Fixing the flaw in digital images

There was no flaw in the performance of the powerful konfirmant Elisa when we did the photoshoot session last year. Young woman with lot of interest ment that we had enough of ideas to play with and had lot of fun.

On the other hand there was a flaw in the images. Flaw that I have been dealing with ever since I bought my first digital camera, the Kodak DCS Pro. This flaw is to be found in every digital camera I have worked with be it Hasselblad or or fuji, Nikon or Canon. It has its base in the raw file and the photocell and is difficult to deal with.

To fully understand what I mean you would have to take a portrait with a Mamyia RZll and 80mm lense set to f 8 and that is not enough because you would have totake that portrait on Ilford HP5 rated at 200 Iso and then develop it in Ilford IDll diluted 1:3. When that is done then you would Ither drum scan the negative or print on Ilford Multigrade paper using two or three filter technique and develop it in Kodak dectol developer before toning the image in Celenium toner diluted 1:19 for about 3-5 minutes at 20C.

Try a different way with Hasselblad camera, 150mm lense, fuji Provia film and then enlarge on Ilfocrome/cibachrome paper and you would get this wow feeling also.

This time I used a Canon eos 1Ds MKll and 70 – 200mm lens. The aperture was set to 7,1 and the focal length was about 120mm. Development of the file was done in Adobe Lightroom and every thing was as it was supposed to be regarding colors and saturation, still I was not happy with things. Just as I had not beenfully  happy with any other thing I have ever done in digital photography.

Last winter when dealing with some rock and roll images and the difficult lighting situation that is with all those colored stage lights, I tried a different approach to my developing. I liked the result but then went on dealing with other things.

To night when I was to exhausted to work on those things that I was going to work on I blindly started to work on the image of Elisa in a desperate seek for this simple wow effect that I have now spent 6 years looking for and quizzzz, boooom bang there it was, like a cloud of spilled stop bath cleaned from my image. The tone, the contrast, the cleanness, the sharpness.

What a joy what a fun, eureka I found it at last. No more digital look ever again.