Walking the Plank As a fine arts photographer, I had a difficult year in 2008. With the economy crashing all around us, it meant dwindling sales of my fine art prints. Adding to the frustration, my annual show in December was interrupted by a snowstorm, and at least two-thirds of my attendees never made it to the show. But what was really devastating to me for the year was the loss of nearly eighty percent of my images from my fieldwork, because of problems with film and unrelenting dirt issues.
I love film. I love the smell of it, the way it looks on the light table, and how it translates into a final image. Monochrome photography is my lifeblood, and I still have found advantage in photographing on film in the field, while utilizing extensive digital postproduction to make my image back at home. The simplicity in the use of film in the field, and also the joy of my Leica MP and Zeiss ZM 2/35 have made my work fulfilling over many years of effort. While the industry has pushed on to digital capture many years ago, I have been holding on to film dearly. In fact, so much so that it has put me out of sync with the majority of photographers—which has been burdensome in my writings on the subject. Over the years, many of my colleagues have urged me to move forward to digital capture, but to no avail. It was not a matter of stubbornness on my part, but one of image quality. I simply found no ready means of photography with Bayer matrix-based color digital cameras for my monochrome works. The artifacts from the Bayer demosaicing result in significant loss of detail as interpolation is used to fill in the holes of the “Swiss cheese” from the image sensor. While other photographers claimed to have good results in monochrome derived from their Bayer matrix-based digital cameras, my efforts in testing showed me different results. It is not that I was without significant digital-camera experience, as I had shot a nearly one-of-a-kind digital monochrome camera, the Kodak DCS 760m, for eighteen months. This six-mega pixel camera had a pure monochrome sensor, which resulted in stunning image-making. Alas, the camera developed a technical problem, which could not be readily resolved by Kodak, and it took about a year for its repair. The interruption in my work was devastating, and I returned to film. Since my DCS 760m days, I have been unable to convince a single camera company to build a true digital monochrome camera—which to me is an obvious need. The pixel count of the modern Bayer matrix-based digital camera is a lie. What manufacturers state is not the truth in terms of the information content of a camera. A Bayer cell was meant to be a cluster of four sub-pixels, which form a matrix of gB, Rg at the site. While RAW image processors try to de-mosaic the Bayer cell to imply greater resolution from the results, the truth is that the holes in the “Swiss cheese” cannot be filled. A level of artifacts and loss of resolution remain when a Bayer matrix image is stretched to display more than its information content will support. For this reason and for the sake of simplicity, my life has continued around the use of film in the field. But for some reason, the photo gods have not been kind to me this last year. Each roll of film arrived back from the lab looking good on the light table, but was a disaster upon scanning. My Hasselblad X1 scanner would see hundreds, if not thousands, of small specs of dust and dirt on each negative, impractical to retouch by hand. Naturally, my thoughts turned towards the lab and its film development and handling practices. But after battling throughout the year on this issue with my film lab and its extraordinary efforts towards resolving the issue, it made me realize that something else must be wrong. In the end, I found it was the film stock itself that I was using. I had been given a large quantity of a new film type for testing and had used it continuously since I received it. What I had not realized is that the pre-production batch of film was tainted with production teething issues, as the company dialed in the film on the production line. My “dirt” was actually the film. I had one good stroke of luck during the year when I ordered and had drop-shipped new film stock into California for a west coast shoot. It is the only film of the year that yielded images for me and did not have the dreaded “dirt.” Take a clue, Myers. I had to look at myself in the mirror at the end of 2008 and make a decision about my path forward. What I was doing was not working. Perhaps just bad luck and certainly likely fixable, my film work smacked me in the face over the year. I don’t think the Photo Gods were angry at my work, but rather have been pushing me forward, kicking and screaming, towards the new age. In December of 2008, the Nikon D3X was announced. This is the first professional workhorse camera that has been available in small format size with a 24-mega pixel (24mp) Bayer matrix image sensor. Take 24 mp, divide by 4, and you get 6 mega pixels—magically the same number as my pure digital monochrome camera produced in monochrome. Six-mega pixels are what I would consider the true resolution of the D3X camera based on cells, not sub-pixels. In 2009, I am going digital, and it will be with the Nikon D3X. I have sold my scanner, and am in the process of selling my film camera system. Soon I will be in a new era, trying my best to derive monochrome works from a color-based, Bayer matrix camera. While it might seem to most photographers that my transition was long overdue and an obvious course of action, it is not to me. Film is magical. I can readily pull 50 mega-pixels of monochrome image content off of a 35mm black-and-white negative. Downshifting toward six mega-pixels of true RGB image content with the Nikon D3X is going to be a shock. While gradation will improve tremendously with the digital camera, resolution will be painfully lower. The hope is in the tradeoff between gradation and resolution in terms of overall image content. This article is both the launch of my digital transition and of this column that I will write for Red Dog Journal. Over the New Year, I will be writing about my new digital camera work and the impact it makes on my fine art images. Of significance to readers, there are a number of unique math tricks that I will be trying with my work to attempt to counteract the effects of the Bayer matrix and de-mosaicing on monochrome image quality. If even half of my tricks hold, it should bring a pallet of new tools into play for digital monochrome and in understanding how to contend with and derive works from a color-based Bayer sensor. Wish me luck! ---------------
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© Red Dog Journal, 2008 |