I am fascinated with developing creative technologies,

When Adobe tells you something, it’s just “because”!

The Kodak X-15, a Christmas present in 1973, took 27-mm square pictures on 126 film.

The Kodak Pony II, my first 35-mm camera. I remember paying five dollars for this entry-level camera from the 1957 at a flea market in 1975. Because it had no light meter or rangefinder, I had to guess the exposure and distance.

The Sears Tower Reflex, my first 2¼ inch square camera that I bought for eight dollars at the same flea market in 1976, with which I still had to guess the exposure and focus.

The Praktica LLC, my first 35-mm reflex I bought in 1977 for $100, included my first light meter, and I no longer had to guess the distance.

The Nikon FM, my first Nikon I bought the moment I could afford its $200 price tag in 1981. The camera’s light meter was so easy to use I generally forgot that automatic exposure was not among its features.

The Hasselblad 500C, my second 2¼ inch square camera, purchased in 1984. The camera had no light meter, so I either used my Nikon, or I guessed the exposure as I had before high school.

The Nikon F70, bought in 1999, my first camera that does automatic exposure, which learned to love very quickly. I was astounded to see how accurate Nikon’s through-the-lens flash metering is.

The Nikon Coolscan IV, my “first digital camera”, making 11-megapixel scans of slides and negatives, it quickly replaced my enlarger and darkroom equipment.

The Nikon F4, Nikon’s top of the line offering from 1986–1996, a camera I bought in July 2006. A waist-level viewfinder can be used with this camera, reminding of the Hasselblad, fantastic for interiors and candid photography.

The Nikon Coolscan V, a dream of a film scanner, that makes 20-megapixel scans of my negatives and slides.

The Nikon D90. Finally taking the plunge, I bought my first digital reflex in December 2008. It’s impressive and amusing to see the progression in quality and technology my equipment from the top to the bottom of this column.

My opinions of the Internet and the World Wide Web are strong and divergent. Many web sites are full of gratuitous special effects and advertising, though there’s not much preventing people from publishing good, creative work on the Web. My web site serves as a permanent exhibition space which I can update as my work evolves. The Web offers another kind of democratization for publishing, as the advent of desktop publishing in the late 1980s offered.

The phrase “computer-generated art” implies going beyond the possibilities of photography, drawing and painting and film; mixing images and media, and generating images that are, in the realm of computers, “organic”, having never been touched by the human hand. While I admire these new possibilities, I take advantage of them rarely, only as an artistic diversion. I use computers to distribute my pictures in ways I couldn’t without computers, and to enhance my photographs in ways I never could in a darkroom. You can take a look at a before and after example of how I rescued a picture by editing it with Adobe Photoshop.

The passage of a tow truck improves a photo in Northampton: Hover over this picture to see the truck disappear; take a look at a bigger version of this example.

The dawning of the digital era

Naturally, the “digital” in digital photography means computers. Until the early 1990s people would give you a funny look if you suggested that computers might have something to do with photography. In the 1980s computers didn’t interest me at all because they were at best digital typewriters. Like it or not, the main interface is and will be for a long time the keyboard. Luckily I learned to touch type on electric typewriters in high school, and never forgot. The first computer I liked at all was the Mac Plus in 1989, because I saw that all kinds of neat things could be done on it, like word processing, graphic design and page layout, though working on pictures wasn’t possible because it had a strictly black and white screen, with no grey scale values.

Digital photography: scanning black and white prints

A couple of years later I was scanning my black and white prints with flatbed scanners, and improving those scans in order to prepare them for printing in newsletters, magazines, books, etc. I vastly preferred removing dust and scratches with the mouse instead of the triple zero brush and Spotone™ inks, and saw that I was indeed able to make moderate brightness and contrast adjustments region by region.

Digital photography: scanning color negatives and slides

In the mid-1990s I started to work in digital color, on scans of slides and negatives. At the time film scanners were too expensive, costing at least two or three thousand dollars, and affordable computers weren’t up to the task of handling high-resolution color images. This changed a bit after the millennium; I bought an iMac and a Nikon Coolscan IV film scanner in February 2001. A few months later I sold my enlarger and all my darkroom equipment because I wasn’t using it any more.

