I’ve been looking at a book of Edward Weston’s photographs and I can’t get over the monumental power of many of his images. But I can’t help thinking that a lot of that power comes down to the incredible detail and richness of texture that is inherent in the 8 x 10″ negatives. An 8 x 10″ negative has more than 50 times as much information as a 35mm negative. That’s a tremendous amount of detail.
As for richness of tone, I’m not sure how the size of the negative affects it but I see a tremendous difference between my 21mp digital images and even the reproductions in this book. I have never used a large format camera and don’t really want to use one but I don’t like the idea that I’m trying to make beautiful photographs with a tool that’s not up to the task. Everyone says how wonderful the tone of large format negatives is but I’ve never seen anyone describe in detail why this should be.
Anyway, I hate the thought that I simply can not get a sufficiently high quality image even with a modern 21 mp camera and top quality lenses. I’ve done a few panoramas with multiple frames from that camera and the fine detail is very noticeable on enlargement. The equivalent of about 75 megapixels makes a pretty nice 10 x 30″ panorama but then you still have the error inherent in the stitching process. I can’t help feeling like the quality still doesn’t approach that of a large format negative. That’s about four times the resolution in a normal image. Remember, the 8 x 10″ negative offers 50 times the detail of 35mm.
I think maybe I’ll try making some stitched images of a smaller subject matter from perhaps four or six frames and see if it makes a big difference in the appearance of the image and at what size you begin to see the difference. Can you see extra resolution in a print as small as 8 x 12 inches? Maybe. I guess I’ll have to find out.
The other thing I simply can’t continue doing if I want sharp and rich images is to hand hold anything! I love to hand hold the camera. I just like looking through the viewfinder and adjusting my view intuitively. I hate the idea of having to wrestle with a tripod in order to get the sharpness I want. But you can’t avoid it. All the pixels in the world won’t help unless you are absolutely locked down on a very solid tripod, you’re using the mirror lockup, and a remote release.
Stitching images may be fine if your subject matter is good enough to hold still for you. I mostly shoot landscape so that’s not too big a problem for me but even in landscape you can run into issues with clouds moving, certainly with water moving, or with a breeze stirring the trees or grasses. I also have my doubts about how good a job stitching software does with highly detailed and complex scenes such as most landscape entails. That, too, requires some experimentation.
I don’t want to get hung up on anything technical. I’m not one of the photographers that loves to think about equipment. I want a camera capable of taking a high resolution, sharp image. I don’t want to own a fleet of different cameras. And I don’t want to have anything to do with film. Unfortunately, even medium format digital is outrageously expensive and it’s not all that much higher in resolution that the top of the line 35mm cameras.
The other part of the look of those Weston photographs is the contrast. I notice a lot of contrast in these images. More than I would normally put in any of my photographs. One of the main keys to the look of a photograph is where you put the contrast via the curves. The photographs in this book look like they have very deep blacks and a lot of subtle distinction in the medium to light values. That suggests to me a curve with a real dip in the dark values and a steeper gradient up toward the high values. Maybe not just a pure high contrast S-Curve but less contrast in the low values with a lot of the change in value spread over the middle to upper values. I’ll have to experiment with that too.
Another aspect of contrast is not just the overall distribution of light and dark in the scene but what I’ll call local contrast. Local contrast adds contrast between elements in small areas rather than just stretching the range from dark to light in the whole image. You will see some of this if you use the “clarity” slider in Lightroom. Plug-ins like Akvis Enhancer do something similar. But once again, I think if there’s not enough detail in the original image then you won’t have enough to work with when you go to increase local contrast either.
So many things to consider in the effort to get great looking prints.
