A New Look at Black and White

For a month or two now I've been trying to find a way to do B&W with digital. Technically it's no problem, but the B&W look and feel I've cultivated is based on film, which has built-in dirt: noise, grain, haze, halation, chemical burn. The effect is something like mezzotint, something like drypoint, something like the drone in Eastern music. Digital doesn't have it, and it goes against the grain (so to speak) to corrupt the smoothness of the digital image in an effort to copy the sins of emulsion-based photography. So I've been trying to develop a new look – new to me, anyway.

I've been at it only a few hours. Took delivery of a 20D and 10-22 zoom yesterday. Sold my Contax G2 kit. Hell's own trouble trying to keep myself away from film; the 20D was an inducement.

Here's another try – one of the first shots I made with the new cam, in fact.

It's not very thrilling, maybe, to see these feeble efforts. But those who get what I'm up to may find them amusing.

Apothegm

One of an amateur's many advantages is that failure costs no more than success.

Note from Neil

Sent my friend Neil Fiertel a collection of my B&W prints. He replied as follows on 5/15/05.

I think you have a certain view of the world that shows up very keenly in many of the pictures. There is a kind of double theme that appears in that there is this kind of funereal landscape like stillness in many...never motion and never even a hint of change and then there are the somewhat macabre human pictures with odd poses, attitudes and compositions... There is nary a normal picture so to speak...even those that bespeak of normality are just a bit off...a bit...just a tiny bit...scarred with a kind of mould or sourness...even the nice portraits of Chris' nieces or relatives have that kind of inner sense of darkness...

I wonder though why you feel the need to define the tech for each of the images as if that has anything really to do with them. It does not. That might be of interest to the student or the technically inclined but I suggest that those that appreciate the subtle nature of your pictures could care less about that but those for whom f-stops and whatnot are paramount, likely they would not like your approach to photo. One of the most maddening things about photography is the very nature of the art being tied so keenly to a machine. As you well know, I have no problems owning, using, dominating and abusing if necessary a machine or a computer or a machete or any other tool of the trade but that is all they are in the end and for the artist to divest his images of any secret within the image with a kind of bland statement of 1/2 sec f6.3, tele-Smirkaron or whatever goes against what is really within your images...they deserve better...please don't return in the next letter with...oh, I do this just because it does take away significance from the images as I know that you truly do want people to appreciate your take on the world as seen through these images. They need silence and not tech to propagate within the mind. I mean, if I were to detail the history file of my colour prints from my last show... It would become a kind of conceptual art gallery with thousands of lines of essentially programming but it would say Nada about my images...