Using a scanner and image editing software, I was able to make better prints than I ever could with an enlarger in a darkroom. Furthermore, computer technologies allow me to make my own color prints, something I had hardly ever done in a darkroom because of the time, patience and expense required. And digital photography has to be gentler on the environment than printing in a darkroom.

David Henry taking pictures of the fontaine «des Quatre Points Cardinaux» in front of Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris, September 18th, 2006. —photo by Linda Schenck.

The first “reasonable” digital reflex cameras came out in 2003, with six megapixels of resolution and costing two or three thousand dollars. I regarded them as toys because my Nikon film scanner did 11 megapixels and cost half as much. Digital cameras had a long way to go before they could match the cost, ease of use and transportability of 35-millimeter color film.

Digital photography was coming out of its adolescent phase in 2005, there were cameras offering 12 megapixels of resolution, previously unavailable at any price, but they were still two or three times as expensive as my scanner. Digital cameras back then didn’t give nearly the exposure latitude that color negative film provides. I was afraid of being disappointed in getting a twelve-megapixel camera, when one spends thousands of dollars on equipment, it’s supposed to be in order to have better quality, not less as compared to what you already have.

People sometimes considered me a resolution/definition snob when I explained why I didn’t want a digital camera from 2004–2008. As it happens, 35-mm film is no great shakes to start with, until 1996 I had a Hasselblad, a 2¼ inch square (6x6 cm) camera that took pictures so sharp that 8x10 inch (20x30 cm) prints were disappointing, I generally wanted to print the Hasselblad’s pictures bigger to see all the detail.

Until the end of 2008, my way of doing digital photography was a “best of both worlds” hybrid, using traditional film cameras, and scanning my negatives with the Nikon film scanner, the first of which I bought in 2001. I’ll always keep such a scanner as it gives me access to my archives of negatives and slides I have taken over the decades.

I’ve been teaching photography almost every day since January 2006, which allowed me to get to know digital cameras very well, the Canon EOS 350 and the Nikon D70 at first, then the 400d and the D80 and D200, etc. People would send me pictures I’d taken with their cameras, and I was rarely impressed. Pictures taken with Nikon reflexes, seemed sharp enough, but my scanner still gave twice as much resolution, while Canon digital reflexes made images where the pixels quite frankly had a “children’s finger painting” look.

In 2007, 10-megapixel cameras became common and affordable: the Canon EOS 400, the Nikon D80, D200, etc. I sold my film scanner in April 2007, the same day I bought the current version, the Coolscan V which gives 20 megapixel scans.

100% digital photography; with a digital camera

In the spring of 2008 I noticed that 10-megapixel cameras were indeed capable of giving as much or more definition than a scan of a negative at 20 megapixels. I started wanting to buy one but was interested in an “extra boost” in technology and features before investing. That came along when “Live View” and better performance at high sensitivities became common.

Helpful Links: Luminous Landscape: tutorials, discussions and articles on photography, digital and otherwise. Négatif Plus: a fantastic professional color lab in Paris that does traditional and digital work equally well. Météo France: weather predictions from the official source. Freestyle Sales: great deals on photo equipment and consumables. Photo Zone: reviews on photo equipment, lenses for the most part. SLR Gear: another site with reviews on photography equipment. Guidelines on “ethical” digital photograph editing. Popular Photography, the web site of the widely distributed magazine in the United States.

I bought a Nikon D90 in December 2008 and felt like a Scientologist who had just had his appendix taken out. Naturally I did the film/digital comparison shortly after, taking exactly the same picture of a brick building façade with the same zoom lens, first with my Nikon F4 on ISO 160 Kodak Portra film (said to have the finest film grain to date), then another zoomed back to get the same coverage on the D90’s smaller digital sensor. Not so surprisingly, the digital image is a bit sharper than the negative I scanned at 4,000 dpi.

What is digital photography? What isn’t?

