Ken Wronkiewicz posted a rebuttal to my recent article, Why are we still shooting slide film?, bringing up something I completely failed to consider: slide film has a greater Drange (density range) than print film does. This means that while you give up dynamic range, you get a significantly better contrast range in what you [...]

The ~5 stops that most slide film can capture is simply not enough for many non-studio lighting situations. It’s quite common to be faced with the choice of having to severely blow out a bright area or severely block up shadows. Landscape photographers who shoot with view cameras or SLRs can sometimes get around this with split ND filters, but not everybody can take 20 minutes to set up a shot, not every subject has a brightness boundary that falls in a conveniently straight line, and there are plently of cameras that don’t let you look through the lens to see what you’re doing (rangefingers, TLRs, pinholes, toys, etc.), so it’s not a solution for everybody.

Swamp, inkjet transparency transfer by Wade Beals This jaw-dropping photo was made with and links to this inkjet transparency film transfers how-to by Donia Nance. There’s also a Yahoo! group about this technique. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks fairly easy and the results are clearly amazing.