Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/09/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I've spent the last few days mucking about with my newly delivered Nikon LS-2000 scanner and Epson Photo Stylus 700. I can only describe the experience as a kind of epiphany. I'm a reasonably competent b&w darkroom sort--studied it pretty seduously, done a fair amount of work with large format (8x10) negs, learned the zone system at an early age. For the past 20+ years I haven't had the access or the opportunity actually to oversee the translation of negs into print, and I never learned how to deal with color neg/pos. Yet in the last weekend, I've produced what seems to me, at least,some breathtaking images (nearly all of them old Leica SM--Summarit, Summitar, Summicron) images, with a fidelity and dynamic range that simply boggles this skeptical imagination. Many of you already know this stuff, but there's something that borders on the sublime in rendering images shot with a 50 year old camera/lens combo, intermediated by an equally antique medium (silver on acetate) into a digital image over which I, in my clumsy way, have almost complete control. In a very odd sense, it's much like that first experience, aetat 16 or so, of seeing the image emerge on a piece of paper in a chemical bath. Oh brave new world . . . Chandos Michael Brown Assoc. Prof., History and American Studies College of William and Mary http://www.resnet.wm.edu/~cmbrow/