[rollei_list] Re: Scanner advice needed, please


----- Original Message ----- From: "Don Williams" <dwilli10@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 28, 2006 7:56 PM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: Scanner advice needed, please


At 10:37 PM 7/28/2006 -0400, David Dodge wrote, in part:
I hold with Cartier Bresson that "Sharpness is a bourgeois virtue" :-).

There have been some recent posts on this forum and on the Exakta
forum about using older or "softer" primary lenses, in one case there
is a contest running in which only 3 element lenses can be used
(actually a cemented 4th element doesn't count).

Someone, don't remember who, said he preferred to take the sharpest
possible photos and then degrade them with PhotoShop, or in the darkroom.

I would guess that there are folks on this list who will make a
strong case that the effect one gets by using a soft lens in the
camera is entirely different than what one gets with PhotoShop or in
darkroom processing, regardless of the darkroom process used.

If this is not the case, how did Rollei manage to make money selling
Rolleisoft adapter lenses if the same thing could be done in the
darkroom in the olden days?

Anyone have any opinions about this?

About scanners, I'm still hanging in with my old CanoScan D 1230U. I
can only print up to 8X10 so maybe I would want a different scanner
if I had a larger printer, or sent files out for printing. (I do
both medium format and 35mm slides and negatives, and of course scan
a lot of documents for OCR, and pictures for reproduction. Seems to
meet my needs) What am I missing?


Don Williams
La Jolla, CA

The softness and character of the defocused image from a lens is pretty complex. I suppose one could duplicate it with an image editor. The image from a lens of a three dimentional scene is also three dimentional so the nature of the defocused image is important. Photoshop can produce some interesting blurs and one can mask the image to make whatever part of one wants blurry but I don't think it ever looks quite like the effect from a lens.
I spent quite a long time learning how to make really sharp images. Once I figured that out I began to experiment with soft focus.
Soft focus produced in an enlarger from a negative is fundamentaly different than soft focus from the camera. The effect of spherical aberration or a soft filter is to spread out the highlights. When the same device is used in an enlarger the shadows are spread out unless one is printing from a transparency. Even then the three dimentional effects are missing. There is room for both effects.

---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 

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