Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Technology

Ideas about the mechanics, techniques, and technology behind image making.

  • Tools

    Tools

    Man is a tool maker. Tools are used in most activities in our life to extend our performance or help us get our tasks done faster, easier, and more accurately. The same is true in most of our art. Some people say that it is our tool making nature that allowed us to become the dominant species.

    A tool using artist

    I’m an artist. Specifically one who works with images originating as photographs. A camera is a tool I use. So is a computer. So is a printer. These tools do not create my art. I use them as part of my creative process.

    Yes, the tools allow me to create things I could not do otherwise. That just means they are good tools. My Jeep allows me to go places I would rather not have to walk, especially carrying my gear. That does not mean the Jeep creates my art. I know a sculptor who now prints a lot of pieces on a 3D printer. Does that make them no longer art?

    I believe in using tools to make my life better and to take my creativity further. Indeed some images don’t really start coming to life until I am manipulating them in Photoshop. As I try things and apply ideas and tools the essence of the image may start revealing itself to me. Note, though, that I – the artist- decide how the image should develop. I don’t sit back and watch Photoshop create it for me.

    Limits of tools

    There are probably some sharp Adobe computer scientists working on that right now., Maybe someday you will be able to point your phone at a scene and a “perfectly” composed and processed image will appear instantly in your social media feed. I hope for all of our sake that they decide that even though they could, they won’t. (Note: it came faster than I anticipated. Adobe announced many “AI”-based tools at Adobe MAX 2020. Now anyone can do almost anything to an image without know how they did it. Too bad.)

    Tools should be used as force multipliers. Not a crutch to let people with no skills seem to create something. That’s like going to DisneyWorld and believing you went on a pirate adventure. It is a manufactured experience that you did not contribute to. If you are over the age of 5 you know deep down inside it is fake.

    At the risk of being unpopular and sounding like a Luddite I will say I do not believe an image created entirely by a computer without an artist is art. It is just software combining patterns it has been trained with and throwing is a little random variability. Maybe this could be said of some artists, too. Let me just add that I spent an entire career working in advanced computer science, including artificial intelligence. So it’s not like I just hate technology.

    Digital fits my personality

    I am ADD enough that I don’t like there to be much lag between seeing something interesting and capturing it. It would be hard for me to work in a world of making multiple sketches of a scene to work out the best composition and staging, then spending weeks laying down the image slowly in layers with dry times between. All in order to create one work. I would abandon it after the first couple of sketches and be off to another idea.

    Photography is much more immediate and rewarding for me. See a scene. Click. Nice, but maybe move a little to the right. Click. Better. Maybe raise the camera a little higher. Click. Almost there, maybe reduce the depth of field. Wait for the right moment. Click. Good! Now I have a good starting point to work with on the computer to create a final image.

    In the computer I use a fairly disciplined non-destructive workflow. That just means never commit to something that can’t be undone. This does not slow things down and it actually makes it easier to get in a creative flow. That is because whenever I hit a dead end or even just decide I’m not liking the direction things are going, I can back up to any point I want and modify what I’ve done or even throw large “experiments” out and take a whole different path. The tools let my creativity flow naturally.

    This ability to freely experiment and take risks is wonderfully empowering. I even sometimes create several versions of an image. It is an embarrassment of riches to be faced with a hard choice of which one I think works best. The ability to be spontaneous and free is very important to my creativity.

    An artist

    I create art. My camera or my other tools do not create the art, I do. The fact that I start from a photograph should not matter at all. Some people think something is not art unless the artist had a long and difficult process from training through making an image. How myopic and judgmental.

    It had been said that an artist has to suffer. This is true, but you hear the statement from critics more than artists. Critics think they can analyze the process the artist went through to determine the worth of the art. Real artists know that art is suffering and what we learn and the feelings and vision we develop in the process guide our outcome. Art can be a cathartic expression of a deep experience, but that is not required.

    But this “suffering” is very personal and internal, at least for me. It may be the result of decades of failures to realize our vision. A suffering born of frustration that drives a continual renewal and a reach for what we feel but can’t quite express.

    It has almost nothing to do with a camera. That is just a tool, part of the technology used in creating art.

    Any tool

    When someone picks up a tool to create something as art, they become an artist. It doesn’t really matter if it is a brush, a pencil, a welder, … or a camera. What matters is what you do with it. Is something better and more worthwhile because it is carved from marble? Is it better if it is oil applied to canvas? Careful. These are dangerous judgments.

