Good afternoon to all,

Something bothers me a little bit about a lot of pictures that I see on this site, with the last exemple coming from Salgado'spictures (before him, I can think about David Allan Harley(?) ): it seems that there is a tendancy to underexpose. I am expecting pictures with a lot of details (look at HCB and many many others). So my questions are: what do you think? why do we get such results?...I do not critize the work presented on this site, it is just something that I would like to discuss with you.

Many Thanks - Arie

-- Arie Haziza (nhaziza@northrock.bm), May 16, 2002

Answers

why are details so important? sometimes they are necessary, sometimes they are not....this isnt the school of ansel adams, right?

-- grant (lotusphotography@yahoo.com), May 16, 2002.

When I write that they lack detail, I really mean that they look somber (If I can say that),dark is a better word. I could see how it can be used to communiquate a feeling, but when I see systematic "darkness", I wonder...- Thanks

Arie

-- Arie (nhaziza@northrock.bm), May 16, 2002.

I personaly wouldn't make any judgments from looking at web pictures - the change in gamma from a Mac to a PC is just one variable that can make a picture very different in apearance from the original. However film and paper emulsions have changed over the years and older emulsions gave more midtone seperation and an altogether smoother richer feel to the photographs. I always believed this was to do with the greater silver content. Modern materials are faster and finer grained and as an environmental concideration silver content is reduced but this is at the expense of the midtone quality. BTW as I now scan my colour and B&w negs I'm now under exposing them. I always used to give the exposure on neg 1/3 or 1/2 extra for printing but for scanning it's the opposite.

-- Johann Fuller (johannfuller@hotmail.com), May 16, 2002.

Arie, you can't judge print quality from a computer screen. Go to some galleries that specialize in photography and ask them to show you some examples of excellent prints. Incidentally, I've never considered HCB prints to be the paramount of black and white printing.

-- Steve Wiley (wiley@accesshub.net), May 16, 2002.

Ditto on the computer screen. As someone who has seen a Salgado exhibition his prints are among the best there are. I recently switched from an 'old' (2 years) conventional computer screen to a fairly high priced flat screen. Though color images aren't bad the brightness and contrast on B&W is terrible.

-- Bob Todrick (bobtodrick@yahoo.com), May 16, 2002.

Previous posters are correct: you can't judge much from your monitor. I saw Salgado's latest show ("Migrations" last summer in Edinburgh and the prints were just beautiful, obviously well-exposed and nicely printed.

But some people may intentionally go dark. In his autobiography, "Unreasonable Behavior," the great British photojournalist Don McCullin recounts how many people have criticized his photos as being too dark, and his reply is that with the horrors depicted in his work, how could be make it any lighter?

-- Douglas Kinnear (douglas.kinnear@colostate.edu), May 16, 2002.

Douglas, very interesting answer. I will travel to Paris next August, and I will take the time to visit photo exhibitions to see the difference.

Arie

-- Arie Haziza (nhaziza@northrock.bm), May 16, 2002.

FWIW, I got a similar impression to Arie's from looking through DA Harvey's book on Cuba. The print reproductions in the book looked generally OVERLY dark and somber to me, as if DAH were wanting to convey that Cuba is a bleak, depressing, miserable place. I don't know if that was his intention, but that's how it came across to me.

-- Ollie Steiner (violindevil@yahoo.com), May 16, 2002.

First of all, I agree with all above who said that you can't judge a picture's tonality from online photographs. Every monitor is different. The salgado images looked quite good on my Radius monitor.

Whether or not a photograph is to dark is very subjective. I'm the pround owner of a few original Salgado prints, and they are wonderfully printed. They are very rich, but not overly dark. This should be obvious in his books as well, which are very well-reproduced. Some of the Polio work was in Vanity fair last month, and there too, it was fairly well printed.

David Allen Harvey, and many other chrome shooters, have a style that involves slightly underexposing slide film, often in contrasty situations where there are a lot of dark areas in the frame. IMHO, the images in his Cuba book are printed a bit dark. I saw him speak once, however, and the slides he showed were luminous and didn't have the murky quality of the images in his book.

Images such as Salgado's and Harvey's are probably intended to be a little dark and moody. The problem is, when it comes time to reproduce them on the web or in print, if the scans and/or printing isn't perfect, the results can be even darker than intended.

-- Noah (naddis@mindspring.com), May 16, 2002.

monitor variability
To help get around inevitable monitor variation, I provide a simple grayscale and color calibration page on my website at < b>http://www.bayarea.net/~ramarren/calibration/cal.html . Of course, not all monitors can be adjusted to even display the entire grayscale gamut, but if you get yours reasonably close, you can actually judge photos on a monitor, at least insofar as they are presented as a web gallery.

darkness
I don't find it really a matter of "underexposure" or "darkness" as a technical flaw. It's a matter of aesthetics. Many photographers like the look of photos with rich tones cycling into the dark end of the spectrum. For me, a good B&W photo should display the entire gamut ... Key is a matter of what predominates: Low Key is dark tones, High Key is light tones ... but they should all have a maximum black and a maximum white in the image somewhere or I feel the photo is washed out or underexposed, unsatisfying.

Crisp detailing is important when the subject matter calls for it, but more of the stuff that I prefer pulls the essence of motion into a still frame photograph... Ultimate razor sharp detail is not the point in those cases.

Godfrey

-- Godfrey (ramarren@bayarea.net), May 16, 2002.

Reproductions seldom match the originals. I print professionally for some photographers you've probably heard of, and I see this happen all the time.

-- Steve Wiley (wiley@accesshub.net), May 16, 2002.

Arie,

Do you mean "dark negatives" or "dark prints"?

-- Ray Moth (ray_moth@yahoo.com), May 16, 2002.

I meant dark prints.

I received today the book "Faceless" by David Douglas Dancan. It is funny how the contact sheet shows very light images, and the actual prints are much more darker.

-- Arie (nhaziza@northorock.bm), May 17, 2002.