The Whole Picture
May 16th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
I’ve only recently learned of high dynamic range photography.
Now there’s a new prospect: one’s own robot digital arm to take a lot of photographs and stitch them together into a very detailed tableau.
Read about it here: Boffins take gigapixel photos. The London landscape shown is familiar and the demonstration is interesting, but, it doesn’t work for me. At least not yet.
I grew up with black and white photography; developing and printing my own photographs — I could get nostalgic for the smell of fixer.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (obituary) is someone whose work I admired from the beginning. I’d rather a single Magnum photo of something meaningful, one of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moments perhaps, than any amount of dynamic range or detail.
Once I corresponded with the great, self-effacing man. I was a student, running a newly-founded university photographic society. He offered me one of his photographs as a gift. I felt obliged to decline, as I suspected he had confused the society with a more distinguished one, but I still have his air mail letter with his Paris address and the injunction about it’s confidentiality.
With fewer scruples I might have asked for nr 27 in the Magnum series (previous link, and below). Entitled “The Whole,” it’s of a couple on a train in Romania and, of all his photographs, it is one of my favourites.
I’ve read that he didn’t realize the woman was heavily pregnant until they got up to go. The original is rewarding in ways that cannot be appreciated on a computer screen. I saw it properly in an exhibition in Venice years after I first saw a reproduction. Its “wholeness” is luminous, indeed almost biblical, if not older — a man and a pregnant woman on a journey is also part of the story of humanity.
The unaltered image, perfectly composed and printed in black and white, will always have a special grip on our imagination, surely.
With you on that one - I too adore the old black and whites, the digital colour, though very good, somehow seem to lack soul, in the same way as technically good modern pianos don’t have the tone of the great old wooden framed Broad/Steins and Suzuki method violonists seem a bit too perfect.
You embrace technology, but I’m getting a tad Luddite in old age, I rue the fact that my kids have to question what they see, CGI, digital manipulation etc, whereas we just had to take whatever was said with a pinch of salt.
Cartier-Bresson embraced technology too, up to a point. He was a pioneer with the 35mm Leica camera and at least some of his success taking pictures such as the one above was down to people simply not realizing he had a camera. But he disdained anything to do with the whole business of reproducing images, which obsesses many who get the photo bug, and he left printing to others and eventually went back to drawing and painting.
Above all, I think the camera mustn’t get in the way. I feel sorry for people who become so engrossed in the technology that they experience places only through the viewfinder.
I’m not impressed by those Gigapans either. But the smell of fixer … I walked into a wet darkroom a couple of years ago, after an absence of more than 15 years, and it was Proustian.
HDR has the ability to shift the picture much like an artist would interpret a scene. In HDR does a person have a mind view which is produced or are they doing things to a picture then looking at the results of the manipulations? Unlike an artist it probably is more limited in its interpretations though technically more accurate. This website was mentioned, I believe on Slashdot, several months ago but I did not realize that it was a simple process.
I remember also that time passed by incredibly quickly when in the darkroom. Since I liked crisp pictures the larger format cameras tended to be more “in the way” than a 35mm. Though I certainly preferred the cost of using a 35mm camera when exploring the Zone System.
Alas, the darkroom has not felt any use in a decade. It now houses a clothes washer and drier where time does not fly.
Ah yes, the darkroom as a time machine. Been there! Recently, I found http://www.dpreview.com was another. At least I wasn’t paying by the minute. That’s the great breakthrough with digital photography.
HDR seems to me just a form of compensation for the shortcomings of the camera, and it will be automated in our lifetime. However, I get uneasy when things look TOO GOOD. What do you think of this?
http://www.lightscapephoto.com/images/Timeless%20NPN.jpg
Cameras have conditioned us to see things in a certain way–shallow depth of field is something we accept as normal but our eyes don’t see in the same way. With digital it’s all negotiable. BTW if you want to see a REAL darkroom Robert Scoble posted some video of Ansel Adams’s on Qik.com recently.