    The art I create is not because I’m a photographer. Photography is a medium that works very well for me. It fits my personality. I use it to create my art.

    I look at the creative process different from an oil painter or sculptor or author or graffiti painter. That is good. Artists are not supposed to be all alike. They should be as unique and individual as possible. That extends to the medium and process and tools, too.

    So, I’m an artist. I use a camera to capture pixels that become my art. I’m proud of it. I like what I create and it works for me. I’m very thankful for the tools I have. They help me create, they do not define me.

  • The Problem of Mega Pixels

    The Problem of Mega Pixels

    I love the capabilities of modern digital cameras, especially the wonderful sensors and great lenses available. But nothing is free, and I’m not just talking about the price of the gear. Having too many mega pixels can cause problems you may not anticipate.

    Resolution is wonderful

    I love extreme resolution. I’m not a fanatic about it, but I really appreciate it. I have not gone to 100+ MPixel sensors yet and I don’t normally do very large panoramas. Still, I get a thrill when I zoom in to 1-to-1 and see the great detail that is there. Then when I sharpen or contrast it more and the detail pops – wow!

    Having large resolution allows me to create large prints. It is a necessary thing since I do this for a living. It is also something I really like to do. I don’t think an image is complete until it is printed. For me, a print is the physical expression of the image.

    All things being equal, which they seldom are, higher resolution usually leads to sharper images. I love certain images to be “crunchy” sharp with great detail. It is part of my values that I can’t get away from.

    Also, larger files allow for more cropping freedom. I try not to rely on this. It is much better to compose the image the way I want it at capture time. But sometimes it cannot be avoided. Maybe the image works better in a square format, or maybe I’m only carrying a lens that goes to 70mm and I want to shoot something I can’t get close enough to. In that case I have to “zoom” in post processing by cropping the image.

    Or maybe I realize later that the real interest is in a smaller part of the frame. I have to crop the image heavily to salvage it. It’s not good practice, but I admit to doing it on occasion.

    For me, a great print from a well executed, high resolution file is a joy.

    Resolution is a pain

    On the other hand, high resolution can be a pain. It increases the cost and time of all the downstream stages.

    Every time I press the shutter it drops around 60 MBytes on my memory card. That is just the raw capture. It requires CFExpress or XQD cards to keep up. They are very expensive.

    As long as I can process the image in Lightroom the size stays around this, but when I step into Photoshop each image balloons to several hundred mega bytes. And that is even without adding a bunch of layers.

    Did you know that a Photoshop psd file (the native Photoshop format) cannot exceed 2 GBytes? Or that a tiff file cannot exceed 4 GBytes? I have found this out the hard way. Some of my images now have to be stored as psb files, the large file format version of Photoshop’s data.

    Processing and editing time goes up with pixels. I use a powerful computer with 64G RAM and very fast Thunderbolt3 disks, but it can take seconds to do a simple stroke when I am masking or burning or dodging. I have seen multi GByte files containing one or more embedded smart objects take 2 minutes just to save to disk.

    And you have to get to know disks in multiples of Terabytes. If you have a disciplined backup strategy, something I am fanatical about, then there are layers and layers of them.

    I have bought in to the need of powerful and expensive equipment for editing and storing my images. The biggest problem, though, is the slow editing speed. This interrupts the flow of my mental process. I don’t like waiting on the computer.

    Technique

    One of the unfortunate truths they seldom tell you when you are looking at a shiny new high resolution camera is that it is harder to take good pictures with it. This is partially because of the geometries you are dealing with.

    A full frame sensor, by convention, is 36 x 24 mm. My Nikon Z7 places 8256 x 5504 pixels in this space. That makes each pixel site 0.004 mm square. That is 4 microns from the center of one pixel to the center of the next. If you do not work in the world of integrated circuits or advanced physics you may have trouble conceiving these sizes. We do not directly encounter these dimensions in the real world.

    As an example, human hair ranges from 17 to 180 microns in diameter. Therefore the thinnest strand of hair you can possibly find would cover over 4 of these pixels. An average sized hair, around 50 microns in diameter, would cover a strip of at least 12 pixels wide across the sensor.

    A fun fact, but so what? The so what is that with each pixel being so small the problems of focusing and holding the camera steady are greatly compounded. Focus is critical and you almost have to rely on the very sophisticated focus system in your camera. Especially if it is contrast detection – meaning that it is searching for the best contrast, hence sharpest focus, measured directly on the sensor pixels.

