basic film vs digital stuff

Some of this may also just be me shaking stuff I did learn in Photo 101, like every print has to have a true black and a true white or else it's flat. Sometimes that's just not what the image wants to be, although I'm glad I did learn that habit, generally speaking.

I've had to try and dial back on the Lightroom adjustments, when I first got it I adjusted things because I could as much as because I needed to.

I will say tho, that having switched to RAW early this year, going back and working through all these images shot in JPEG feels like working without caffeine, or thumbs. Amazing how quickly I come to take that fuller control for granted, on white balance especially.

Yeah, having good retrospective control on WB is one of the pros of RAW/Lightroom for me. I know I could take more care in camera but that involves fiddling about!

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8434/7749246514_2c113bf7e4_z.jpg

straight out the camera - - - feel like I couldn't do much besides fuck this up, even though histogram-wise it's well clear of 'true black' and 'true white.'

^ i have no idea what this is but it's rad

Frozen lake, lotus plants. Thanks!

wrt holding off on getting too into tweaking your prints, i guess i opt out of that kinda thing by just scanning & not playing with the colours, because then i have the plausible deniability of the thing i'm looking at having some arbitrary claim of authorial 'realness', in representing the photo i framed & lit & took. the problem with this is that a lot of 'tweaking' is an actual redress of how the photo should look, should have been printed or come out - how it would have looked if it had been printed in better quality, or more attentively, or w/e, so less qualifies as 'automatic adjustment'.

in terms of making alterations to purposefully work up & improve the look of a photograph, it almost just feels easier to just not, for me, to save yourself the decisions, save yourself the weird diffusion of considering what it is you're eventually looking at, albeit at the expense of your image having slightly more pop or contrast or w/e.

xp
i thought it was some smashed up pipes/a showerhead on the sidewalk, so

Yeah, I think that's a legit position to take, totally just "whatever I got through the lens." I think this is more difficult with digital because the process is more obviously mediated, vis-a-vis the camera having white-balance settings or automatic saturation things it does or whatever. I could still adopt a WYSIWYG position, but I don't think it'd have as much of a philosophical foundation, and meanwhile I'd be looking at the images being able to see the better image waiting to emerge from the chrysalis.

oh sure. but tbh i think my philosophical foundation/vague correlation w/the "truthiness" of the photo i took is just as flawed - i don't print my own stuff, so outsource a bunch of decisions affecting how things come out, & if i did print i'd be making all of those authorial decisions -- so why feel awkward about doing it on screen?

i have no idea whether that camera that allowed you to retroactively shift focus, change DoF, &c, are going to become standard, but i guess that would be the ultimate (or an ultimate) of this sorta thing - in which shooting & refining are two p distinct stages of a process. i almost feel like there's something extra, philosophically, with digital that makes further 'negotiation' of an image different - that working with pixels means you have a different relationship w/the verisimilitude of a "source", ie with hold-it-up-to-the-light-emulsion-film that exists physically and outside of the camera.

When I'm scanning film I tend to make minimal adjustments to the settings, mostly concentrate on cloning out dust spots etc. The temptation to adjust things comes with the digital stuff, but the amount of adjustment I do has been tempered somewhat by having worked with film a lot more over the last 9mths or so. I tend to be less happy with my straight from camera images than the film ones, though maybe shooting RAW isn't helping too much there.