Well, my streak of daily posts ended, alas. I’ve been under the weather for a couple of days (no tests but reasonably certain it’s not Covid after a video appointment with a doctor). One of my goals for the blog is to get to a point where I’ll have at least a few scheduled posts in the backlog to cover such contingencies. Something to work towards.
In the meantime, here’s another shot that was completely forgotten about. This was on my D600 which has assumed a back-up/second body role ever since I got the D800. The D800 has never failed me and the last time I had two camera bodies out at the same time was my very last Colorado adventure day back in September. For some reason, I never downloaded the images from the D600 from that trip. This was among the shots that I found on there:
Nikon D600, Nikon AI Nikkor 80-200mm f4.5
This suffers some of the problems I talked about in this post. I just played with this for 90+ minutes in Lightroom and Photoshop using a host of techniques. It still just looks…digital…to me. The tonal transitions just don’t work on digital sensors the same way as they do on film.
I’m wondering if part of this has to do with the fact that my film usage lately has skewed towards medium and large format. Everyone always seems to think that larger film is about getting more detail. That’s definitely one plus but I love that bigger film is more adept at recording subtle changes of tonality. Gradients are smoother and there’s more nuance. That’s only part of the story, though because I still prefer 35mm film B&W over digital B&W any day of the week.
That being said, I felt like color still was a diversion in this photo and it worked better in B&W, even if it’s a less than perfect B&W.