    And for the sharpest results, don’t even think of taking a picture without using a good tripod. I don’t know how steady you think you can hold something, but consider that for optimum sharpness the camera cannot move or shake as much as 0.004 mm while the shutter is open. I can’t do that, especially after coffee.

    You need new lenses

    Another sad truth is that to realize the full benefit of your high resolution sensor you need lenses designed to match it. Current lenses achieve resolutions significantly better than was the norm a few years ago.

    The requirements for lenses for these new sensors greatly exceed the standard required for film or, say 6 – 10 MPixel cameras from just a few years ago. I have tried older lenses on my Z7. The results might be usable for some things, but nowhere up to the quality of something like a Z 24-70 f/2.8 designed specifically for the Z series.

    So another cost and problem of trying to achieve very high resolution is that you need to use lenses that will achieve the quality you are seeking.

    Why have lots of Mega Pixels?

    With all those problems, why should you want to shoot high pixel images? Maybe you don’t. That is what I am leading to here.

    Your gear should be chosen based on your intended use. These days many people will only post images on social media or put together a slide show of a trip or event. If they print at all it will probably be 8.5×11 inches (about A4 for you in the rest of the world). Quite honestly, a good 6 MPixel camera is all you would need for any of these things. Almost any mobile phone is great, except for the lack of lens choices.

    I have images from a 6 MPixel camera in my portfolio.They are good files and the quality of the pixels is good. I just would not try to print them very large.

    About the only thing that requires huge files is making large prints. This is a world I live in, but if you don’t then why bring these other problems on yourself? A good 12-16 MPixel camera is probably more than adequate for most people. They are smaller and lighter and cheaper. It is easier to take good pictures with them, it is easier to process them if you want to, and they require far less disk space. You can probably keep most of the images you want in online storage.

    But human nature being what it is, we can’t discount the lust factor. Pixel lust. Just like I know people who do some woodworking and have a workshop outfitted with an array of near commercial quality equipment. An expensive overkill, but if they have the space and money to burn, why not? You might need it someday.

    If you want to be logical and save some money and time, resist the lust for lots of mega pixels. You won’t need them.

    Its an OK problem to have

    Some of us are convinced we need them. Some of us just want the biggest and best. Many are just caught up in the hype of shiny new products.

    If you are going to have a high mega pixel camera, be aware going in of the costs and problems. But if you “need” it, go for it! The results are marvelous if you use the tools well.

    I love the results I get so much that I forget about the size and processing problems. I love the results so much that I gladly learn the required techniques to achieve them. They make all of my images better.

    Cameras and gear have advanced to the point where many of us cannot achieve the maximum they are capable of. But that is an astounding problem to have. What an embarrassment of riches! If we are the weak link in the process, we can learn and improve. We get better and our results get better.

    It’s a great time to be a photographer.

    What have your experiences been with high resolution photography? Let me know!

  • What Is Color?

    What Is Color?

    This is a fascinating question to me. Most of us do not stop to even ask the question, but it strongly influences much of what we do as photographers. So what is color? Is it the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation? Is it just a property of the way surfaces reflect light? Or is it simply the response of our eyes to the impinging radiation? Or is it something more subjective?

    Technical Details

    Let me hurry through the technical details. Apparently few people care about actual technology.

    Electromagnetic radiation is the way signals propagate through space. It is the mechanism of everything from radio through X-rays and gamma rays, including what we know of as the visible spectrum. For the really hard core, what we consider “light” is radiation in the range of 380 nm through 760 nm. This chart does a good job of visualizing this.

    The rods and cones in our eyes are sensitive to these wavelengths of radiation that we call light. This provides the sensation of light and color that we perceive. Our window on the world is based on these hidden gems.

    I go into this detail to make the point that light is not a “thing”. It is simply our response to a small range of electromagnetic waves. This is significant because much of what you will read about light in art is very “fluffy”. It supposedly has hidden meanings and deep psychological responses. Maybe it does. But don’t forget that it is basically a simple sensory perception. We each respond to color mostly the same, but a little differently. We are human, not a calibrated scientific instrument.

    Perception

    These rods and cones give us incredible perception of color and light. The very best digital sensors made cannot see the range of lightness values the human eye can resolve. The very best digital sensor cannot distinguish the range of colors the human eye can sense.

    Digital images are represented as a grid of pixels. Each pixel contains 3 pieces of data, values for red, green, and blue. A very good sensor, mapped into a wide color space like ProPhotoRGB, can use 16 bits for each of these values. That gives 65535 steps for each color. This is only an approximation to what our eyes can do.

