Why I Use Digital Printing

The color photographs on this site are all printed digitally, while the black and white images were produced in a traditional wet darkroom.  Digital photographic processes have acquired a somewhat seamy reputation in recent years.  A furor arose when National Geographic moved an Egyptian pyramid  an inch or two in a photograph to make a more effective cover, and when Time Magazine altered a cover photograph to make the subject look sinister.  It is unfair to blame these "enhancements" on digital processing.  Photographic composites produced in traditional wet darkrooms have been used for years, for ersatz documentary purposes (faked flying saucer photos) and for artistic ones (Jerry Uelsmann's magnificent composite prints).  Nevertheless, digital printing offers a degree of control and finesse, particularly in color imaging, that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve through darkroom processes.  Moreover, because transparencies are scanned with very small distances between the light source and the imaging device, all possible detail is captured from the transparency without the corner falloff of resolution and light intensity that result from conventional enlarging.

Whether digital printing has integrity or not depends upon the integrity of the photographer.  In my prints, I do not:

• introduce any picture element that was not present in the original transparency;

• composite two or more photographs together (e.g., take a moon from one photograph and put it into another).

That said, I feel entirely free to use the sort of image processing long common to photography.  Like Ansel Adams, who retouched distracting high school hillside graffiti from "Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada," I feel free to digitally remove distracting elements.  Similarly, I do not attempt to match precisely the colors in the original scene, but rather to adjust the color balance and saturation to match as closely as possible the image I previsualized when I made the exposure. This is no different from using a highly saturated color film, such as Fujichrome Velvia, to achieve a more intense result than a flat literal rendering.