Category Archives: Photography

Film vs digital

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Interesting comment by Feli Di Giorgio in a Lightstalkers discussion.

Digital has lower noise (grain) and better color accuracy, especially in mixed light.

Digital ‘sees’ deeper into the shadows and film handles highlights better,

Film negative has greater exposure range, 10-18 stops depending on whom you believe.

Digital has more dynamic range than slide film , but less than negative. With the exception of the Finpix S5 Pro, pretty much every DSLR on the market delivers about 8 stops of usable dynamic range. Usable being the keyword here. The Finepix S5 PRO gets 10 stops, because of it’s high dynamic range SuperCCD, but it’s only 6MP.

Film also tends to have greater color resolution, but that is changing as manufacturers up the resolution of their A/D circuitry, which will also increase the useable dynamic range. There is a noticeable difference between the results you get with a 12bit and 16bit A/D converter.

One reason why the M8 may deliver more film-like images is due to it’s use of a CCD, rather than a CMOS chip. CCD’s tend to deliver images that have a more film like quality.

I’ve seen tests where the 16MP Canon 1Ds MkII runs neck to neck with a 6×7 negative and delivers less grain over 400asa. The film negative will have better tonality and greater dynamic range.

But in the end they are different media, like oil paint and acrylics. I prefer the look of Tri-X, so that’s what I shoot. Sometimes digtal is the better choice. I just use the tool that offers the best solution for the job.

Where did 35mm film come from?

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Interesting aside to a discussion about the Leica M8:

As an aside on the whole sensor size issue—I guess there is some practical or economic limitation that keeps most sensors at 75% of the standard 135 film size, thus forcing all of the rethinking of lenses and such, but it’s interesting to note where the 35mm standard came from. Apparently, in 1889, Thomas Edison was developing the Kinetoscope and a worker asked him how wide to cut the film. He held up his thumb and forefinger and said “About this wide…” and the 35 millimeter standard was born…

Sensecam

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SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images.

At first sight this product of research at Microsoft’s Cambridge Lab seems banal. But it seems to have a really intriguing application. As Tech Review reports:

When Mrs. B was admitted to the hospital in March 2002, her doctors diagnosed limbic encephalitis, a brain infection that left her autobiographical memory in tatters. As a result, she can only recall around 2 percent of events that happened the previous week, and she often forgets who people are. But a simple device called SenseCam, a small digital camera developed by Microsoft Research, in Cambridge, U.K., dramatically improved her memory: she could recall 80 percent of events six weeks after they happened, according to the results of a recent study.

“Not only does SenseCam allow people to recall memories while they are looking at the images, which in itself is wonderful, but after an initial period of consolidation, it appears to lead to long-term retention of memories over many months, without the need to view the images repeatedly,” says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist who works as a consultant to Microsoft.

The device is worn around the neck and automatically takes a wide-angle, low-resolution photograph every 30 seconds. It contains an accelerometer to stabilize the image and reduce blurriness, and it can be configured to take pictures in response to changes in movement, temperature, or lighting. “Because it has a wide-angle lens, you don’t have to point it at anything–it just happens to capture pretty much everything that the wearer can see,” says Steve Hodges, the manager of the Sensor and Devices Group at Microsoft Research, U.K.

The camera stores VGA-quality images as compressed .jpg files. It can fit 30,000 images onto a 1GB flash card. And run them as crude movies which are obviously good enough to jog the memory.

Interesting illustration of the utility of photography.