Re: [Leica] Cool Leica Pictures

[Alan Ball <AlanBall@csi.com>]

Thanks Eric for sharing your images. I take this opportunity to raise a
question that has been bugging me for some time: the useability of Web
technology for the observation of pictures.

Looking at your photography site, as much as looking at almost anyone
else's, gives the viewer an opportunity to get a remote, general, idea
of the type of pictures you enjoy taking or the ones that are your bread
and butter. It certainly does NOT give any idea of the qualities of a
lens or of an emulsion. It can even destroy the subtilities of the
dynamic range of a rich slide or of a hand printed enlargement and thus
become counter-productive. The various 'jumps' of treason levels during
the picture digitalisation process are enormous: scanner performance,
operator's workstation screen calibration, operator's software action,
destruction of image information through compression, viewer's graphic
card and monitor settings, all add up to caricature the original
picture. In a way similar to what low end brutal screening and cheap
paper can do for printed media.

To be even more radical: none of the images you show on your site (nor
any of the images I would be able to show on a site of my own) would
render any differently if you had used cheap P&S hardware instead of
Leicas. Or even recent digital cameras (with the million + pixels CCDs).
The only way round this would be to put uncompressed high res TIFF files
on line. Unviewable by 99 pct of Web users.

The only things that survive Web browsing might be the essential ones:
the relevance of the image, the idea or feeling it chooses to convey or
the documentary value it brings. But it certainly is not a good showcase
of technical performance. It can be cruel in the sense that it strips
the 'glitter' out of the image, and leaves only the barest level of
information.

Maybe Web imaging requires a new way of creating the images, with Web
usage as the main objective even at the shooting stage, and attention
concentrated on the strengths and weaknesses of this particular
application: the technology allows the creation of 'living' images,
loaded with 'inner' animation, timed transformation, etc.

Anyone care to share his/her thoughts on this ?

Alan
Brussels-Belgium

Eric Welch wrote:
> 
> I've added to my web page (address below) a section called "Cool Leica
> pictures." In addition to a few of my favorites of recent vintage, I've
> added a special group of pictures I took last week.
> http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch