Here is a link to my blog, unguided-tour.blogspot.com explaining a little bit about my philosophy. The first post is an article from the New York Times, the second post are my thoughts and sentiments.
http://unguided-tour.blogspot.com/search/label/Musings
In Brief: For me, photography is a combination of intuition and science or alchemy. It is about working with light, emotion, silver, and chemistry to manipulate the lights, the darks and the midtones. It is about decding how you want the grain on the film to look, large or small, sharp grain or fine grain, and resolution.
With Digital photography, regardless of what cameras you buy, the image texture looks the same, and i feel the photographer no longer leaves their signature on their prints by how they printed, it has become all homoginized because every is using the same tools.
Granted a lot of photographers may use leicas, however, they all have their own special way of processing their film, weather they're using rodinal at 1:25 or 1:50, whether they are processing their film at 68 degress, or for less time at 75 degrees. Whether they are using D-76, Hc 110, Pyro, or technidol, or microdol. Agitation also effects grain, density and contrast--whether they agitate the film slowly or quickly.
When it comes to printing their are million possibilities to interpret a print, with all kinds of developers, additives, and toners. Whether or not you want contrasty images, or continous tones with more seperation of the carious hues of greys. The possibilities are endless, as well as putting the final touches on the print with toners, sepia, selenium--even different dilutions of selenium and different times will effect tonality--blue toner, copper toners, gold toners, and myriad of combinations.
With digital, you are just working in grayscale and printing ink on paper, not actually manipulating or working with the embedded sliver to interpret tonal range of your negatives.
It also gives me a chance to disconnect myself from the world, news, internet, wife, children, parents, pets, telephone calls, I go inside lock the door, and everyone knows to leave me alone, unless the house is burning down, then it is mad dash to first save the vintage prints, the negatives, the books, the cameras, then the kid, then the pets, and then the wife--ok just kidding, but you should get the idea!
What is also fun, taking one image, and printing it 1000 different ways, with different developers, different papers, different temperatures, and toned in toners and different combinations, you begin to see all the charm that is being lost.
Linear Mode
