In gathering images for my Daily Photograph Blog, I get to go back, I mean really far back, into my LightRoom database to seek out old images that just didn’t fit into the projects I was doing at the time. My first digital images were made in about 2004 and that is really old, in digital terms of course, and the rapid growth in digital technology is quite evident in the quality of the files. Fifteen year old digital files are not as good as the files I am creating today. Mechanically, today’s lenses and sensors are orders of magnitude better and then there’s the software. Take my word for it Lightroom CC2020 is much, much better than Photoshop 3.0. Current software is so much better that it makes the “old” digital files look really pretty good.
Now, the thought strikes me that someday, (and it probably won’t be too soon from now) we can look back and call today the “Good Old Days” and wonder how we survived with such primitive digital tools. Digital tools will continue to improve, but…
Silver prints are frozen in time. There is no big difference in silver prints made today and silver prints made thirty or forty years ago. The same could be said for platinum prints. The technology used for these two image creating processes has reached the ultimate level. There is no reason to advance this technology because there is no reward for a better way to make a gelatin silver or platinum print.
A few years ago Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame) and I attended an exhibit of Ansel Adams Masterwork Prints. The best prints of the best images Ansel made. It was a great exhibit by a master printer of gelatin silver prints. We both left the exhibit feeling the images were a little bit flat and a soft. We knew these were among the best gelatin silver prints ever made and they came up short against our current print experience of digital prints.
Eventually, there will be some time in the not too distant future when our current image capturing and printing technology will no longer be current. Then the prints we make today will look just as dated as the silver prints we made thirty years ago.
This image shows up in the "Light Through a Window" project and as part of the "Fifty:Revisited" project. The image (as you can see in the upper left corner of the photograph) was captured on a 5x7 view camera, printed as a silver print, a platinum print, digitized, photoprinted and as you see it now as a bunch of pixels. Reminds me of the old restaurant sign, "Served any way you want it."
Don't forget to stop by my website (linked in the blog header) to see the latest Journal Publication and the "Fifty"Revisited" project.
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