    Because our eyes are so much better then the sensors, we sometimes have to exaggerate the image data we are working with in order to simulate what we remember seeing. Basically, we often have to trick the eye into believing there is more data there. That is because the eye can perceive more than what we can capture. It is also because the sensor is completely objective. It does not know what we feel when we see the image.

    Objective or Subjective?

    Color has to be objective. It also has to be subjective. Confusing? Yes, but most of the talk about color is.

    I’m a professional print maker. As such, my work has to be reproducible. My computer is well corrected to ensure that the colors I see when I am editing are reasonably close to the “actual” colors of the original subject. Through a little more magic, my prints use color profiles for my printer/ink/paper type to make sure that what I print is as close as possible to what I saw on my computer.

    This is objective use of color. It has known, fixed values and it can be reproduced over and over again. It may suck some of the life and spontaneity out of the process, but it is necessary to produce professional results.

    Subjectively, though, things get interesting. Who says that color has to stay just like the “real” world it was taken from. As an artist, I am free to do anything I want to create a result I want. If I want a world of purple bananas and red oceans that is a valid choice for me. No one can say that is not right because the real world did not look like that. So to an artist, color is a choice, not a limitation or a fixed property.

    Our incredible post-production tools allow amazing enhancement of – or damage to – our images.

    Interpretation

    Now, to get real, my world does not usually include purple bananas. But there is a big overlay between the objective and subjective worlds. Images that come out of the camera as RAW files are flat and dull and lifeless. They contain all of the data the sensor recorded, but not what I remember. I work many of my images to create the impression of color that struck me at the time I took the picture.

    I would call this interpretation. I am selectively enhancing or changing the colors to recreate the impression I saw (or wanted to see). A color purist might see this as wrong, since I am changing the tonal structure of the image to reduce or exaggerate colors or contrasts. I am not a purist.

    There is an irony here that is not lost on me – my systems are set up to deal with color very accurately, but then I sometimes alter the color drastically. What can I say? It’s art, not engineering.

    Symbolism

    The discussion would not be complete without touching on the mystical area of color symbolism. People can get worked up over this: no, that can’t be red because that would mean anger; no that can’t be white because that means death, etc. Some of these considerations are reasonable for some applications. If you’re an advertiser, you want to avoid chasing customers away.

    But is color symbolism a real thing? Yes… but. A lot of it is cultural. And opinion. Colors seem to have different significance in different parts of the world. One representation of this is the Lüscher color test. It attemped to codify the symbolism of colors, at least to the western eye. Given that it varies for different people, it does not seem that the symbolism is a significant tool to use when creating art.

    A small example of cultural differences: in the western world that I’m familiar with, financial reports mark upward trends in green and downward ones in red. In China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan they are reversed. That is, red marks an uptrend and green marks a downtrend. A very simple thing but it can lead to a lot of confusion if you go “out of culture”. I am trained, in this context, to perceive green as positive and red as negative.

    Emotion

    Color does touch us on an emotional level. Not everyone reacts the same, but there are patterns and generalities.

    It is known that certain colors produce rather similar reactions in people. Blues tend to be calming. Reds tend to increase energy. Yellow tends to cheer people up. So if I was creating an image where I wanted to create a calming mood, I would use a palate of blue and green. If I wanted to be bold and attention getting I would selects strong red and orange hues. This is not relying on the symbolism of colors, as far as meaning, but on general reactions across populations.

    Like smell, color invokes a response in people. It is another tool that artists need to be familiar with and be able to use to their advantage. It can require a lifetime of study and practice.

    What is color?

    Coming back to the original question. Can we say what color is?

    Not satisfactorily in a short blog. Color is electromagnetic radiation in a certain range. It is definite ranges of data represented by red, green, and blue values (in photography). Color is a property that invokes an emotional and/or a cultural response. It is so subtle and well measured by the human eye that we cannot yet capture it precisely in imaging or print all the eye can see.

    In short, color is part of the magic we live with all the time and that we artists work with in various ways to create our art. Understanding the technology does not really help us understand “color”. Neither does treating it as a mystical spell. It is this wonderful stuff we perceive because we are human.

    Even if I spend hours agonizing over mapping color tones and micro-adjustments of hue or saturation, that does not mean you have to know that in order to appreciate the image.

    Enjoy! Don’t over-think it!

  • Far Enough

    Far Enough

    “You don’t know you’ve gone far enough until you’ve gone too far.” – John Paul Caponigro

    This very insightful quote by Mr. Caponigro has become important to me. But before getting too far into it, I need to deal with a basic assumption it is based on. It assumes that you will be processing your images heavily. Not everyone believes or practices this. I didn’t either for a long time

    Do I need to process images?

