[Leica] How I plan to get my M9 while keeping both kidneys...

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 3:43 PM +0100 9/15/09, Neil Beddoe wrote:
>I'm not about to sell my enlarger or my M6.  The technology has yet 
>to arrive that can better the beauty of a selenium toned RC print 
>with it's abyssal blacks.  Colour on the other hand just became a 
>pain in the neck.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: lug-bounces+neil.beddoe=raidllp.com at leica-users.org 
>[mailto:lug-bounces+neil.beddoe=raidllp.com at leica-users.org] On 
>Behalf Of Chris Saganich
>Sent: 15 September 2009 15:40
>To: Leica Users Group
>Subject: Re: [Leica] How I plan to get my M9 while keeping both kidneys...
>
>I went to a friends wedding and met some old NY artist/photographer
>friends who moved out to LA.  Among them Iris Klein who recently had
>a show at the Leica Gallery (March 9th).  (Just to lend some
>credibility to my post here, lord knows I have little), her recent
>experience is that the top B&W photographers, meaning the ones with
>$$$ sorry no names, are returning back to traditional processing due
>to the relative lack of gradation in the digital color
>conversion.  In other words they are done with the excitement of the
>technology and getting back to what good B&W is all about.  I also
>know a Magnum photographer in my neighborhood who showed me his new
>state of the art darkroom in the basement of his brownstone.  He
>complained about similar issues with digital B&W.
>
>A B&W a la cart option on the M9 would be sweet
>



I find some of this astonishing.

This all has to be prefaced by my notion that digital shooting/inkjet 
output and film shooting/wet darkroom printing both can produce great 
quality, but they are different. Neither is 'better'.



While a good selenium toned print is a thing of beauty, the dmax that 
it produces, especially that of an RC print, can be bettered readily 
by a good inkjet print.

Whether this is achievable in any given instance is another matter.

'relative lack of gradation in the digital color conversion' again 
seems rather simplistic and is not a given. When you start out with a 
good RAW file from a decent camera, and convert it to 16bit space you 
have a lot of data to work with. If your exposure is on the money and 
you don't mangle the file in Photoshop, your conversion to B&W should 
leave you with an amazing amount of gradation.

Both these 'problems' sound to me like lack of understanding the 
digital workflow; just as with B&W printing it takes some time and 
skill to master.

A lot of photographers, myself included, have spent decades learning 
about and honing the skills of B&W shooting, film processing and 
printmaking and knowing what to use when. I certainly am not yet as 
good at digital printing as I am at conventional printing, but I'm 
improving.

Most of us have seen numerous truly great silver or platinum prints, 
but as yet there aren't a whole lot of great inkjet prints that truly 
try to maximize the possibilities.

All that said, I'm going to have a darkroom as long as I can, and I 
too would truly love a B&W only M camera. The results I have seen 
from the last Kodak B&W digital (760??) were truly outstanding, and 
that was a 6Mp camera.

And as you say, colour is a whole 'nuther matter. But I was never 
even a decently mediocre colour printer.

-- 

    *            Henning J. Wulff
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