Photography is part of my life, just like reading, hiking, eating and drinking.
As slide photographer, I started to take photography seriously nearly half a century ago. But I soon became fascinated by images, printed in the vdarkroom.
For over two decades, I worked almost exclusively on black and white photography.
But at some point I realized that it was inevitable to use black and white or color depending on the subject.
Photography is a combination of several activities: As a photographer, I have to think about what I want to capture, find the right place and angle of view, put the shot on film or memory card at the right time of day, work out the image I wanted to show inpublic. Working out the image involves again several steps. The most important is to find the answer to the question: “How do I manage to convey the mood I felt, when taking this photo?” This is a step, that is not taken into account on the storage medium.
In terms of light range alone, the human eye is far superior to any lens and any storage medium. The eye can switch from light to dark and from dark to light in a flash, and even the focus between near and far works without our knowing. We therefore intuitively perceive a landscape as a whole in razor-sharp detail, and it usually appears to us to be optimally lit (unless we are forced to look directly into bright sunlight). Of course, our own on-board computer in our head helps us to merge these in reality rapidly successive pieces of information full of brightness and sharpness into a single image. However, for a photo, the photographer must ensure that the raw data of the shot (a sky with threatening clouds may be a few stops brighter than the park in the foreground) merge into an image that corresponds to the image in the viewer’s head (namely threatening dark clouds that promise a premature end to the picnic in the park, above an idyllic spot still in the sun). Therefore, image development is an extremely important part of every photo.
Images, that can be transferred from film or memory card without any image processing are even rarer than white mice in nature. For me there is no difference between developing in the darkroom and editing on the screen. There are challenges, and they have to be solved.