    Yes is the basic answer. The bits that come out of the sensor that you load into Lightroom or whatever you use to process your images are not just RAW, they are “raw”. It is a faithful data capture but it is not what you remembered or want to see.

    Any image needs basic sharpening, contrast adjustment, color correction, and usually tone mapping. In addition there are esthetic changes like removing distractions, cropping, vignetting, etc. All this is usually necessary just to create a “straight” version of the image that faithfully matches the scene you saw.

    Once you have bought in to the need for processing, now the question becomes “how much?”

    What is the picture?

    Every artist must be able to answer for themselves what their goal is for an image. Is it a faithful rendering of the scene as they remembered it? Or is it to create an interesting piece of art?

    The answer has a lot to do with the type and amount of processing they will allow themselves. The answer is a personal and artistic decision. There is no right or wrong.

    For me personally, the further I go as an artist, not just a photographer, the more tolerant I become of serious modifications.

    On the other hand, in an article in the September 2019 issue of Photoshop User Magazine, Ramtin Kazemi states “I will never change the permanent subject matter of a scene”. His self imposed limit is that he will not move a tree or remove a boulder, although he may make dramatic changes in lighting and color. He will also change “impermanent” things like clouds. This is his decision as an artist. I will not criticize his choice. That does not mean it binds any boundaries on my artistic vision.

    How far is enough?

    When you give yourself permission to dramatically alter the basic image it opens up significant artistic opportunities. The digital tools we have today are marvelous. Artists today can do far more post processing than ever before; vastly more than chemical darkroom users ever could.

    We have such an embarrassment of riches that it can be a challenge to know when to stop. This is part of what Mr. Caponigro was talking about. How do you know you have taken your artistic vision to its limit?

    You do it by taking it beyond your limit and them backing off. I believe you will only know what your personal limit is in any dimension by going to the point where you say “too much”. Now you have found a limit for this image for where you are right now. In other words, the limits are moving targets and you need to keep pushing to find where they are today.

    And that is just talking about post processing. The same applies to how we approach all of our art. Push the boundaries. Keep trying new things.

    Use the tools

    The marvelous tools we have usually allow non-destructive editing. Most of the tools have a workflow that can be adopted to allow us to remove or modify changes and make different decisions in the future.

    For instance, Smart Objects in Photoshop allow most adjustments to be edited at a later time. Using new layers and adjustment layers prevents making permanent changes in the basic image information. Lightroom is inherently non-destructive for al its adjustments.

    So assume you do your basic image correction in Lightroom. Push all the adjustment to the point where you say “I don’t think so”, then back them off to the point that seems best. This works for all the controls in Lightroom. You can come back to an image months later and visualize it differently. You can re-process it with no loss of fidelity. I do this often.

    I occasionally see artists doing tutorials who still do destructive editing. That is, they do things like making a couple of adjustments in Photoshop and then merging them down. This commits them as a permanent, uneditable part of the image. Their work is beautiful. They must have such confidence in their artistic vision that they know they will never change their mind.

    I admire them, but that doesn’t work for me. I am forever learning and seeing differently. I like doing “what if” exercises, where I take an old image and try new things with it. I am sometimes amazed at what I discover.

    Is there a “too far”?

    If there a “too far” point, it can only be decided by each individual artist. I know I lean towards a lot more processing of my images now than I did a few years ago. I also realize it is a moving target for me.

    On any individual adjustment I can usually find a “too far” point. But in the larger sense, I do not believe there is a fixed point beyond which we should not go. There is no edge of the earth point where we fall off into chaos. The limit for any image is determined by my current artistic vision and my intent for the image. It is fair game to use any and all of the tools available to create the art I visualize. Ultimately, the far enough point is a personal judgment.

    Your mileage may vary.

  • Is Digital Imaging Going to Stick Around?

    Is Digital Imaging Going to Stick Around?

    Got ‘ya. 🙂 Sorry to disappoint, but this is not a rant against digital imaging or a plea for a return to the “good old days” of film. Digital imaging is a technology. As such it should be a neutral consideration. It doesn’t matter if our art if it is created “digitally” or by some other means.

    It’s just a technology

    Art, by its nature, is created with a medium using specific technology. Digital imaging is the currently popular medium and technology used by most photographers. If I were writing this 30 years ago, the medium would be film and no one would give it a second thought.

