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Ansel Adams: "I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable characteristics, and the artist and functional pratcitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them."
Vincent Versace: "For me the black-and-white image has always been the core, the essence, and the soul of photography. ... The magic in watching a black-and-white image appear in the developer tray, along with the smell of stop bath and fixer, is what sparked my desire to be a photographer. My formal education in photography was in large format black-and-white nature photography. Before 1998, the year I went totally digital, I was shooting some 6000 rolls of film per year, of which 90% were black-and-white. At the time, I made my living doing head shots for Hollywood actors, and those were always shot and printed in black-and-white.
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As I entered the digital world, black-and-white prints took a backseat to the new art of digitally capturing color images and to the concerns of how to best produce a print that remained true to my vision. One of the basic tenets of my training as a photographer was derived from an Ansel Adams quote. "The negative is everything, the print all. The negative is the sheet music and the print is the symphony." ...
Until recently, this was the sorry state of affairs that existed for the great black-and-white negatives produced by such photographic icons as Ansel Adams, Minor White ... Their prints -the ones with which we all fell in love - were made on papers that are no longer available. Today's photographic papers no longer contain heavy metals...Ironically the same heavy metals made the older papers archivally stable and gave them great maximum densities. ...
Film works with density and digital cameras work with luminance, so they have different RGB responses and tone-reproduction curves. Images captured on film will look different from those captured with a digital camera.
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Another factor to consider is that film, digital cameras, and people all see the colors in a scene differently. There are many reasons for this, but two of the more significant ones are the spectral sensitivities and tone-reproduction curves that are unique to each medium. Every film type has unique RGB characteristics because of its photographic emulsion chemistry. Each digital camera type has unique RGB responses and tone-reproduction characteristics because of its RGB sensors and filters, as well as its signal (image) processing characteristics.
Neither film nor digital cameras reprodusce color the way the human eye sees it. The eye has unique color and tone responses. Film and digital cameras attempt to approximate the way people see color; but, as is always the case, there are design trade-offs that compromise the goal.
So what is RGB, really? If you walk away from this lesson having learned only one thing -- aside from how to make a great black-and-white print from a color capture -- it shoud be this: RGB isn't a color, it's a formula to mix color."
Quoted from Vincent Versace, Welcome to OZ, a Cinematic Approcah to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop.
An exhausting book to read, but one I highly recommend. I tend to agree with much Versace says. And, for us with equipment and lens fixations... um, enthusiasms... the message of how much more there is to learn and do to master the medium is daunting. And this went for the film and darkroom days at least as much as it goes for digital. Getting a 'good capture' is only the start.
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