It's Perfect

ranger9 said:
On the other hand, human behavior being what it is, I can tell you from direct observation that if you show people a picture they think is interesting, they will walk right up to it and examine it as closely as they can.
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That is absolutely the case for me and everyone else I see at photo galleries, which is why when someone who has a camera with a low resolution sensor starts yabbering on about standard viewing distance, I just roll my eyes.
 
How many here are printing? And "a 14x21 inch image"...

Next to nobody needs it on prints within my family and the rest of the close circle. L size is maximum print size for those rare instances.
I print for just myself to see it on the print. It is a waste. Most views are on the large screens. 2800 pixels on the long size is enough.

If you in business or an illusion you might be one day, yes. Wright it of from taxes or overpay for 38 MP dream camera. :)
 
See my signature at the bottom? I don't sweat this kind of stuff.

If the picture is good enough, no one will care about trivial technical matters. I like to point out, for example, that Stanley Forman won two Pulitzers with photos that were not sharp.

I've blown up 1/2 of an 8mp APS-C frame and printed it borderless on 13x19 inch paper and it looked good. I have full frame cameras up to 36mp. Prints look good from them.

But I could be perfectly happy using just my 12mp Nikon D700 for the rest of my life.
 
I have a cheap flip-phone with a 2.5 megapixel camera in it (my only digital!). I just snapped a photo of our blizzard aftermath to send to friends suffering on the sunny beach in Puerto Rico. It was reasonably sharp, colors were good, and it got its message across. Perfectly adequate for my intended purpose. Not trying to be snarky, but I just want to make the point that perfection is a very malleable concept.
 
In a few gallery shows that I've seen that had them, large format contact prints can be stunning, even (and especially) 4x5. Absolutely something different about them vs 35mm, med format or even highest resolution digital (at the same size). And I bet they don't have an underlying dot pattern;)
 
agentlossing said:
But why have a perfectly detailed image at high resolution, when what has made photography interesting over the years is texture, the feel imparted by the medium?
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Sometimes I want someone viewing my prints to hit a wall of grain, beyond which any additional details are a matter of interpretation. And at other times, I want my photos to reveal crazy levels of detail.
 
Dear Bill, 6-24 MP. Does not matter for this old Italian broad. Number of pixels is because of which camera I want to use. Everything dear husband and I using is 24, but I look at D70 in back shelf with fond memory.

What formula does one use to find the number of enough pixels to support the content?

I have made gallery prints with early digital and, yes, some people walk up close, some people looking at prints in photo book with magnifying glass also, but not too many. Mr. Jay Maisel making beautiful prints from early, early Nikon digital and he doesn't speak about viewing distance and nobody complains about technical quality. He still works with D5 or maybe D6 this is 20MP (or less!). His prints from D3 days are lovely. 12 MP. His first Nikon digicam was 2.7 MP. I still don't hear anybody complaining.

I have a picture of my mother I am making with 6MP and printing at 12x18". She complains (before she died) about one tiny little hair growing on her chin!

Galleries don't count pixels. They count euros, dollars, rubles, which is content/name and body of work driven. News editors don't count pixels. They count blah-blah, clicks, sales, reader share.

I love your questions. And all the answering here! Because of this I have decided to try instead of just jpeg, jpeg + RAW for one year. We'll see! I am closer to 70 than 60 years so it is a fun thing trying something new!

Ciao bello,

Mme. O
 
The difference between grain and no grain, traditionally, is the difference between smaller film formats and larger ones. But, by extension of that, it became also the difference between dynamic scenes with subject movement, and those without. Now, I'm excluding studio lit photographs for the moment, where light can be made sufficient for any exposure speed and motion is contained within the preset area where the camera is pointing. But generally, large format, highly detailed and devoid of grain photographs don't handle quick motion. Thus, the sense of being "in the thick of things" with a 135 format camera is synonymous with grain.

With large sensor modern cameras, however, you can capture all kinds of fluid action without grain (or noise). But I don't find this aesthetic as compelling as the poetic grain of 35mm film. In those images, movements of animals, the human body, people doing things, is approximated out, abstracted a bit, by grain. I don't really care whether I can make out the exact length of the frayed thread on a person's coattail in a street photograph. Where there's action, I don't feel the need for extremely clean detail and uber-high resolution. I like to see the broad strokes.
 
The last show I had in Italy, my prints were roughly 20x30 inches and they wanted one photo that was 10mp. Once they saw the file at their desired print size, they decided on another photo. Basically all the photos they used were 24mp. https://www.cecontemporary.com/verti...john-gellings/ If I was not a nobody, I might be able to dictate print size. I would certainly prefer a mix of small and large prints. Ironically, the next photographer that showed there used a high resolution camera from Sony and they printed them small. :)
 
Bill, I was just curious as to why you used 360dpi in your calculation. I think most of us figure 300dpi is full quality. So using 300dpi, then 14 x 21 x 300 x 300 = 24.5MP. Isn't that all that most of us need?
 
