Leica S-E / S2 or something else

[Shashin]

Hi,

I would not agree on that, at least not fully.

A lot of research has gone into image quality and it is pretty well understood. Take the issue of diffraction.

Very clearly, once you are past optimum aperture and that may be f/4 for a highly corrected system or f/16 for a poorly corrected one, diffraction comes into play. So you can stop down to improve DoF but you loose sharpness in the plane of focus. In digital photography, sharpening also comes into play. You can sharpen more if you have a clean image.

Optimum aperture range is a function of format size and viewing distance. An optimum aperture is irrelevant if it does not give the depth of field that is wanted--or the exposure that is needed. As you have stated, this is pretty much understood.

Regarding sharpness, Ed Granger at Kodak developed SQF that is regarded to correlate well with perception of sharpness. In the real world, it is not that easy.

Let us be a bit realistic...

• If we make small images using wide angle lenses a cell phone will achieve very good results.
• If we make large prints with the main subject in focus and don't care about the rest, SQF is a good measure.
• If we want to achieve selective focus, with background out of focus we want good performance at large apertures. SQF will be a good measure, but out of focus rendition may play a major role. Cell phones have small sensors with short focal lengths, so they will not work for this.
• If we want focus from foreground to background, diffraction will be the limiting factor. The only cure is the ability of using tilts for tilting the focal plane.

In general, having low noise levels is always beneficial as it allows for more processing. Except at high ISO or in extreme darks, the only factor determining noise is the full well capacity and how well we utilize it. We need to expose to the right to utilize FWC. If we have a good FWC, like most modern CMOS sensor have, we can be a bit more conservative regarding exposure.

I am quite serious about this. Any modern camera you can buy today is capable of delivering seriously good image quality. Luminous Landscape has an interview with Ctein, whom Kodak regarded the greatest master printer. Ctein now uses APS-C or may be even 4/3 for all his work. It is absolutely good enough for A2 (16"x23") prints and as good as 6x7 film ever was. I don't have seen Ctein's prints from 4/3, but I am pretty sure they would put anything I achieved from my 37x49mm P45+ to shame. Why? Because he knows how to print!

I know how to print as well--I print for museums and artists and I assume people take my work for exhibition is the quality of my images. And once you state that print size is a determining factor in image quality, you don't understand printing or perception. I am sure you can make great A2 prints from APS-C or micro 4/3--I have. You can also make them much, much larger--I have done that as well. Print size does not change the image in significant perceptual ways (my largest image to date is 167" x 167").

Image quality is about the perceptual qualities of an image. That, in the final assessment, is all that matters. Which is why the technical criteria alone cannot define quality. Noise, like diffraction, will not in and of itself result in low(er) image quality. They might for you, but those are your personal criteria for image quality.

What I would say is:

• Any decent camera today can produce decent pictures. If not so, the photographer is at fault.
• To have the best image quality, you would look for the sensor having the least noise and the highest full well capacity.
• For best tonality, you would look for an efficient CFA paired with a low noise sensor with high full well capacity.
• To extract maximum detail and avoid artefacts you would look for a sensor that matches the resolution of your lens.Excellent lenses need excellent sensors to make them justice.

But, all this fails if the photographer doesn't do an optimal work.

I don't say that you need to be an expert in optics, sensor technology or image processing. But, if you want to make the best of your equipment, a basic understanding of the processes behind will certainly help!

Best regards
Erik

Photography is a process. Image quality is dependent on that process. But there is more to the process than technical factors. As as you pointed out, each person has biases. Your assessment of what is important in image quality is very much shaped by your bias. My bias shapes my work. But I have worked with enough processes and photographers to know that image quality extends beyond what I produce for myself. Image quality is not a fixed set of numbers.

 

[Shashin]

There is no way that an APS-C camera will create the same image quality as Medium Format Digital. No way on Earth. Linear sharpness can be equal but that is all.

