2023 Black & White Awards

T

thronobulax

Very Active Poster
Registered User
Joined
Aug 29, 2020
Messages
1,394
I only skimmed this article, so I am unsure if capture was film or digital ...

newatlas.com

What you lookin' at? The winners of the Black and White Photo Awards 2023

The beauty of black-and-white photography is that it removes the distraction of color, creating dramatic imagery that’s one step removed from reality. In a celebration of monochromatic photography, the prestigious Black and White Photo Awards has revealed its 2023 winners.
newatlas.com newatlas.com
 
Alan Klein said:
I've found images converted from film still have the look of film.
Click to expand...

At the risk of sounding snarky, I find the inverse to also be true:

Images captured digitally can often be spotted because of excessive post production fiddling that goes on. Mind you, I don't think it's innate to digital, just human nature. When you give people knobs to turn, they turn them.

It puts me in mind of what happened when multi-track recording really took off. Historically, classical performances were recorded with minimal microphones configured - as best as possible - to capture what a human would have heard, had they been present for the performance. This included "hearing the room" because room acoustics figure into the listening experience rather prominently. Then along came the "microphones for everyone" and the "we'll fix it in the mix" crowd. Recordings - even of some the very best performances in the world - became sterile and uninteresting to listen to. What you got was a deconstruction of the performance, followed by a reconstruction as the mix engineer glued together the individual tracks from the now many microphones in use. It was not generally a very good reconstruction and led to the aforementioned dull recordings. Some very fine European music companies like Telefunken refused to fall for this and continued to produce very musical recordings.

I have seen some beautifully made images that were digitally captured and post processed but, more often than not, I see heavy handed HDR, over saturation of colors, and all manner of non photographic intrusions into the image designed to pump it up at all costs. Instead of fine wine, we get eye candy...
 
Last edited:
Alan Klein said:
I've found images converted from film still have the look of film
Click to expand...

That depends entirely on the person doing the conversion and their level of expertise.

I can make digital look like film or film like digital. What matters is that the resulting image pleases the client, who is often also the photographer.

The trick is subtlety in manipulation. And it's not just converting from film to digital that suffers from over-processing. I've seen plenty of "crunchy" digital images.
 
Well, since digitizing film is the only way to show film photos on the web, we really have no options. We could stick with photo clubs where everyone brings in their prints and passes them around. But then I couldn't show you my work from America very easily. I suppose we can look at the issue from a positive viewpoint rather than its limitations. Let's be cheery about it. Nothing's perfect.
 
Alan Klein said:
Well, since digitizing film is the only way to show film photos on the web, we really have no options. We could stick with photo clubs where everyone brings in their prints and passes them around. But then I couldn't show you my work from America very easily. I suppose we can look at the issue from a positive viewpoint rather than its limitations. Let's be cheery about it. Nothing's perfect.
Click to expand...

I say we pick a pub in the Midlands or Yorkshire, meet there for a pint and show our work ;) (If only)
 
thronobulax said:
I say we pick a pub in the Midlands or Yorkshire, meet there for a pint and show our work ;) (If only)
Click to expand...
That sounds great. I was in London in May for five days, but don't know when I'll get back. Maybe you can bring your photos here to New Jersey? I'll compromise. We can meet in NYC.
 
Alan Klein said:
That sounds great. I was in London in May for five days, but don't know when I'll get back. Maybe you can bring your photos here to New Jersey? I'll compromise. We can meet in NYC.
Click to expand...

I'm afraid my going anywhere near a big city in the US is more compromise than I could endure ;)
 
Joanna Carter said:
That depends entirely on the person doing the conversion and their level of expertise.

I can make digital look like film or film like digital. What matters is that the resulting image pleases the client, who is often also the photographer.

The trick is subtlety in manipulation. And it's not just converting from film to digital that suffers from over-processing. I've seen plenty of "crunchy" digital images.
Click to expand...

Some years ago now I met up with a member of another Forum in Southern Turkey, to learn how to make Platinum prints. We went out shooting 5x4 and then I processed my films. They were scanned on his Epson scanner, the files adjusted and digital negatives & then Platinum prints produced.

A year or so later when back in the UK I made some darkroom prints off the negatives, they were a fairly good match to the Platinum prints, later I bought a secondhand Epson A3+ printer and using QTR I found I could match match the darkroom prints perfectly on the now gone Harman Warmtone FB Inkjet paper.

