuracy and color film photography are not synonymous," he notes.

Getting that medium to match reality can mean an endless battle in the darkroom. It's a battle Johnson abandoned in January 1994, when he converted his large-format camera to digital with a special attachment and took his first pictures. Johnson was already a professional photographer and a consultant to digital scanners and publishers in the San Francisco area. Offered a chance to try out the 140-megapixel digital "scanning back," he and its designer, Michael Collette, spent a day taking photographs with both film and the digital attachment. What he saw on his computer that night changed his career.

"The amount of actual resolution, the ability to hold highlights and shadows, the extraordinary accuracy of the color--the results were just astounding," he recalls. Johnson abandoned film that day and began immersing himself in the idiosyncrasies of digital scanning-back photography. In the process he became a rarity--an exclusively digital fine-art photographer. With his heavy camera and sweeping landscapes, "his work loops back to turn-of-the-century photography," says David Adamson, a leading digital printmaker, "but he transcends that tradition by . . . making the leap into the digital world."

Color lines. Digital scanning backs, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, are distant kin to ordinary digital cameras. While consumer models record an image all at once and register red, green, and blue light in alternate pixels, scanning-back devices scan across the image line by line, capturing the colors separately and then merging all three into each pixel. The result: extremely fine resolution and true-to-life color saturation. Collette's prototype required nearly four minutes to make a single image. The current version of the digital camera back, the BetterLight, takes just over a minute.

While this rules out using the device for action shots, the line-by-line scanning can produce captivating effects, particularly when there's water in the scene. The slicing of time lifts waves into brushstroke-like pinnacles flecked by minuscule rainbows. Wind-whipped mist whisked off a waterfall paints ghostly fingers across the surrounding rocks. And because of the enormous size of the image files, even taking a magnifying glass to one of Johnson's 40-by-60-inch prints won't reveal an iota of graininess.

Nine years after he first saw what digital scanning backs could do, Johnson is putting the finishing touches on "With a New Eye," a digital survey of more than 50 of America's national parks (you can see glimpses at www.sjphoto.com). He hopes that his work, combined with increasingly powerful consumer digital cameras, will convince others that digital is the future of art photography as well as of snapshots. "Digital photography has the promise of being dramatically better than film-based photography," he says. "On the high end where I'm working, it already is." -Janet Rae-Dupree

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ March 23, 2003 02:28 AM: Message edited by: Super-8mm in the DigitalAge ]</font>

[Mike Buckles]

Hummmph!!!! Sounds like the guy either isn't skilled enough to handle film photography, or he just wants to "point and shoot" (digital slam). This process of his is no threat to film..it's impractical for most photo applications. Slit scan photography in movies was used in the 60's in 2001: a space odyssey, and was heavily used for a time after that. I have a plug in for my special effects program that mimics slit scan, it's pretty cool. When I was filming backlit animation on a Mitchell 16mm, we used time-exposure and black slits of construction paper to mask off the image for our split scans...it was extremely cool, but with filming one frame at a time and moving the mask to animate a little at a time for each shot, took a long time to film...but the results were really neat! I also noticed he slams film for having un-natural colors...ever try Kodachrome 64, sir? The colors are true to nature and, properly exposed, beautiful. Incidently, they are using a hybrid of his technique to improve the digital transfer of old films to dvd....most notably, "Singing in the Rain"...since 3 strip Technicolor shrinks over time, it loses it's registration sometimes between the 3 layers...creating a halo effect. The new transfer procedure scans each strip individually, then digitally interlaces them into a composite picture with stunning results. I was most impressed by the beautiful transfers it creates.

[Mike Buckles]

As another example of "film is not dead", Technicolor in the last few years has reinvented it's dye transfer process...simplified it, and brought it back to Hollywood...I've read reports that viewed side by side with a Kodak Vision print, blew it away with jet black blacks, beautiful color and contrast. Too bad it's only for 35mm! Now why would Technicolor spend all that money and time to develop this new process if film is on the way out? I know it's not still photography, but kind of the same situation for both movie and still film!