Without reading quotes or interviews or fully understanding the context from which this has supposedly been read or taken there is no way APS can be compared with Medium Format film of digital. No way on earth. The only thing it is comparable is linear sharpness, which is the least interesting thing about larger formats. Post can certainly get them closer in terms of the tonality loss but there is no way it will match a Medium Format digital or film print that's been equally printed by a competent printer. Good enough, is another very subjective thing.

??? APS-C does not have the same qualities as MFD. Film and digital are different as well. Wet plate photography is another process that is different. But all can be of equally high quality, even if they look different (although, depending on the criteria, APS-C and MFD cannot be told apart).

 

[DB5]

??? APS-C does not have the same qualities as MFD. Film and digital are different as well. Wet plate photography is another process that is different. But all can be of equally high quality, even if they look different (although, depending on the criteria, APS-C and MFD cannot be told apart).

Exactly. I can't even begin to imagine how someone could say this and even put 6x7 film in the same boat as APS-C.

It is utter madness to suggest. "Good enough" is subjective. It's nowhere near good enough to me.

As an entry to photography these cameras are great and serve a purpose, but to suggest putting it on the same platform as Medium Format film or digital for image quality is madness, blindness, and/or low standards.

 

[Shashin]

Exactly. I can't even begin to imagine how someone could say this and even put 6x7 film in the same boat as APS-C.

It is utter madness to suggest. "Good enough" is subjective. It's nowhere near good enough to me.

As an entry to photography these cameras are great and serve a purpose, but to suggest putting it on the same platform as Medium Format film or digital for image quality is madness, blindness, and/or low standards.

I am a very experienced photographer and I also use APS-C for my work (printed up to 40"). I am not sure that is madness, blindness, or low standards. OK, it might be madness, but that is a different topic...

 

[DB5]

I am a very experienced photographer and I also use APS-C for my work (printed up to 40"). I am not sure that is madness, blindness, or low standards. OK, it might be madness, but that is a different topic...

I'm not saying you are mad, blind and have low standards for using it. I'm saying that you are mad, blind and have low standards if you (you didn't say that, it's in a post above from Eric) think it's as good as medium format digital and film.

Im sure people have their uses for it but personally I wouldn't touch it for my work. YMMV.

 

[MGrayson]

Some pictures can only be taken with a phone camera:



APS-C can be amazing.

--Matt

 

[Abstraction]

It seems that many of you are looking at "image quality" in terms of a zero sum game. Either a print contains image quality or it doesn't.

I would think of it in different terms. Some painters paint in water colors. That gives their paintings a certain look. Some paint in oil, that gives their paintings a different look. Some do charcoals and some do pencil sketches. They all have a different look to them and this look conveys a different feeling. Which one is "quality" and which one isn't? Are you willing to say that if a painter chooses to do sketches he's not a real artist or if he's doing watercolors?

The same goes with cameras. It's fundamentally futile to compare film and digital Different films have a different look to them and you choose your film (or you choose to shoot with film to begin with) when you want to create a particular look. Digital has a different look. You choose digital for its own set of values.

The same can be applied to different formats. You choose the format to have a particular look. A larger format gives you the shallower depth of field, various formats have different sets of specialty lenses and you choose the format based on what your want to shoot. You wouldn't necessarily shoot street photography candids with a large format camera whereas the large format or a technical camera allows you the movements to create a particular look that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise with a different type of a camera.

So, that means that "image quality" as a set number means nothing if you can't get the shot and the look you want. You can have the most technically perfect lens/camera combo, but that doesn't mean squat if you can't fulfill your vision with it. Producing the best technical quality of a brick wall means absolutely nothing.

Every camera, every format produces the best image quality when applied for the type of work that it's best suited for. The only application where the "technical perfection" actually means something is in reproduction work where you NEED color accuracy and resolution and low noise, etc because you're producing strictly technical work.

Otherwise, for artistic and commercial endeavors, the current set of technologies digital and analog are perfectly capable of producing meaningful work, the quality of which is good enough to hang in a museum. I think that's what our goals should be: producing meaningful work, rather than shooting the same things in the same way that millions of other people have shot and concentrating solely on perfecting one's technique and the technical aspects of the image that's produced. It's more important to produce meaningful work even if it's taken with a phone camera than stagnant, stale, technically perfect imagery taken with P1 or Hasselblads or Leicas.