So yes I totally agree.

Ian
 
I will say that - upon a second viewing - the images in this competition to look highly manipulated. That doesn't make them bad, it just speaks to a very heavy hand in post processing.

The things is - at some point - lots of digital post processing moves the image from the realm of photography to painting. Again, not in and of itself an awful thing. But part of the joy of photography is harnessing the light via photographic machinery, not painting what's not there digitally.
 
Almost all the entries look as though they have been adjusted to produce what I once read in an amateur publication - “…what we are all looking for - IMPACT!”. Well, not all of us.
But, as Joanna says and Ian confirms, it now seems possible, with skill, for one process to produce results hitherto deemed exclusive to the other. In practice the mode of capture does seem to influence the output. Digital users seem to prefer one look and film users another.

A brief comment on musical recording, if I may.
Some years ago, I visited a small recording studio, perhaps no more than ten feet square, if that. Even then they could adjust the atmosphere (don’t know the technical term) to sound like a concert hall, a cathedral, a nightclub, the open air and so on, all very convincingly and with apparent ease. Technology must have advanced since then. My conclusion is that the “sterile and uninteresting” output is a matter of deliberate choice, not a technical limitation. Presumably there are fashions in recording, as in everything else.
 
David M said:
A brief comment on musical recording, if I may.
Some years ago, I visited a small recording studio, perhaps no more than ten feet square, if that. Even then they could adjust the atmosphere (don’t know the technical term) to sound like a concert hall, a cathedral, a nightclub, the open air and so on, all very convincingly and with apparent ease. Technology must have advanced since then. My conclusion is that the “sterile and uninteresting” output is a matter of deliberate choice, not a technical limitation. Presumably there are fashions in recording, as in everything else.
Click to expand...


Weeeeelllll .... not quite, though I stipulate this entirely my rather biased view.

It is possible with modern digital recording methods to simulate pretty much any desired room ambience. It's similarly possible to digitally simulate the sound of pretty much any instrument/amplifier combination.

But it's never quite exactly right. The reasons are complex and likely boring but have to do with several things:

  • How sound bounces around a room
  • How sound "intermodulates" to produce the "timber" of final result
  • How our ears and brains interact with all this when we are in said room and thus what we expect to hear in a recording

For most pop music and/or electronically delivered sound, this tends not to matter a whole lot since the "sound" isn't really much determined by the room, just by electronics at very high volumes. Anyone who's been to a rock concert will confirm the generally execrable quality of the sound. I was surprised to find this to be true also of acoustically produced music being amplified in a large venue. Since this is where the bulk of the commercial opportunity lies, it's not surprising to see digital take over that world.

But the room sound of an acoustic performance - an orchestra, choir, small jazz ensemble, bluegrass .... - will definitely matter. If you want to hear a brilliant recording that does this really well, look for "The King James Version" by the Harry James Big Band. Originally recorded direct-to-disk and then rereleased on CD, this recording was done in a church and is all about "hearing the room". Deutsche Grammaphon and Telefunken have similarly made many wonderful classical recordings in which the room is an integral part of the sound.

<Veering back on topic>

But this isn't actually about digital v. analog. It's about how the technology is applied. Your recording studio example is one in which the engineers have decided to manufacture a room sound where presumably none is present, or the wrong one is present. This is done by either very close micing of the acoustic instruments or plugging in the electronic instruments directly into the mixing system, blending the whole business together and adding the room sound thereafter. But there is nothing stopping a good sound engineer from digitally capturing a performance in an open room and allowing the room to "sing for itself".

In much the same way, we can use digital photography as a means to capture what we see and wish to express thereby, or we an use it to produce what is clearly an manufactured artifice - perhaps still art, but no longer "photography". More troublesome is somewhere in the middle, when an image is digitally manipulated - usually to a social or political end - and the manipulation isn't obvious. The current deep fake imagery leaps to mind.

I remain convinced that digital photography will branch off into it's own much like photography departed from painting as the modernists moved toward more realism. A more interesting question is what will happen with AI mediated "photography" in which the tools - look at Topaz.AI as one example - actually can reconstruct what should have been captured but wasn't.
 
