OT: WAY OT - I'm Grumpy, Therefore I Blog

[Tim Daneliuk]

[John]

[jo4hn]

It depends upon one's requirements. You are obviously interested in the aesthetics of fine photography and therefore are able to come closer to your "minds eye" picture with analog equipment. Others are more interested in convenience and cost to get a "really good" picture that is easily disseminated to friends and family on the internet.

I once had a conversation with a young girl who lived with us for a couple years regarding music. She asked me to listen to a CD of the grunge band Nirvana, which I did. There were a couple of slow numbers that were melodic but the fast stuff was garbled words and guitar noise. She told me that composers like Cobain were the poets of her generation. I guess I can accept that recalling that my parents never quite understood the existence of Chuck Berry and Hank Williams.

Is this progress or simply movement? I would certainly hang one of your photos on my wall rather than one of mine. At the same time, I am quite happy with an inexpensive digital camera and will never buy something that requires film and chemicals. And yes, I dumped my POS 20 YO Craftsman CS in favor of a PM66. Progress definitely.

mahalo, jo4hn

[Swingman]

"jo4hn" wrote

Well put ... proving one man's poi/poet is another man's poision, my father could never understand my fascination/regard with the songwiters I consider two of the real poets of my generation - Kris Kristofferson and John Prine.

To this day he sees no value whatsoever in their "poetry".

LOL ... my sentiments exactly.

[J. Clarke]

If you read the complaint it's basically that 35mm doesn't give the same results as medium format. All the rest is misdirection. If small format isn't "good enough" for him, then why was he even trying to use it? Seems to me that he doesn't really understand his equipment if he expected any different result from the one he got.

[Mike Marlow]

Buy that man a beer! Two of the best critical voices of our times.

[Tim Daneliuk]

I believe you need to reread what I wrote. The comparison was between a state-of-the art *digital* camera and medium format. The digital came up short because - in my judgment - it ends up having the same performance more-or-less as a 35mm film camera - something I long ago realized could not do what I wanted.

[Colin B.]

Here's the short version of it:

Comparing *ANY* SLR to a view camera is pointless and misleading. Neither a

35mm SLR or a medium format SLR (or TLR) can compare to a view camera, and it has nothing to do with digital vs. analog. In time it will be possible to buy an affordable digital back for a 4x5 view camera, and life will go on.

Something I found telling about the article was that he was frustrated and ready to give up on the computer as an editing tool, because after recently getting into digital photography for the first time, he wasn't as competent at it as he was after 30 years in the darkroom.

There's more crap out there in any field you could imagine, but there's also probably more great stuff as well. There are talented artists and musicians and writers and poets and craftsmen taking their fields in new and interesting directions ALL THE TIME out there!

One thing to keep in mind: Cultural progress is a measure of the positive, not the ratio between positive and negative. If the RIAA generates a thousand Britney Spears clones, it won't change the fact that Sarah Slean is out there, writing poetry and songs. Rocky LXVII, "Balboa Breaks Out" won't diminish the impact of movies like Amelie, Howl's Moving Castle, or (possibly) Pan's Labyrinth. Good is good, no matter how much bad there is surrounding it.

Colin

[Colin B.]

Why are you comparing these? It makes no sense at all.

Take a 35mm SLR and put a digital back on it, and you've still fundamentally got the same camera. Take a medium format and put a digital back on it, and you've got a medium format. Take a 4x5 view camera, put a digital back on it, and you've got...a really big credit card bill. :-)

Here's a handy comparison chart: film point/shoot digital point/shoot

35mm SLR digital SLR medium format film medium format digital (Hasselblad H3D, for instance) large format film not much. The Sinar eVolution back _might_ be there

Digital wins clearly in the first scenario, without a doubt. It finally beat out film in the 35mm pro realm a year or two ago. Medium format, it's a tough fight between them right now. Large format just isn't there, because the sensors are too expensive today. That'll change.

All this means is that the digital technology (especially from 120 film upwards) isn't entirely mature. I don't know of anyone who claims it is--not even the manufacturers.

Colin

[Tim Daneliuk]

Then you read it wrong - I am quite comfortable with the tools. The limitation here is the camera itself.

[Fred the Red Shirt]

The best consumer grade digital cameras have about half the resolution of a Kodachrome 64 35 mm slide and no where near the dynamic range. I doubt that any even approach the dynamic range of high contrast consumer print films.

IOW, digital imaging is not yet as good as 35 mm.