 

[Oren Grad]

I am quite serious about this. Any modern camera you can buy today is capable of delivering seriously good image quality. Luminous Landscape has an interview with Ctein, whom Kodak regarded the greatest master printer. Ctein now uses APS-C or may be even 4/3 for all his work. It is absolutely good enough for A2 (16"x23") prints and as good as 6x7 film ever was. I don't have seen Ctein's prints from 4/3, but I am pretty sure they would put anything I achieved from my 37x49mm P45+ to shame. Why? Because he knows how to print!

Erik, I haven't seen the LuLa interview, but I have seen many of Ctein's prints in the flesh, both dye transfers from film and inkjets from digital capture, including tiny-sensor and 4/3.

Ctein is a supremely talented printer. I have enormous respect for his craft. It's also easy for me to understand how m4/3 serves well his own purposes as a photographer; he knows what he's doing in choosing and using it. But his big prints from m4/3 do not look like prints from FF or medium format digital captures would if printed with comparable skill - not to my eye.

That doesn't make them "worse" as far as photographic merit. With particular purposes in mind a skilled photographer can have technical, esthetic and practical reasons for choosing any sensor format from the smallest to the largest available, just as has always been true of film. But in purely technical terms, the formats are not interchangeable beyond closely adjacent sizes.

What counts as "seriously good" for any given photographic purpose is in the eye of the beholder. But from a purely technical perspective, even the most exalted 100MP medium format sensor is not close to maxing out the information-conveying potential of a large print made with a high-quality, late-model inkjet printer. Whether that matters for your photographic purposes is up to you.

 

[Oren Grad]

It seems that many of you are looking at "image quality" in terms of a zero sum game. Either a print contains image quality or it doesn't.

I would think of it in different terms. Some painters paint in water colors. That gives their paintings a certain look. Some paint in oil, that gives their paintings a different look. Some do charcoals and some do pencil sketches. They all have a different look to them and this look conveys a different feeling. Which one is "quality" and which one isn't? Are you willing to say that if a painter chooses to do sketches he's not a real artist or if he's doing watercolors?

The same goes with cameras. It's fundamentally futile to compare film and digital Different films have a different look to them and you choose your film (or you choose to shoot with film to begin with) when you want to create a particular look. Digital has a different look. You choose digital for its own set of values....

I agree with this but would put it just a little bit differently. When it comes to whether and how pictures work as photographs I prefer to think not in terms of "image quality", but rather "image qualities". There are many different technical and esthetic attributes a picture can have, and many different combinations of these characteristics can add up to make a picture that I find appealing.

 

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

It depends on your needs. That belongs to the context - and I missed it in my posting.

One thing is if we print large and another view on screen. For large prints a larger image size is beneficial. If we show our images on screen, a full 4K image is perhaps 10 MP.

We will have 8K television in a few years and that will handle resolution.

But, any time the advantages of medium format are discussed, someone will post a web size image, and those will seldom be more an a single megapixel.

An interesting comparison is given in Bruce Fraser's and Jeff Schewe's Image Sharpening on page 30, where he compares images from iPhone 4S up to P65+, those images are small and hard to tell apart. Later pages put all that a bit into context.

The interview with Ctein, he discussed image quality in terms of good enough. He did not say that APS-C was as good as medium format digital, but he said that it delivered what he got from medium format 67 film and it was perfectly good for A2-size prints.

In a sense that chimes with my experience. Admittedly, I never compared APS-C with 6x7 cm Velvia. I did compare 6x7 cm Velvia with 24 MP on full frame, though.

My own experience is limited to a bunch of Sony cameras from 10 MP APS-C up to 42 MP on the Sony A7rII and a Hasselblad with a P45+ back. Fujifilm has for a long time made APS-C, with very good lenses. I never had any of those.