Rob-F said:
Bill, I was just curious as to why you used 360dpi in your calculation. I think most of us figure 300dpi is full quality. So using 300dpi, then 14 x 21 x 300 x 300 = 24.5MP. Isn't that all that most of us need?
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My default is 270 dpi - more than enough. And I've found reducing dpi to as low as 170 still makes for a more than adequate B&W print (unless you're examining the print under a loupe).
 
Rob-F said:
Bill, I was just curious as to why you used 360dpi in your calculation. I think most of us figure 300dpi is full quality. So using 300dpi, then 14 x 21 x 300 x 300 = 24.5MP. Isn't that all that most of us need?
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I'm sure that 300 is fine. 360 is just one of the defaults on Epson printers. I hope folks realize I was being a little facetious in the opening of this thread, especially in terms of print size. Pre pandemic there was a joint show at the Getty of Edward Weston’s 8x10 contact prints, even a few of his 4x5 Graflex portraits, all up against giant 6 foot prints of a contemporary photographer. I thought the little Westons blew away the 6 footers. There was an Avedon show at the Whitney with many of the prints at a very large size. They were silver prints supervised by Avedon’s printer, but made in the Modernage darkrooms that were set up to produce murals. The big prints were brilliant.

So good comes in all sizes, as does bad. That’s true of a lot of things.
 
Recently saw a Kertész exhibition centered on the photographer’s Carte Postale (postcard) period. The contact print images were made with roughly 9-by-12 centimeter (3.5 X 4.7 inch) plates, some a little bigger or smaller. And yet, despite the diminutive dimensions, his Chez Mondrian photograph remains one of my absolute favorites.
 
I've related this before so pardon me repeating it. Several years ago I saw a couple of exhibits over a two day period that were both memorable. One was landscapes by Brett Weston. I understand he used an 11x14 camera for much of this work. Very deep blacks and beautiful grey tones. Beautiful work. But the most exquisite photos I saw were in a Man Ray exhibit. Many were (I think) 2x3 or slightly larger contact prints mounted, matted and framed to 16x20. They were photos you could really engage with, closely. I really like the intimacy of the smaller prints.

When I go to a museum and look at paintings I do like to get close and see the brush strokes. But I never examine photos like that. The brush strokes of a painting are how the artist built the artwork and I like feeling a bit like I'm there during the creation. With photographs, the grain or pixel is just one component of the whole and I enjoy the image as a whole.
 
Bill, I shot a D3 for a long time (I work almost exclusively with 24mp Fuji now...) and I've got to say that up to about 20"x30" it looked as good as anything I had printed that big from Kodachrome or anything else. Maybe better in some cases.

I used a variety of up-res programs and before that I used a script to automate up-resing in Photoshop CS3 (?) up to 100% in 2% steps. Or maybe it was 5%, I can't remember because I settled on Genuine Fractals an age ago. I print in-house on an Epson 7890 with their 10 ink system at 260-300 dpi. (Don't get me started on what's happening with ink these days.)

On the road I print with a little Canon Selphy at 4x6" and I'm always trying to fix the color. The Epsons are where it's at.

Man, I don't know. I really think you might be able to divide the discussion in two.

The first is technical: What do you need for best detail? So, technique aside (because that for sure is my limitation), and leaving out depth of field and content (hair is brutal)....more native pixels is always better at any given print size. So the question really is: How big do you want to print?

The second is then: How big can you print? Probably you can print a little bigger than the mathematics suggest but that will be a subjective choice. Usually (for me) a smaller, "tighter" print will blow away a big sloppy print where things are teetering on the edge of posterization or artifact.

These days I never print larger (on the Epson) than 12x18 and 24mp seems to do just fine. Even with jpegs right out of the camera although I'll sometimes go back to the RAW file and work it to where I think I remember what it looked like. Again, subjective. And it really depends on content. Large colour-field pieces are usually fine straight out of the camera but portraits usually come from the RAW file.

But here's the thing: maybe I'm a slave to content, but I often have to look at the metadata or the back of the print (only sometimes do I write stuff there, so...) to figure out what camera I shot it with. Which in itself is a sort of irrational quest - what does it matter, especially if I can't tell by looking. Yes, sometimes it's obvious what I shot with an iPhone but sometimes it isn't. Look at David Alan Harvey's work out of the favelas. Some of it is iPhone, some of it M9, some Fuji X100, I think.

Look at Alex Majoli's work with Olympus C8080 cameras after he went digital - It is freaking stellar. Granted much of that I've only seen on a screen which, unless you've got a 4K screen, you're probably not getting the whole picture - detail wise.

Lotsa moving parts, Bill. In the film world, look at Lange's Migrant Mother. Detail shmetail. She "missed" focus ever so slightly if you want to nit-pick, and that means lost detail, but who in their right mind would care? I certainly don't. The only thing that photo makes me care about is how badly we as a society have.....etc. Not a single synapse is devoted, outside of this discussion, to the technical because the content crushes it. How about Capa's D-day work. Boom. And then back to digital there is Moriyama who has made a complete oeuvre out of occasionally omitting detail.

So I guess this is a really long winded expression of what could be summed up by the phrase, "I dunno, love. Depends."

I've been lurking for a long time and really enjoy your column. I've learnt a lot.

All the best,

Shane
 
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