The acoustic technology I encountered seemed convincing at the time. However, I'm thinking that just as it's possible nowadays, to produce astonishingle detailed 3-D scans of physical structures (all the brushshtrokes in a paining, all the chisel marks in a sculpture, all the pointing in a building.) it should be possible, if not relatively easy, to generate the entire acoustic landscape of a space. That would make perfect compliance possible.

In photography, I would think that it's probably possible today, to capture an image, analyse it via AI, and output a version of what "should" be there, (as you say) according to specification - obviously de-wrinkled faces, but also different times of day, flowers out of season and suchlike. All in one camera, or more likely, one phone.

As far as a division into Two Ways of Life goes, I suggest you are too pessimistic (or perhaps you are optimistic). Photography is, as we know, writing with light, and a digital image is written with light, too. We already have ways of producing hybrid work, so there can be no full separation. I think it's interesting that the pioneers of hybrid working were probably the platinum printers.
My suspicion is that we shall split into purely digital, for both capture and dissemination and then Everything Else, where the final result is a physical print, however it's generated – film and darkroom, hybrid and all the processes we currently call "alternative." The difference will lie in the output – real and precious or virtual.

We are rather like skilled flint-knappers contemplating the first bronze swords.
 
David M said:
In photography, I would think that it's probably possible today, to capture an image, analyse it via AI, and output a version of what "should" be there, (as you say) according to specification - obviously de-wrinkled faces, but also different times of day, flowers out of season and suchlike. All in one camera, or more likely, one phone.
Click to expand...


I only recently came across the aforementioned Topaz.AI and their model is instructive here. They sell you an inexpensive editing interface for your Mac or Windows computer. But, as I understand it, behind the scenes (literally), is a machine learning farm that they run in their environment to "fix" your images. Out of focus? Fixed. Incorrect color balance, mixed light sources? Fixed. And so forth. In other words, they are not merely amending the capture, they are actually constructing the image in some sense. In effect, what they've done (I think, I've not used it myself) is scale up a very large instance of what on board computing on DSLRs and smart phones does.
 
That sounds very clever indeed. We should salute all this inventiveness, even if we don't always approve of the uses to which it's out. An interesting and perhaps exasperating few yers lie ahead.
 
David M said:
That sounds very clever indeed. We should salute all this inventiveness, even if we don't always approve of the uses to which it's out. An interesting and perhaps exasperating few yers lie ahead.
Click to expand...


I think it will just be another branch in the visual arts.

Painting begat photography

Photography branched into romanticism and modernism

Modernist photography begat realism, abstraction, and avant garde photographic schools

Digital photography started out as an emulation of analog

Digital photography then branched much as it predecessor had - romantic, realist and avant garde variations emerged quickly, probably none moreso prominent than surrealism resurrected (Dali would have loved a digital Nikon ;)

AI Mediated photography will - I think - just become another thing in its own right. It has tremendous power to be abused in the service of political and social causes, but the only thing new here is the convenience of doing so. Recall that Stalin replaced his murder victims that had previously been photographed with potted plants - all via analog means.
 
I believe that digital photography began as a curiosity project rather than an emulation of film even though it was done by a Kodak employee. As we all know, Kodak itself was not interested.
The history of (shall we call it?) art is littered with attributions and connections made by critics, rather than practitioners. A influences B, B influences C and so on down a neat primrose path. It's an approach that denies creativity, although it does make for more conveniently produced essays. If linear influences are the only thing, we have to explain why photography, as an example, was invented independently in several places at about the same time, by unconnected people. I hesitate to advance a woolly-minded "spirit of the times theory" theory.
 
David M said:
I believe that digital photography began as a curiosity project rather than an emulation of film even though it was done by a Kodak employee. As we all know, Kodak itself was not interested.
The history of (shall we call it?) art is littered with attributions and connections made by critics, rather than practitioners. A influences B, B influences C and so on down a neat primrose path. It's an approach that denies creativity, although it does make for more conveniently produced essays. If linear influences are the only thing, we have to explain why photography, as an example, was invented independently in several places at about the same time, by unconnected people. I hesitate to advance a woolly-minded "spirit of the times theory" theory.
Click to expand...

You are, perhaps, reading my description more literally than intended. What I wrote is a broad taxonomy that is retrospectively reasonably close to what happened. It does not, however, described how or why these things evolved the way they did. That is to say, taxonomies are helpful in understanding relationships between things and their sequencing, but they are not really useful in figuring out what exactly caused what.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top