Well, the photo thing...look at it this way:
Open a newspaper and look at a photo. Then look at the same photo 3 inches form your face. Looks much worse, doesn\'t it? It\'s because our eyes do exactly what the Impressionist painters wanted them to do...they merge the colors and forms of the tiny dots together into something that our brain understands: a total image, not a complex creation of millions of pixels. That\'s why when you blow up digital photos (and even film, depending on how big the grain of the emulsion is) they tend to look \"digitized\" or interpolated. When you blow up a digital image too big, sometimes the computer has to fill in the information to make the size of the image larger. And since it has nothing to go on, t looks at the pixels around it and kinda \"guesses\".
But also think of this: Most times when you see images on the web, they HAVE to be shrunk down to be a certain pixel size. They cannot be 300dpi and CMYK and 14.1 Megapixels like they are originally shot in my camera. And when you wanna make the image as large as you can without blowing up everyone\'s CPU, you want to crop down the image to just be the model. Good idea, actually! But what happens is that the models then tend to be larger than life size (and missing a lot of pixel info), i.e., a 1.5 inch tall model is now a 6 inch tall image on your screen. So then ANY brush stroke, dried paint glob, or even speck of white dust (from the stupid white convention hall tablecloths we shoot on) is ALSO magnified by 400%.
i\'m certainly not saying i\'m the best photographer on the planet, by ANY stretch of the imagination. What i am saying is that a model is NEVER represented as well in digital imagery than when you hold it in your palm. To REALLY and TRULY see why a particular model wins in Golden Demon, you really have to handle the model in your own hands.