[Alex]

Back in 1994, when Mr. Johnson did his test, scanners were absolutely inferior to where they are now!

A two hundred dollar scanner now is probably superior to a $10,000 dollar scanner back then.

Another pet peeve I have with this story is it takes him four minutes to "record" a digital image, yet a mere second or two to shoot the film negative.

Why not just shoot two shots on negative and bracket the exposure? I bet the Linda Ronstadt album cover would have come out fine if the shadows had been exposed for. How about we bracket the film exposure by shooting the scene twice, then simply overlay the two images after they are digitied?

Complicated you say? Not as complicated as what Mr. Johnson is using to shoot his digital stills.

Saying that a four minute digital exposure produces a superior result to a 1 second film negative is comparing apples and oranges.

Why is it the digital proponets can't just say digital is great, they also have to say film is "toxic", old school, arcane, not as good...!!! [img]mad.gif[/img] That's the part that bugs me. Add up how many computers you will own and throw away over a twenty year time span and compare that with all the film you have shot.

Don't forget, you do use electricity everytime you view a an image on a computer screen, with film, no electricity is needed to view a still print.
Plus, film tends to not be wasted in the manner video is consumed...and film IS made to last a lifetime, just ask people who are getting spectacular images from regular 8mm film shot from the 40's and only recently transferred!

The actual ecological difference between digital creation and film may be a red herring, a kodachrome red herring. [img]graemlins/camera.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/film.gif[/img]

[Greg Crawford]

One thing you need to consider, a lot of fine art photography or commercial photography for that matter is digitally manipulated in Photo Shop.

If you do not have first hand experiences with this excellent program, you might not know that it's capabilities go way beyond fine print making in a conventional darkroom.

Which leads me into my main point, the still photographers mind set, of how to achieve certain kinds of results is usually a system oriented approach from carful film selection, exposure, processing and digital manipulation.

{ Guys I am doing this next quote from memory based on the Ansel Adams books "The Negative" and "The Print," which I read back in the early 1980's. }

ANSEL likened creating the NEGATIVE to "RIGHTING A MUSICAL SCORE," and making " A FINE PRINT, WITH THE PERFORMANCE."

{Ansels early training in music also is credited for him thinking of tones of gray on a scale.}

I would guess that most of use work at the level of get it right in the camera...with film stock selection, development control, painting the set with light, use of filters and timing and color correction at the back end.

Digital frame by frame manipulation is of course available, but usually way over the top in terms of time and money. Since most Directors and Cinematographers have the philosophy of not letting style get in the way of the story these new tools and special effects show up first in Commercials, music videos and FX's shots in theatrical films. Ok, Ok ...experimental films and perhaps the film your currently working on.

My final point not everything done in still photography is transferable to cinema, but don't let that stop you from trying.

[Alex]

I'm not following your point. I know about digital enhancement technology. Film orgination, digital destination. If the digital cinematographer is going to rave about a 4 minute exposure with a digital camera, then at least bracket the film negative by shooting the same scenic twice at different f-stops.

Then by making an exact overlay in photoshop, the artist can choose the best part of each negative.
Now that would be a fair comparison.

[Greg Crawford]

I did not think my last post made as much sense as I originally thought. I guess I was looking for ways to incurage people to "Think Out Of The Box, so to speak. Learn the tried and true then find your own way..

In my own case, back in the early 80's I was into large format Back & White fine art photography. I think this period helped me developed a stronger graphic compositions. Back then I would never think to use a grad filter instead I would manipulate a print on the enlarger.

My commercial people and products period, taught me to compose for a layout and create a photograph instead of just finding and taking them.

I believe that going back to shooting film and video has given me a better understanding of how to light a moving object. And a desire to get everything right in the camera. In spite of the adage we'll fix it in post.