Exactly, David, and thanks, for you just saved me from typing some godawful
screed about my preference for photorealistic images over . . . well, whatever.
This argument of taste in image "quality" is not much different than the
preference for the sound one hears out of speaker systems. Every sound we
hear is distorted to one extent or another, of course, but my preference
(and thus ultimate speaker choice years ago) was for a sound as "uncolored"
as I could find, and so, based on a review back in the 70s in _The Absolute
Sound_ I eventually purchased a couple of Advents. (If I hadn't been a
relatively poor student I'd have bought four and stacked them. Not that
anyone needs to know that, necessarily, but I just wanted you to know. <g>)
My brother, on the other hand, preferred more the "sound of the times" (a
cranked-up midrange is about all I got out of it) and so bought a pair of
large JBLs. Now I "knew" and "know" that my advents gave and still give a
"better" sound (i.e., more accurate sound) than those JBLs ever could have
hoped to, but there's no way to "prove" that to anyone, least of all to my
brother! And not just because he's my brother but for the reason some
people _want_ to hear different things differently and so they actually
_do_ hear different things differently--whether those "things" are actually
there to hear or not. And it's pretty much the same with vision.
Which is, I guess, my tiresome way of explaining why I don't choose to
shoot a helluva lot of Velvia but do have a hankering to work with Provia
100F. If I ever want or need to add some kind of "pop" to a color image I
figure I can just as well (or almost just as well) accomplish this in
software _after_ the fact. Of course I could just as "easily" shoot Velvia
and then similarly subdue its saturation after the fact in software, but
what's the point in that? I normally want my images to appear to the viewer
as the scene appeared to me in real life. Also, I notice that Velvia
doesn't handle some colors well (it seems to live most happily in extreme
greens and browns), so it's hardly what anyone could represent as anything
like an all-purpose film emulsion. Velvia is, in fact, more of a specialty
film, indeed, has given birth to the rather pejorative term "Velvia
canyons" over the years for this very reason.
Anyway, that's primarily about personal taste and that's fine as far as it
goes. With regard to the test images under discussion, though, the tree
bark and dirty snow look _photorealistic_ to my practiced eye, as do the
bikes and bike-stand's lime-green whatever-it-was with orange stickers on
it (right down to the chips in that lime-green paint!), plus as you note
the backgrounds of these images have what I'd term pleasing gradation of
color throughout, amounting to an attractive bokeh effect so called, more
or less what I'd expect if I'd shot those same scenes with my own analog
gear using Portra. And that's saying a mouthful as far as I'm concerned.
But enough. I'll now return this forum to its regularly scheduled diet of
OT talk re SUVs, politics and the prices of plastic Korean paper clips down
under.
Tris
>The guy said it,
> "Well here is a very quick and dirty test"...snip
>
>"Light was failing so I just ran outside and shot a few frames..."
>
>
>The bark at f4.0 shows incredible detail.
>
>The taxi shows nice yellow colors and the light yellow box with orange
>sticker, well, look light yellow and orange to me.
>
>I guess that the same thing would happen in Manhatan if you shoot with the
>same conditions.
>
>The lighting conditions would have shown the same "lacking of color" with
>35mm, 4X5, 8X10, any film or digial format.
>
>peace
>
>David
>
>
> >
> > Well... if we're judging bokeh only, it was very very good. I know
> we're not
> > looking at composition, and these are fast test shots, but other than the
> > bokeh, the detail and color was lacking.
> >
> > George S.
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