Also, I don't print very large. I am printing pretty much at A2-size (16"x23") , with just a few pictures printed at 70x100 cm. My experience was that:

• APS-C at 12 MP was pretty OK for A2-size
• 24x36 at 24 MP was a significant improvement, I would also guess that 24MP on 24x36 was better than 24MP on APS-C. But, I never really looked at it in detail (*).
• Going from 24MP on 24x36mm to 39MP MFD (P45+) I couldn't see a difference between the two at A2-size or smaller if I did not use a loupe. That is essentially what correspond to theory. Obviously different people have different vision. Young people can achieve maximum vision at 25 cm / 10".
• Comparing 42 MP on 24x36mm to 39MP MFD (P45+) the Sony has in most cases a slight advantage.

The Leica S2 and (S typ 006) use a Kodak sensor, pretty similar to the P45+ but in a smaller size. The P45+ is 49x37 mm and the Leica S2 is 45x30 mm but the Leica has microlenses which give it a small advantage in high ISO capacity. DR on those sensors is a bit limited. I did compare my P45+ with my Sony A900 and my Sony A7rII on an artifical high luminance range setup. The dark parts were like this:

There is no way that an APS-C camera will create the same image quality as Medium Format Digital. No way on Earth. Linear sharpness can be equal but that is all.

Without reading quotes or interviews or fully understanding the context from which this has supposedly been read or taken there is no way APS can be compared with Medium Format film of digital. No way on earth. The only thing it is comparable is linear sharpness, which is the least interesting thing about larger formats. Post can certainly get them closer in terms of the tonality loss but there is no way it will match a Medium Format digital or film print that's been equally printed by a competent printer. Good enough, is another very subjective thing.

 

[Shashin]

Hey Erik, you need to install the updates on your Mac...

:toocool:

 

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

It depends on your needs. That belongs to the context - and I missed it in my posting.

One thing is if we print large and another view on screen. For large prints a larger image size is beneficial. If we show our images on screen, a full 4K image is perhaps 10 MP.

We will have 8K television in a few years and that will handle resolution.

But, any time the advantages of medium format are discussed, someone will post a web size image, and those will seldom be more an a single megapixel.

An interesting comparison is given in Bruce Fraser's and Jeff Schewe's Image Sharpening on page 30, where he compares images from iPhone 4S up to P65+, those images are small and hard to tell apart. Later pages put all that a bit into context.

The interview with Ctein, he discussed image quality in terms of good enough. He did not say that APS-C was as good as medium format digital, but he said that it delivered what he got from medium format 67 film and it was perfectly good for A2-size prints.

In a sense that chimes with my experience. Admittedly, I never compared APS-C with 6x7 cm Velvia. I did compare 6x7 cm Velvia with 24 MP on full frame, though.

My own experience is limited to a bunch of Sony cameras from 10 MP APS-C up to 42 MP on the Sony A7rII and a Hasselblad with a P45+ back. Fujifilm has for a long time made APS-C, with very good lenses. I never had any of those.

Also, I don't print very large. I am printing pretty much at A2-size (16"x23") , with just a few pictures printed at 70x100 cm. My experience was that:

• APS-C at 12 MP was pretty OK for A2-size
• 24x36 at 24 MP was a significant improvement, I would also guess that 24MP on 24x36 was better than 24MP on APS-C. But, I never really looked at it in detail (*).
• Going from 24MP on 24x36mm to 39MP MFD (P45+) I couldn't see a difference between the two at A2-size or smaller if I did not use a loupe. That is essentially what correspond to theory. Obviously different people have different vision. Young people can achieve maximum vision at 25 cm / 10".
• Comparing 42 MP on 24x36mm to 39MP MFD (P45+) the Sony has in most cases a slight advantage.

The Leica S2 and (S typ 006) use a Kodak sensor, pretty similar to the P45+ but in a smaller size. The P45+ is 49x37 mm and the Leica S2 is 45x30 mm but the Leica has microlenses which give it a small advantage in high ISO capacity. DR on those sensors is a bit limited. I did compare my P45+ with my Sony A900 and my Sony A7rII on an artifical high luminance range setup. The dark parts were like this:

What you see here is that the A900 released in 2008 is pretty close to the 2007 generation P45+, in spite of the P45+ having twice the area.