    That is one reason I think it strange that people feel the need to qualify it most of the time. It is said to be digital photography using a digital camera and modified using digital post processing. To me that is putting undue emphasis on the technology.

    Pushing the limits

    Any medium or any technology has limits. Artists are inspired by pushing the limits of the medium. Whether it is painting or music or photography, a great craftsman knows the capabilities of the medium he is using. It becomes a game, a quest, to push the limits of the technology to create new art.

    But photography is fairly unique in that the technology is advancing rapidly. I don’t think people are inventing new cellos ( well, there are the electronic ones…). The quality and capability of oil paints is probably improving slowly, but not being revolutionized. Digital photography is a much less mature technology and it is based on the electronic and integrated circuit industry, which is huge and rapidly moving. Consequently we tend to think of getting a new shiny gadget that pushes out the boundaries rather than learning the limits and using them as part of our art. That is a problem for photographers.

    I love the quality of my equipment and the things I can express with it. But there is a tendency for most people to focus too much on the technology. The resolution, the dynamic range, the focusing, the low noise are easy to see as the important thing. I am glad these things are improving all the time. Too often, though, we get caught up in looking at what the technology can accomplish rather than focusing on what the artist is doing with it.

    Art is made by an artist, not a camera

    It is easy to get blinded by the brilliance of the technology and loose sight of the fact that ultimately, we should be talking about the art. Art is made by an artist, not a camera. An artist can make exciting art with a cell phone or a disposable film camera. Resolution and dynamic range do not make art.

    I am delighted to admit that my main camera is a mirrorless 46MPix wonder. The image quality is remarkable. I will confess that in one part of my work I like super detailed, crunchy sharp images. But I also, more and more, find myself making extreme abstracts that are unrecognizable from the original capture. The technology enables this, because the images have such depth and fidelity to begin with that they can survive serious processing. Pushing the limits. The technology lets me do these things. It does not do any of them for me.

    I love the technology and I make use of it, but it is not digital art, it is just art.

    It’s not perfect

    Saying that digital is just a technology also admits that is is not perfect. It is so good that it has displaced film, but it is not ultimate truth. Someday it too will be displaced by something else.

    A digital image is simply an array of pixels. That means there are artifacts that become obvious at extreme magnification. The sensors are getting better all the time, but that is a built-in limitation of the technology.

    A digital sensor can only capture about 14 bits of dynamic range (+/- 2). This is 16,384 brightness steps for each color. It is amazing how good this looks, but it is far short of the capability of the human eye. And the sensor is linear while the eye response is logarithmic. Again, the eye had a significant advantage.

    Technically, current digital imaging products are the best photographic devices that have ever been made. Technically. That does not mean they produce better art.

    Ephemeral

    Another important consideration for digital imaging is that it is and has promoted an ephemeral view of images. Digital images have fed the huge social media, entertainment industry, online viewing trend. People have become used to glancing at images for about 1 second or less and moving on. This has tended to devalue most images. Especially if they are on a screen.

    I don’t believe this short attention span culture is healthy for the viewers or artists.

    But there is a still more insidious problem with digital images: they have no physical presence. Did you at some time end up with a shoe box of family pictures that brought important memories back? Did you discover and enjoy a drawer full of negatives and old prints at your parents? Those do not exist any more.

    Digital images only exist on your computer or in “the cloud”. E.g. once the computer dies or you stop paying for the cloud, they are gone. Totally. No record of their existence. A career of art, a lifetime of family memories can disappear in an instant.

    This is a dark side of digital imaging.

    Prints are even more important

    Because digital images are so ephemeral, I believe it is even more important now to make prints of important images. Prints have substance, weight, physical presence. They seem much more real than an image on the screen. And they are.

    A print is “permanent” – well, maybe 100 years for a good quality pigment print on professional paper. When you handle it it has weight and the image seems important. It is something that can be displayed proudly on your wall to view often and for others to see. It can be handed down to others later. A print is a real material thing, not just a bunch of bits.

    Some photographers say an image isn’t finished until it is printed. More and more I’m coming to agree with that view.

    Will it stick?

    So, will digital imaging stick around? Sure. It already has. It is really hard to find film any more. Even harder to get it processed. Digital has become so clearly superior to the alternatives that it has displaced them all. That is not to say it does not have faults. Everything does.

    But digital is just a technology. It will dominate until something better comes along. A technology does not make art. What an artist does with the medium is art. A super high tech digital camera is not a requirement to make art.

    I would much rather be remembered as an artist than as someone who was very proficient with digital technology.