It irks me when people are so sure that digital photography means a digital camera. For me, the transition was gradual, from black and white with a flatbed scanner, to color with a film scanner, to the 100% digital process with a digital camera. Someone asked me one day, “How and why was Photoshop used before digital cameras came out?”. I said, “Oh, there are scanners…”, and a bored and uninterested look passed across his face. In 2002 and 2003, people would write asking if I had a digital camera, I’d write back saying, “No, I just know Photoshop pretty well.” A year or two later I imagine they just assumed I had a digital camera. To this day, at least 90% of the pictures on my web site are ones I took with film.

What is a digital camera?

A digital camera is one in which the manufacturer has placed a scanner behind the lens, except that we usually refer to it as a sensor. Taking pictures with a digital camera is thus quite a bit like taking pictures with a scanner; many of the adjustments in a camera’s menus are typically found in scanning software: contrast, white balance, saturation, sharpening, gain (sensitivity), etc. Thus there was no mystery for me the first time I saw a digital camera in 2002, after all not much has changed in photography, ƒ8 will always be ƒ8, a 500th of a second will always be a 500th of a second, and ASA 100 is still ISO 100.

Until the end of 2008, my scanner was on my desktop, not inside the camera. For the better because I can make 16x20 inch (40x60 cm) prints without upsampling, and I can make prints with detail in the brightest of highlights and darkest of shadows without taking several pictures and resorting to “HDR”.

A picture taken with my Nikon F4 and a Nikkor 35–135 mm lens with ISO 160 Kodak Portra film of a brick façade opposite my apartment, scanned at 20 megapixels with my Nikon Coolscan V film scanner.

The same façade taken with my Nikon D90 and a the same lens, at ƒ10, a 1/50th of a second and 78 mm, the picture taken with film must have been at 52 mm. The image appears a bit sharper at 12 megapixels and we don’t miss the film grain. Place your mouse cursor over these images to see the difference between film and digital photography.

The 20 megapixels that my film scanner does can be considered “oversampling”, and my 12-megapixel Nikon captures a bit more detail than a 20 megapixel scan of a 35-mm negative. So my D90 makes sharper pictures than my F4 with Kodak Portra with the same lens, that’s nice, it’s just that if I had a commission to take pictures for exceedingly huge prints, I’d be more likely to take the pictures with a film camera:

Take a look at a panorama of the Grand Foyer in the Paris Garnier Opera House, printed at 37x120 feet (11x36 meters) to see an example of a photo project I’d prefer not to do with a digital camera for the moment.

Are digital cameras better than film cameras?

Better is a relative term, digital cameras have surpassed film with regard to definition, however that extra resolution takes on a camcorder/portable phone look when enlarged beyond 24x36 inches (60x90 cm):

A friend of mine showed me a test print at 185 cm (72 inches) wide of a picture he took with his 12-megapixel Nikon D3. The photo includes a Ferris wheel, and the digital image, upsampled that much, describes the Ferris wheel circle as jaggy stair steps, something film grain would never do, whether printed with an enlarger, or scanned at 4,000 dpi and upsampled like all get out. I doubt that film grain would ever be seen rendered as pixelized jaggy stair steps in a huge enlargement.

Digital cameras don’t offer nearly the exposure latitude that color negative film provides, there’s much less of a chance of getting detail back in windows in pictures of interiors, in the flames in pictures of fire eaters. Another thing that bugs me about digital photography is highlights in nighttime photos; there’s a harsh drop-off transition from the light/medium grey to pure white in the street lights and other light sources, sometimes there’s even a darker edge around the pure white.

That said, I’m happy with my new camera and I’m sure it will tide me over until Nikon comes out with a camera that does 24 megapixels, and is reasonable as concerns size, weight and price. Certainly within ten years we’ll be taking pictures at 30, 40 who knows, 50 megapixels in true 32-bit color!

The Grand Foyer inside the palais Garnier, looking towards the west. Charles Garnier intended the Grand Foyer to resemble the gallery of a classical château. This picture was commissioned by Jan Mulder, a Dutch musician, who had the photograph printed at 37x120 feet as a backdrop on stage for his concerts. See this panorama behind the musicians during one of Mr. Mulder’s concerts.