The highlight part of the same image is very similar:

Leica has a new CMOS sensor in the S (typ 007) that puts it on par with say Sony A7rIII or Nikon D850 in DR, but it is behind the new Fuji GFX, Hasselblad X1D or even the four year old Phase One IQ350. I am pretty sure that both the GFX and the X1D will have an 100 MP upgrade within a year or two, as Sony has released part numbers for the upcoming 100 MP 44x33 mm sensor.

It would make much sense if Leica used the Sony 44x33 mm sensor instead making their own. That would allow for two different formats 4x3 and 3x2, add a few MP and also add another 1/2 EV of dynamic range.

When the S2 was released, a lot of journalists were invited to Wetzlar and Peter Karbe, who is in charge of lens design, told clearly that the lenses were designed for at least twice the resolution of the S2.

It makes some sense for Leica to develop it's own sensor for the Leica M, as the lens characteristics don't play well with modern CMOS-sensors. But, the S2 and S are DSLRs designed for digital sensors. So, it is hard to see that making your own sensor makes that much sense.

It seems that some of Leica's later generation sensor are made by TowerJazz who belongs to Leica's technology partner Panasonic. So it is possible that Leica wants to buy technology within the family.

As a side note, I did a quick and dirty comparison shot between the A7rII and the Hasselblad 555/ELD P45+ combo on of my later trips:

Sony A7rII on the left and Hassy 555/ELD P45+ combo center and right. Center processed in Lightroom and right in Phase One's Capture one. There are differences in colour, but I don't see I great difference.

A central crop is shown below:

Here I would say that the Sony A7rII and the P45+ are quite close when processed in Lightroom. For some reason, Capture One processing was less sharp, I don't think Capture One's sharpening was applied when I opened the file in Photoshop.

Best regards
Erik

 

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

I essentially quoted Ctein from the interview: https://luminous-landscape.com/videos/conversation-ctein/

Just to say, I am a bit in doubt about that statement. But, I have never used a first rate APS-C system.

But any statement needs to be seen in context. What I wrote, and I think made quite clear that smaller sensors are perfectly good for certain sizes of pictures. Personally I have seen some benefits going from 12MP APS-C to 24MP. I did shoot 24 MP APS-C later on, but typically not in similar conditions.

As it happens, I did shoot both 16MP APS-C and 24MP full frame same subject at the same time. In that case, wind was the factor. The 24MP camera was my Sony A900, a DSLR. The 16MP camera was the Sony Alpha 55SLT that I bought because it had live view.

It was pretty dark and it was windy. Dead on focus with the A900 was not so easy, with the A55SLT I could focus with magnified live view and nail focus, so I could use lager aperture. The A55SLT also had a newer sensor, so I could crank up ISO a little bit more. The crop factor allowed me to use a lens that was probably a bit better on the APS-C camera.

My main concern was motion blur on the leaves. The smaller camera gave me a couple of stops in shutter speed.

I printed both at A2-size on glossy paper. It was very hard to tell them apart. The APS-C image had less motion blur on the leaves, so that was the image that made it to the wall.

Best regards
Erik

Erik, I haven't seen the LuLa interview, but I have seen many of Ctein's prints in the flesh, both dye transfers from film and inkjets from digital capture, including tiny-sensor and 4/3.

Ctein is a supremely talented printer. I have enormous respect for his craft. It's also easy for me to understand how m4/3 serves well his own purposes as a photographer; he knows what he's doing in choosing and using it. But his big prints from m4/3 do not look like prints from FF or medium format digital captures would if printed with comparable skill - not to my eye.

That doesn't make them "worse" as far as photographic merit. With particular purposes in mind a skilled photographer can have technical, esthetic and practical reasons for choosing any sensor format from the smallest to the largest available, just as has always been true of film. But in purely technical terms, the formats are not interchangeable beyond closely adjacent sizes.

