[thechat] b&w photography

[Martin Burns]

On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 01:22  pm, Luther, Ron wrote:

> Any other 'surprises' in going to digital?

1) The CCD/CMOS isn't the same size as a 35mm neg (it's smaller)[1], so
truely wideangle shots are not going to be yours, and if you're used to
a relationship between a focal depth and level of magnification for a
given aperture, it's going to be broken.
[1] except for high end digital SLRs like the Canon D1s

2) Variable ISO speed

3) You don't get reciprocity failures with long exposures at low light
levels. You *do* get digital noise caused by low signal-noise levels and
charge leakage, particularly noticeable if that noise includes random
bright pixels. Some manufacturers have a noise reduction option whereby
the camera takes 2 shots - one blank shot to generate the noise which is
then subtracted from the main shot. Digital noise *can* look like film
grain when you drop out the colour, though:
http://www.easyweb.co.uk/photos/morgan/images/dsc00515.jpg

4) With some cameras you can set your whitepoint - no more filters to
remove colour casts from incandescent light

5) Sheer speed of taking the shot to having it viewable. Although having
an LCD preview does make you lazy - you tend to spend too much time
watching the LCD rather than the event unfolding around you.

6) You lose a wee bit of colour detail as CCDs have more green pixels
than red & blue (cos the human eye is more sensitive to green). The
'missing' red & blue pixels are somewhat calculated from neighbouring
pixels. Take a look at each colour channel up close to see what I mean
(high end digicams can take 3 shots - 1 for each colour - in succession)

7) The general colour quality is not ideal - you will be spending some
time with either Levels or Curves in Photoshop. Alternatively, if you
don't have the time to tweak in detail for each image, Extensis
Intellihance is good, particularly if you're batching with Photoshop
Actions/droplets.

8) If you're used to quality SLR lenses, unless you're using a quality
SLR digicam, you're back to crappy consumer lenses. And if you *are*
using SLR lenses, remember that the focal lengths will be out by a
factor of 1.2 or so - see point (1).

9) You'd keep your negs safe, right? So always, always work on a copy of
the raw images off the camera, keeping these separate. I tend to store
my originals in iPhoto as a cataloging tool, and a double click opens in
Photoshop. My *first* action is a 'save as'. I have destroyed originals
before - it's too easy to do, even if you're as sensible with data files
as I'm sure everyone here is.

Cheers
Martin
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