Shadows, digital, and a snap...

I have a collection of the Best of Photojournalism books from the early to mid 1980's which taught me how to see things as a photographer. How to expose film to get a feeling, capture a moment, and use the darkroom as a tool to make an image snap. As a young dreamy photographer, I would peruse image after image from revolutionary Nicaragua, Jewish immigrants in South Beach, and crack heads in New York City. That grainy portrait, the dark shadows and poppy highlights. Creative darkroom work made those images even better. I mean really really powerful. Those books made me dream of the day I would run around the world with an Nikon F3HP, a pocket full of Tri-X, and a few Nikkor primes.

Alas, those days are gone. Everything...youthful naivety, the desire to be a war correspondent and that pocket full of Tri-X. Film, sure it still around, but digital is king. I still use it but 99.9% of all of my jobs are purely from my Canon digital bodies.

I shot this bike rack with my Leica and a 1970s Summilux 35mm lens. I had to do a little "dodging and burning" in photoshop but nothing more. Well, a little tweaking in levels but really, its the film. The film was not able to resolve the shadows and expose the highlights properly. Sure I could have exposed a little differently but shooting a stop under really made this graphic snap. Digital would have captured this scene completely different. Even if I were to have dropped my exposure a few stops under, I don't think it would have recorded this type of feeling. Digital has taken the magic out of photography.

I don't think my photo above is something that special but it shows where and how I sometimes look at the world. In reality, I don't think this image would have looked the way it does if it was shot digitally. Digital has way too much resolution and I would have had a great exposure with plenty detail in the shadow areas.



I shot this image this afternoon from my lanai err...balcony today and I kinda got the same shadow effect but the digital file just recorded too much. I completely played with this image to make a darker shadow but it wouldn't budge. Its interesting but what snaps more?