The Straight Goods

The image below is from a 35mm slide I ran across today while looking for something else. It's a shot of my two kids (they're 15 and 13 now) that was always a favorite of mine so I thought I would give it a fresh scan now that I have better equipment.

Nikon F80 shot on Ektachrome Elite 200

It's long way from the kind of creative black and white work you'll usually find me writing about here, but the process of getting it to the hard drive gave me a bit of a pause for thought, so if you were expecting more moody monochrome bear with me a bit here. Based on their age here this shot was probably taken just before I got my first DSLR. In the years that followed there were of course many more photos of these two taken digitally. Whenever I identified one of those shots the process was invariably the same - bring it up in Photoshop and subject it to every improvement I could think of until I was satisfied there was no more. As I prefer to scan a bit soft and adjust the contrast later I likewise brought this up in Photoshop for a few rather minor contrast tweaks once the scanner was done with its work. So here I was in a familiar situation from years past. I started looking it over the way I used to, asking those same questions - What do I need to do with the saturation, a bluer bucket, a pinker bathing suit? Noise filtering to reduce grain? Some selective sharpening maybe? Unlike before though the answer to all of these questions was different. Now it was no, no, no and no. None of those things would contribute to what makes this shot work for me or why I like it. they just seem like distractions. Some tiny movements with the levels sliders and a slight crop where the scan picked up a bit of the film margin and I was done. 

It was time to save the result into a folder full of images of the kids around this age, most of which were done with DSLRs. Among them were a few like this one:

A shot with the Nikon D70s

It's a product of that old process of employing every trick I knew that seemed to apply, making every improvement I could think of (I'm really tempted to put that word improvement in quotes) so that the image should in theory be as good as I could possibly make it. And yeah, it's gawd awful. Did I really think this looked good at one point? Did it not occur to me that what I wound up with after putting in the work was worse than what I started with? They're not all this bad of course, but going through this folder a disturbing number of them bear similar hallmarks of my efforts to improve them. 

Don't mistake this for a comparison between film and digital images. I'm sure if I started over from the RAW files I could get equally natural results by taking a similar approach to the Ektachome scan. It's not even about tweaks and manipulations per-se as sometimes heavy-handed dodging and burning operations (either in the darkroom or the Photoshop equivalent) have always been standard practice with my monochrome work and I've never objected to it in the work of others if well done. I'm sure it' me that has changed. I just have to wonder what's behind the change. It could be just a maturity thing I suppose, but I have to wonder at the fact that this kind of thing only started to bother me after I had distanced myself from digital photography for a while.