Thinking of Photography
March 5th 2005
A couple of quotes from Galen Rowell I found on a random site…
“Whenever anyone asked what camera I used, I should blithely reply: ‘Asking a photographer what model of camera he uses is like asking a writer what model of tyewriter he uses.’”
Speaking on film vs digital, Mr Rowell relates Bill Atkinson’s thought on the matter — “When I asked Bill about this confusion of medium and message, he shrugged and said that searching for grain in a digital print to validate it as photography is like listening for tape hiss in a CD to validate it as music. The noise is apart from the artistic signal, and to listen for it is not to hear the music.”
I had the privelage of talking with Galen for about an hour some years ago at his site in Emeryville. He came down to talk because I had posited some theories about techniques he had used for one of the prints. The young woman quickly ran upstairs and got him.
I learned alot that day about his methods. He had by that time learned to digitize his negatives so that he could use digital printing. He went that way because at high magnification, you don’t get the blurry edges that you get when you pass light through the negative followed by multiple layers of glass.
He was all about using whatever was at hand to get the effect he wanted. He even used others to produce prints for him because they were better at the process he needed to achieve the effect he was after.
He said that there was no difference between a 35mm neg scanned at 11,000 dpi and one scanned at 5,000dpi. He did these experiments on a $50,000 11kdpi scanner. So I figure a 35 megapixel camera should yield equivalent results to film given adaquate ccd sensitivity.
Sounds like his methods alright — from what I hear from my father, he was indeed all about getting the effect he wanted. It was something about the feel of the image rather than its capturing the true light; the feeling was more important.
Galen was a true loss to this world; it would have been very interesting to see how he used the technology that will be developed in the coming years to create even more breathtaking photographs.
If you’re ever in Bishop, his “Mountain Light” gallery is still there; newly renovated, in fact. It’s a great stop on the 395.