Tired of the fight? Yearn for the good OLD Days? YOU were the one that used to Yell EXPAND YOUR MIND! Or, the Making of an Old Photograph

Vincent Chooses a Brush, Arles, late 1888

Wick Beavers Photographer, 2011

The Making of an Old Photograph

It's a fight, getting people out of their ruts- especially when they learned it right the first time.

Talk good photography, talk the masters, talk the history and you're talking:

1) 10 stops from totally Black to totally White (the Zone system of Ansel Adams),

2) Blown out whites, major black in the shadows, what choice is made by the artist? To allow the high end to blow out or the low to go to black. Sometimes, there is no choice, it ALL goes.

3) Use of so-called black and white spaces as the artist's "compositional elements" in a masters print,

4) Lack of color,

5) In studio lit photographs, are the images dancing in the high key end or stumbling like a dullard in the low? Or did the Photographer strive to get it all within the limited 10 stop histogram (what? you snuck this word in to describe the gamut of old film based photographs? yeah, it works and we all know what it means).

What about my beloved GRAIN?

So, this week I gave up defending the amazing dynamicism of the new age in Photography.

And I'm not talking about digital. But a realm of photography as we knew it that is falling fast.

Which I have talked about for a few years now. HDR.

And Dan Margulis' super sharpening using hi radius low amp

litude (hiraloam) to control blooming and other artifacts derived from sharpening in the traditional manner. Which, if I were really speaking tradition, we'd be talking about UNSharpening, right?

So, here are two pictures in the love it left it and came back department from a couple of portraits shot yesterday and recently.

See if you see what I mean.

Best

Wick

Grant Wood's

"American Gothic, Post Divorce"

Wick Beavers Photographer, 2011