Just about a decade ago, I was asked to do the keynote address for a Western Canada new-media conference. Since I had been back in Canada for a relatively short time, I assumed that not all the attendees knew my work, since most was published in the USA. I produced a retrospective slide show of my decades of film work and few years of digital—which ran continuously.
I did my talk and opened the floor to discussion. Eventually the director of a major agency stood up and roared that she could not stand the "look of digital". I gestured at the screen and asked her to point out exactly what she did not like, as the slides rolled by. Her expression evolved to be more manic, and finally she blurted out, "Some of those are DIGITAL?"
Further discussion revealed that she was looking at the work of people who had recently adopted digital, and who had yet to achieve even a modest degree of fluency. It was like blaming the violin for the horrid sounds a first-year student makes. In the hands of Itzhak Perlman, his Strad makes unsurpassed sounds (in spite of his always calling it his "fiddle", which amused me much). The same fiddle in the hands of a first year student, will cause the most arrogant of tom-cats to choose suicide over having to listen to the kid practice. I began my foundation for the transition to digital in the late 1980s, and by the time viable cameras arrived, my digital photography was identical to my analogue photography. Thus the digital stuff was indistinguishable from film.
She could not tell the difference—because there was none. In the year 2000, my digital cameras were about on par with my 35mm cameras. With my current cameras, I have a refrigerator well stocked with medium-format film and still have top-of-the-art medium-format cameras to shoot it. Many years have passed since I shot the last film. I am hung up on image quality, and I just can not bring myself to compromise. Though I have a superb scanner, and great cameras, the quality I get from my digital systems are now way beyond what I can do with film—short of large format.
Back in the film era, we joked about wanting a 35mm-sized camera that would produce 8×10 contact-print quality images. Pure fantasy back then. Depending upon how much longer I have to live, I may actually do this. I was all set to replace my worn-out 13" printer with a contemporary printer of the same size, but now am leaning toward a 17" printer. If I had someplace to put it, a 24" printer would be a no-brainer—the obvious choice—but I would have to move to a bigger place, and I hate moving. If one can not equal the print-quality of a medium-format film camera with an XP1, the problem is not with the cameras.
