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Bruce Davidson


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Heard a wonderful conversation with Bruce about his work last night at the 92nd St Y on NYC.

 

It was interesting that he said he spent the past year shooting a project and just hated the look of digital prints. Thought they were too clean, too perfect. Went back to shoot the same with Tri-X and is much happier

 

He said that his Midwest background gets him up around 3AM and he goes and develops and prints. He loves printing, believes it is simply magic. He has discontinued Agfa paper in the freezer which he loves and laments its passing. Printing on the right paper, to him, is critical. He and the commentators mentioned a printer in Switzerland who is apparently the best in the world at this moment. Apologies I don't remember the name.

 

Most of what he talked about was how he engaged with people to do his projects.

 

Seems like a really nice thoughtful man

 

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A single Bruce Davidson photo - shown to us in a high school documentary photography class 45 years ago - taught me the real power of wide-angle lenses. Not to distort dramatically, or allow pictures in cramped spaces - but to look inward and outward at the same time. To fit "here" and "there" into one frame, expressively.

 

https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDZTRZXN.html

 

On topic (film) - also shows the value of high dynamic range ;)

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A single Bruce Davidson photo - shown to us in a high school documentary photography class 45 years ago - taught me the real power of wide-angle lenses. Not to distort dramatically, or allow pictures in cramped spaces - but to look inward and outward at the same time. To fit "here" and "there" into one frame, expressively.

 

https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDZTRZXN.html

 

On topic (film) - also shows the value of high dynamic range ;)

And the virtue of front tilt.

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I completely respect his choice of film as a medium.  But I still wonder whether he has tried some of the excellent film emulation that's available:  Mastin, Alien Skin, DxO, Nik, etc.  Even Salgado found a film emulation that he was happy with.  Digital is designed to be clean and perfect, but doesn't have to end up that way.

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A single Bruce Davidson photo - shown to us in a high school documentary photography class 45 years ago - taught me the real power of wide-angle lenses. Not to distort dramatically, or allow pictures in cramped spaces - but to look inward and outward at the same time. To fit "here" and "there" into one frame, expressively.

 

https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDZTRZXN.html

 

On topic (film) - also shows the value of high dynamic range ;)

I wish I could remember the name, but he mentioned that in the late 1950s one of his Magnum colleagues taught him how to use wide angle lenses, for which he is forever grateful

 

 

 

 

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...

It was interesting that he said he spent the past year shooting a project and just hated the look of digital prints. Thought they were too clean, too perfect. Went back to shoot the same with Tri-X and is much happier

...

I can see the differences between film and digital... It strikes me that discussions about CD versus LP, 20 years ago, were very similar to the discussions we see in photography now.

Looks like film will be here for a long time if it follows the trail of vinyl. Even main stream stores are selling vinyl again!

 

Being a pro investigator in the audio domain in the 80's and 90's provided some insight in what was really going on.IMO the gap in perceived sound quality was never really an issue of digital sound being too clean. It was actually missing audio information at subliminal levels. These are not measurable in their own right (certainly not in the seventies when CD was developed) and they were discarded by Philips as not important...

Even cutting edge digital technologye couldn't deal with it anyway at that time. First generation CD players were only 14bit 44 Khz because that was the limit at the time. It took about ten years to fulfil the CD standard of 16bit 44 Kz in an accurate way.

 

I am not as knowledgible in the visual domain, but I see Leica and other brands struggle with similar issues e.g.:

- color channel depth

- sensitivity to full visual spectrum

- dynamic range

...

 

in audio, it is now an established fact that to really capture everything a human being can hear, you really need 24bit and about 200kHz sampling. Only very recent and experimental audio formats can reach that. It is my guess that it will take at least 10 years before this becomes somewhat available to the general public in a way CD is now.

 

Looks like in camera technology it will at least take about 20 years before digital will be able to surpass film on every visual aspect of photography.

 

Just my two cents...

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Looks like in camera technology it will at least take about 20 years before digital will be able to surpass film on every visual aspect of photography.

 

Just my two cents...

 

Have you missed the point of Davidson's dislike of digital? He doesn't like digital because it is too literal, too clean, too unemotional, too accurate. It is what are now thought of as the 'faults' in film that he likes, the colour balance that changes between film type and lighting, the grain of the image, the characteristic curve that is unique to each film. Digital doesn't need to "surpass film", it already has on a technical level, what it hasn't done is take photographers along with it who think of technical perfection as the bane of intellect.

Edited by 250swb
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I can see the differences between film and digital... It strikes me that discussions about CD versus LP, 20 years ago, were very similar to the discussions we see in photography now.

Looks like film will be here for a long time if it follows the trail of vinyl. Even main stream stores are selling vinyl again!

 

 

Last year, musicians received more in royalties from vinyl sales than they did from all of the streaming services combined.

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Have you missed the point of Davidson's dislike of digital? He doesn't like digital because it is too literal, too clean, too unemotional, too accurate. It is what are now thought of as the 'faults' in film that he likes, the colour balance that changes between film type and lighting, the grain of the image, the characteristic curve that is unique to each film. Digital doesn't need to "surpass film", it already has on a technical level, what it hasn't done is take photographers along with it who think of technical perfection as the bane of intellect.

No, I did not miss it at all. My point is that in the past vinyl was thought of as faulty and surpassed by CD as well. Vinyl lovers were thought of as nostalgic individuals who liked distortion and noise because it 'produced' a richer sound.

Now I can tell you that wile this may have been true for some of us, it is not true for all. Yes, I was (and am) a vinyl convert as well, but I count myself to those that really hear something in vinyl that was there in the original(analog) recording but is not there anymore in digital. Because of the advance in audio research and measurement equipments we can now prove that CD was and is not superior to vinyl on all aspects of the audible spectrum. It is actually very poor in reproducing certain aspects of sound we humans can perceive very well. e.g. minute timing differences, the basis of any sound source localisation...

 

So my point is that if digital buffs denied something was there in analog audio versus digital audio 30 years ago, and have been proven wrong now... Why are you so sure we will not see in the next 20 years or so that analog photography is actually still vastly superior to the current state of the art in digital on certain aspects?

It is not because you can not measure it, that it is not there...

Edited by dpitt
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