Didn't Ansel Adams called it the "Fuzzy wuzzies"?

Rubbish.

Who is the painter to decide which of the 100000 points of detail I care about? I want to define those points then it's up to me (the viewer) to decide which 100 details I care about. That can only happen if I am presented with 100000 points of detail in a finely crafted LF image.

 

A man barely alive... We can rebuild him!

 

Occasionally, Ansel and his crowd were wrong. This was one of those times. I am sure there were others.......Regard!

 

Ansel wasn't the person who first referred to "fuzzy wuzzies."

 

In the early 1900s photographs that produced the effect by being out of focus were of the "Fuzzy Wuzzy School" :
https://www.artsmia.org/get-the-picture/print/stieglitz.shtml
This is not the same as where the blur was produced in printing.

 

John Austin sounds more related to Steve Austin than me. Van Gogh put incredible intensity into every single brush stroke, while nobody who tried to fake him can. Same for Jackson Pollock and his every drip. They felt it, and I guess that explains why anyone capable of that level of intensity has to be half-nuts to begin with. A pixel does none of that. It's unfeeling. And there is no such thing as an abstract photograph if it contains discernible subject matter. Just wannabee. That's why I halfway agree with Emerson. Photography will never be painting. But painting will never be photography either; so I prefer Emerson when he was still doing what he is best remembered for. ... Yes, across the room, Steve. It has nothing to do with relative detail. I need reading glasses for that. I was referring to surface quality, tonality, etc. Inkjet ink looks like ink. It has an opaque color palette quite different from optical color print products. Otherwise, I'm rooting for all the coyotes starting to invade the burbs of Techie Land around here. They're good at catching fuzzy little beady-eyed pixels, eating them, and keeping their numbers down.

 

exactly !
" Drew Wiley squints his left eye a little bit ( ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ) and exclaims " INK JET!"

 

No, I squiggle my nose, and think to myself, Stinkjet !

 

squiggle = squeeze + wiggle?

My fancy stinkjet printer was a gift from a good friend (Thank you Govind Agarwal!!) and it served me well until I realized that I was such a cheater. My fully equipped darkroom gave me so much pleasure and so many late nights with wine and good friends (my friends are mostly photographers) and was now relegated to storage. Now? The gifted stinkjet would be collecting dust except that it is now a convenient flat place for random stuff that shields it from the dust it should be collecting. The darkroom is back in commission baby!

 

Very nicely put.

 

Oh, I was offered a pretty nice drum scanner for free. But other than these rainy day web diversions, while my prints keep trying to dry on the darkroom screens, I've had it with computers. My hands were darn near crippled with carpal tunnel and trigger finger misery. Now they're almost completely normal again, just two years after retirement. I have a friend nearby who has plenty of space and does inkjet work, but even he didn't want the scanner. Once you've got one, you still need backups for sake of parts and maintenance. Then software goes obsolete over and over again. I'd rather deal with replacing a burnt-out darkroom sump pump from time to time. Inkjet does a wonderful job with certain kinds of subjects, but unfortunately, not with the subtle gray, greiges, infinite shades of muted green and gold we have here in California. Any fool can create loud oversaturated noise. But I don't call that music. Color is about hue relationships, involving intelligent modulation between saturation and breathing space. Just slathering an image with more jam and jelly and sugar isn't going to make it taste appealing. You just feel sick afterwards. But going the opposite way and pancaking everything with HDR and deliberate tonal blaah is like eating egg whites without any salt.

 

And that sums it up nicely.