What counts as "seriously good" for any given photographic purpose is in the eye of the beholder. But from a purely technical perspective, even the most exalted 100MP medium format sensor is not close to maxing out the information-conveying potential of a large print made with a high-quality, late-model inkjet printer. Whether that matters for your photographic purposes is up to you.

 

[Paratom]

I think as much as we try it is not so easy to make clear statements.
As someone changing camera systems too often and owning too many I have compared systems side by side many times. In most cases this has not lead to anything, except those cases where I detect really lemon lenses or faults. Otherwise small differences in exposure, focus, profile, software etc. make it hard to draw conclusions. In my opinion you know how good something works after using it for some time in real life, different kind of light and applications. Doing this I find the S systems clearly stands out compared to dx and ff. I immediatly also found the same to be true for the x1d.
The difference between a modern dx (like the Leica CL with good lenses) and FF I can not see all the time.
During my last ski vacation I shot the Cl+11-23 and the S007 with the 24mm side by side and the difference in "perceived" IQ was smaller than I had expected. Image quality I get from Leica M is often destroyed by slight unprecise focus ( I like to shoot in the f2.0-f4.0 range with FF).
IMO smaller sensors get better and also lenses and profiles are an important factor.
I know the DR of the 007 is better than the S006, but found it seldomly a problem with the S006. I want to sell one one my S (either S006 or S007) and I even think to maybe keep the S006, because I believe recent used prices do not do justice to what this camera is capable of.


I gave up to rely on numbers, I try to trust my eyes. Also in my case I have bad knowledge in post-processing, and dont like to spend much time with it. So a system where the images come out close to my taste in the first step is a big advantage.

 

[DB5]

It seems that many of you are looking at "image quality" in terms of a zero sum game. Either a print contains image quality or it doesn't.

I would think of it in different terms. Some painters paint in water colors. That gives their paintings a certain look. Some paint in oil, that gives their paintings a different look. Some do charcoals and some do pencil sketches. They all have a different look to them and this look conveys a different feeling. Which one is "quality" and which one isn't? Are you willing to say that if a painter chooses to do sketches he's not a real artist or if he's doing watercolors?

The same goes with cameras. It's fundamentally futile to compare film and digital Different films have a different look to them and you choose your film (or you choose to shoot with film to begin with) when you want to create a particular look. Digital has a different look. You choose digital for its own set of values.

The same can be applied to different formats. You choose the format to have a particular look. A larger format gives you the shallower depth of field, various formats have different sets of specialty lenses and you choose the format based on what your want to shoot. You wouldn't necessarily shoot street photography candids with a large format camera whereas the large format or a technical camera allows you the movements to create a particular look that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise with a different type of a camera.

So, that means that "image quality" as a set number means nothing if you can't get the shot and the look you want. You can have the most technically perfect lens/camera combo, but that doesn't mean squat if you can't fulfill your vision with it. Producing the best technical quality of a brick wall means absolutely nothing.

Every camera, every format produces the best image quality when applied for the type of work that it's best suited for. The only application where the "technical perfection" actually means something is in reproduction work where you NEED color accuracy and resolution and low noise, etc because you're producing strictly technical work.

Otherwise, for artistic and commercial endeavors, the current set of technologies digital and analog are perfectly capable of producing meaningful work, the quality of which is good enough to hang in a museum. I think that's what our goals should be: producing meaningful work, rather than shooting the same things in the same way that millions of other people have shot and concentrating solely on perfecting one's technique and the technical aspects of the image that's produced. It's more important to produce meaningful work even if it's taken with a phone camera than stagnant, stale, technically perfect imagery taken with P1 or Hasselblads or Leicas.

No one is arguing that producing meaningful work is less important. It's an argument that is quick to come up in these times and it has very little relevance. It is a false assumption that someone looking for technical perfection is by default lacking meaning in their work. A passionate craftsman and artist can want and need as much from his or her tools than they can from their own content.

