Sharpening

Comments regarding how sharp the plates are in books are appearing everywhere. Some think they are too sharp, others not sharp enough. I took the middle ground. Most images I see published in birding magazines and on the internet are heavily sharpened. This often makes the image more striking because of the added contrast. This is tends to be at odds with how we view the real world. The world is not sharp. If you look out of you window what you see does not show extremely sharp definition and high contrast. For this reason we tended not to sharpen images a lot in the book. In fact many of the images were blurred. Most magazines and books tend to show images that have been sharpened a lot more. This is their choice but often has little to do with the quality of the original image.