In traditional film and darkroom photography there are a limited number of alternatives to f/64 detail perfectionism. The obvious alternative is simply imperfect detail, as achieved either through less-than-the-best equipment or less-than-the-best technique.

Another alternative is the deliberately soft/blurred focus that f/64 explicitly rejects. How evil is this?

In Fig. 10 a sultry morning haze softens detail in much the same fashion as we saw in Figures 1 and 2. Individual leaves and blades of grass are no longer distinguishable, but art is more (or less?) than counting hairs. What seems to jar is not artful softness, but a jarring harshness that lies somewhere between crisp focus and soft de-focus, such as we see in Fig. 9.

In such a case softness is often an improvement:

Yet, so ingrained is the f/64 Manifesto in the psyche of contemporary photography, that the option of actually softening an image (or foregoing artificial sharpening) is simply overlooked.

Consider the following painting from the impressionist period done in a technique called pointillism:

Now consider this crop from a photograph taken on coarse (high-ISO) film then scanned with no attempt to reduce the grain (scanner noise):

Soft focus and deliberate grain are just two techniques, and ones that have been available to photographers for a century. The digital darkroom simply removes all limitations on what the photographer can do at the level of meta-texture.

The default is to pledge allegiance to the f/64 Manifesto and do nothing. After all, it worked for two centuries of painters following the Renaissance. Where a painter in the year 1700 might have slaved away for months on a single canvas in pursuit of exacting detail, a contemporary photographer uses large, expensive, and slow-operating equipment in the same pursuit. By 1900 impressionist painters had taught the world that fine art could be made in hours instead of months and that composition could actually be strengthened by replacing natural textures with meta-textures.

For 75 years landscape photography has been dominated by the f/64 aesthetic. There are other approaches to fine art than costly, cumbersome equipment and ever-larger armies of pixels dancing on every square inch of print. It's time to use the power of a tool such as Photoshop to find alternate approaches to meta-texture. Ones that are driven by artistic concerns, such as beauty and strength, rather than by non-artistic concerns, such as how precisely the worm holes in a distant apple have been rendered.