OTOH, there is only opne place on Earth that still processes Kodachrome 64, Dwayne's photo.

The reasons for the changeover to digital photography do NOT include the quality of the images.

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Doh! If you use the same film in two different formats that yield two different sized negatives the larger negative will have more data.

[Robatoy]

A poet, writer, painter, sculptor expresses ideas, visions, thoughts, and feelings. Picasso didn't use much resolution/detail/colour in this 'sketch'

doesn't use big words to express himself.

A photographer can be a recorder of an image, or he expresses a whole a lot more using an image..... How cold he and others were on that rainy day. You do not have to be able to count the rain drops to get 'the picture'.

[Leon]

What, no "Fity Cent" ???

[Swingman]

"Leon" wrote

Nope, no second grade iambic pentameter allowed.

[B A R R Y]

Fitty Cent has a 49,000 sq/ft home about 20 minutes from me.

Apparenty, being a moron pays very well!

The former owner of the home was Mike Tyson!

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[Tim Daneliuk]

That may be true for the consumer grade stuff, but at the high end prosumer, and certainly at the full blown pro level of equipment this is arguably not the case. Subjectively, at least, at 10MP the Nikon D80 I'm using is the equal of 35mm generally up to about 11x14 (which is where 35mm fell apart for me anyway) and is arguably getting pretty close to K64 in range of light and contrast. I can provide jpegs if you'd like to see for yourself.

But, the issue for be was/is that it cannot yet replace medium- or large format because the CCDs do not yet capture sufficient detai. However, for what I wanted it for, the D80 is a fine instrument. Digital *has* replaced 35mm for all intents and purposes, and it has done so with a level of convenience and malleability that far exceeds its film bretheren.

[Robatoy]

Photography was a serious hobby for me for most of my life. The processing, the frugal aspect of framing a shot, the whole ritual of mixing the chemicals, the discussions amongst friends about the colour integrity of the old Ektachrome (light reversal) or new stuff E-4 (chemical reversal) yadda, yadda, yadda. Kodachrome 25. CPS 4x5 plates which I processed myself. Cibachrome was grossly expensive.

Then I dragged along a little Nikon 885, just for fun, and realized I was tired of dragging along a bag of lenses and managed to get a very good price for my Contax system. (Kept an M4 and a Nikkormat for a while) unloaded my Graflex and rubber tanks, enlargers etc.

The buzz of opening a new box of Ilford paper, has long since left me.

Now it's an H2 Sony with a Zeiss (as if) and I'm watching closely for a credible SLR. I toss the Sony in a side pocket of the truck, $300 to replace it, I no longer sweat the knowledge of a bag full of German Zeiss on my shoulder.

My digital in on 'auto' 95% of the time. I have become a tourist.... and "GET OFF MY LAWN!!!"

r

[Fred the Red Shirt]

I don't see how, since a 35 mm Kodachrome 64 slide has resolution roughly equivalent to a 25 Mp digital image. It is not the finest grained film available either, though Kodachrome 25 (no longer made) may have been the finest grade _slide_ film made, I don't the resolution of Kodachrome 25.

Grain in film isn't as evenly distributed as pixels in a digital image so the resolution of film is 'uneven'. But with more than twice as many grains as a digital image has pixels it is a fair bet that the former would still capture finer detail.

I don't know what 'prosumer is'. What I call a consumer digital camera costs less than $2000 and produces images up to 10 -

12 Mp resolution.

Since there aren't any computer monitors that have color saturation, contrast and especially not dynamic range even close to pretty much any slide film, even if that much data were in a jpeg, it couldn't be observed.

Digital imagery has much better potential for color vermisilitude, however.

The other problem of course is storing that information. Hence jpeg and other image modeling formats that essentially smooth away the fine detail, typically producing an image that looks good to the eye, but actually has much less information than was captured on the CCD.

Incidentally, if you can set your digital camera to record a bitmap and then print the bitmap without ever converting to jpg, you might get better results with your large prints. But the file sizes for the images may be up to 500 Mb! GIF is a compressed bitmap format-it faithfully preserves the pixel values that were downloaded from the chip (not necessarily the same as the data numbers for those pixels.). I _think _ that BMP and TIFF are too. FITS certainly is.

Yes. it is 'good enough' for most consumers and photojournalism, and much more convenient. I am surprised at how long it has taken for digital to make it over the hump to consumer dominance.

[Upscale]

Apparently beating the shit out of people can pay well too.