VRlog :: photographic Virtual Reality, wilderness, exploration

 










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Thursday, July 7, 2005

I've been shooting more digital than film recently... and in fact a recent panorama I shot ended up taking about the same amount of time to make as film would have, except for the waiting for the film to get developed part. Why is that? Because quality panoramas take a lot more effort to make than single shots (I sometimes build panoramas in both QTVRAS and RealViz to see which one can do a better job). And when you shoot RAW files, you potentially defer a lot of decisions from the moment of exposure to the Photoshop phase. Lastly, a lot of fiddling can be necessary with digital images to eliminate problems from noise, cyan blow-out, and color fringing.

I found some interesting points in two photographer's thoughts about digital photography. The reason I'm posting these is I think most people are familiar with the arguments for digital photography. 'It's faster, it's more convenient, etc.'

The first is Bruce Barnbaum's thoughts. One of his strongest points has to do with the "convenience" argument for digital photography: 'Recently I have been hearing from workshop students that some are turning to digital because of convenience. They tell me they can start and quit at any time, save what they have where they are, and continue when it’s again convenient. That’s fine if it keeps them in photography, but it should be noted that none of the great work in photography was done when it was "convenient." It was done by people who were committed to self expression, by people who put other things aside to do photography because it was so important to them. It was not done by people who put photography aside until it was convenient. That’s not opinion. That’s a fact. That fact won’t change. Work will be produced in times of convenience, but it won’t be outstanding work. The people who will do great digital work will be as artistically visionary and as committed to it as the great photographers of the past and present who have been committed to their work. People doing it on a "convenience" basis will not produce much of lasting value.'

He goes on to make some salient points about the "Fix it later in Photoshop" mentality.

The second is Joerg Colberg. Some of his arguments regarding cost are very relevant to photographers like myself.

Lastly what neither post mentions are the flaws inherent in many digital images which take time and energy to eradicate, if you want to produce something as pristine as can be achieved with film. For instance... cyan blowout and color fringing. I think I covered cyan blowout on VRlog before, so I'll just mention the fringing problem. In thousands and thousands of cases, I never had ran into color fringing in my film panoramas. When I shoot digital scenes with the sun in the picture (which is most of the time for my kind of wilderness panorama), suddenly I have a new problem which various plugins and tools may or may not eliminate. While the public may not understand yet that color fringing is indicative of a quality problem, at some point they will.

In the following digital photo extract, notice there are two colors of fringing: purple, and green. ANd it's not limited to hard-edged objects... even the clouds display some fringe.

fringing-example.jpg
7:01:31 AM    


© Copyright 2006 erik goetze.



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Purpose
VRlog provides news, developments and analysis of the virtual reality (VR) world from a nature photographer's perspective. Since I am not connected to or funded by any VR vendor, I intend to objectively appraise what's going on, and the direction VR is headed in. -- erik goetze
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