I agree with most and you make some good points, however I question how far we can take the argument that film and digital are just different. The entire photography industry, world was given a replacement for film. It has closed down labs, we've lost beloved film stocks, film companies and outlets have shut down entirely and prices for film and development and have shot through the roof. While some of this has stabilised in more recent times (cost certainly hasn't and it's getting worse) it is still considered a film replacement for most so it becomes a necessity rather than a choice for many and most.

Additionally, digital colour and detail is flawed and unnatural, it's not able to reproduce what film can reproduce naturally and it likely won't until such time it is developed much further. Digital is very useful but it is limited in this regard and remains the lesser of the two while at the same time taking prevalence over film.

 

[Abstraction]

No one is arguing that producing meaningful work is less important. It's an argument that is quick to come up in these times and it has very little relevance. It is a false assumption that someone looking for technical perfection is by default lacking meaning in their work. A passionate craftsman and artist can want and need as much from his or her tools than they can from their own content.

I agree with most and you make some good points, however I question how far we can take the argument that film and digital are just different. The entire photography industry, world was given a replacement for film. It has closed down labs, we've lost beloved film stocks, film companies and outlets have shut down entirely and prices for film and development and have shot through the roof. While some of this has stabilised in more recent times (cost certainly hasn't and it's getting worse) it is still considered a film replacement for most so it becomes a necessity rather than a choice for many and most.

Additionally, digital colour and detail is flawed and unnatural, it's not able to reproduce what film can reproduce naturally and it likely won't until such time it is developed much further. Digital is very useful but it is limited in this regard and remains the lesser of the two while at the same time taking prevalence over film.

Technical prowess and perfection is only important in so far as enabling the photographer to achieve his vision. Technical perfection for its own sake is a dead end (at least as far as I see it). Hence the difference between an artist and a craftsman. An artist realizes his own vision, he uses tools at his disposal to say something meaningful. A craftsman produces something beautiful with technical precision, but that beautiful something doesn't necessarily say anything or mean anything beyond the item itself. At best, the craftsman realizes someone else's vision by using his own technical prowess to enable someone else's voice.

Re: digital being a replacement for film, film used to be a medium for the masses. Now, digital has become that. The film palette has shrunk and that's unfortunate, but that doesn't change the nature of film or digital. They're still different in terms of looks and rendering and the way that each colors your voice.

 

[DB5]

Technical prowess and perfection is only important in so far as enabling the photographer to achieve his vision. Technical perfection for its own sake is a dead end (at least as far as I see it). Hence the difference between an artist and a craftsman. An artist realizes his own vision, he uses tools at his disposal to say something meaningful. A craftsman produces something beautiful with technical precision, but that beautiful something doesn't necessarily say anything or mean anything beyond the item itself. At best, the craftsman realizes someone else's vision bu using his own technical prowess to enable someone else's voice.

Re: digital being a replacement for film, film used to be a medium for the masses. Now, digital has become that. The film palette has shrunk and that's unfortunate, but that doesn't change the nature of film or digital. They're still different in terms of looks and rendering and the way that each colors your voice.

Craft and art aren't mutually exclusive. Art doesn't have to say anything meaningful either. That has been a widely accepted development since the 1950's.

 

[Abstraction]

Craft and art aren't mutually exclusive. Art doesn't have to say anything meaningful either. That has been a widely accepted development since the 1950's.

Art has to say something meaningful in terms of touching the viewer emotionally. Art is not intellectual, it's emotional communication, so it has to be emotionally meaningful.

 

[DB5]

Art has to say something meaningful in terms of touching the viewer emotionally. Art is not intellectual, it's emotional communication, so it has to be emotionally meaningful.

Art is as much about the viewer as it is the art. It's symbiotic. But art doesn't have to have inherent meaning and "meaningful content" doesn't necessarily make it any more art. Colour and shape can be the main protagonists in a work. So technical respects to colour in our cameras have just as much relevance if it is important to the artist.

 

[Abstraction]

Colour and shape can be the main protagonists in a work. So technical respects to colour in our cameras have just as much relevance if it is important to the artist.

That's correct, but as I said earlier, technical ability is important only as far as fulfilling our vision and not for its own sake.