Does the Tool Matter?



Glow Plug, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

As I work through some of these Tri-X images from San Francisco, I find that the tools used deeply affect the images captured. These are simple, graphic somewhat grainy and low resolution images. I like these simple, almost mysterious black and white images, but their scale and ambition seems smaller than the clean, high resolution DSLR images which seem, by comparison, to be like medium format captures.

To the extent that I want to range widely over my visual vocabulary, it would seem I need to mix up the tools. Film, digital, rangefinder, DSLR.

Technical note on the image: The right side of the hydrant was blown out, or at least the negative was too dense to pick up texture with the Minolta Scan Dual III that I use. I recovered by adding texture lifted from another area of the image. It’s nice to be able to so simply save an area with “real pixels”.

Leave a Reply