Film and digital.

[Jack Williams]

With a film/slide converter I have from time to time been putting up some of the colour slide collection onto the digital media. While my "Blaze Photo" thingy seems to have siezed up at present, I have decided to put up three photos here for members to perhaps comment on. The converter always starts out severely overexposed, so I have to back off the brightness a lot, and there is no contrast control. Anyway, here are three shots: First using a Rollei 35 camera with Kodak Ectachrome film, second using my Leica with Fuji film, third using Canon IXUS 125 HS digital camera. Any comments on the shots would be welcome.

[Big and Bashful]

The light down there looks harsher than the light in the UK, but I find it hard to compare the technologies using your photos. (Apart from the dirt on the first conversion)
However, I have a Canon EOS350D (digital) and it's film predecessor. When I switched to digital I found that suddenly skies had colour and detail which I never had when using film. 35mm film seemed to have a smaller dynamic range so that you either had a washed out sky or dark foreground in the shot. I know polarisin filters bring out detail in clouds etc. but I have found much less need for polarisers with the digital camera. At the end of the day I found that digital (for me) produces a much better picture. I suppose a lot of that may be due to looking at the pictures on a decent screen makes quite a difference as well.
My occasional experiments with slide film produced good photos, better than colour negative. Unfortunately you then need a projector and screen to view them properly, which takes up a lot of space, but the colours did come out better on slides.
I also found that some developer/printers used machines which adjusted the colour balance automaticaly, which often ruined the print (example: adjusting the colour out of a sunset, not clever). I know it's nice having your own darkroom or using specialists, however, I am not a professional or a serious photo-monger so when I got back from my holibags with 8 to 8 rolls of film it was always off to a high street printist.
Digital I love, I can take as many shots as I want, and just look at them on screen, back them up to different hard disks on different machines so that they are safe. The only thing I don't do is photo-shop them, I just stick with what I shoot. If it is good, I keep it, if it needs tweaking, I, erm, still keep it, but like it less!
I rarely print them out, I gave up with inkjet printers a long time ago, stupid prices for ink and decent paper. I love the new phot0 printers (are they dye sublimation?) and know they are cheap to buy, but still I just view mine on screen, it's what your iPad's for!

[Jack Williams]

Thanks for interesting reply Big and Bashful.
Yes I love my wee pocket Canon, that I can easily carry for a quick unobtrusive shot when one pops up, But I think there is more depth to the film result. The boys in the back of the WOMAD camp one really seem back there beyond the others in the circle.
Here's another shot from the same roll as the kids, this time at the annual Blues Club picnic about three years ago. The people's limbs etc seem more rounded and plump I think.
PS: must have another go at getting the 40 years of dust off the camels! Can't even go to Afghanistan any more or even get the Kodak film!

[Big and Bashful]

To me the digital seems sharper and crisper, however, that is probably because the film shots have been mangled in multiple stages. A colour neg print has been taken, developed, (ok so far), then either scanned in or printed then scanned in, with each stage screwing up the colour and the sharpness a bit more. That's no way to treat an image!

Slide film has more on it's side, but then you need a really high optical resolution scanner to catch it well, not most of the dross they sell on Amazon!

Larger format film cameras must be better I suppose, a larger negative to work with. But I haven't got one!

[Jack Williams]

I do need a better slide converter. This is one I bought from the "Innovations" catalogue ages ago, but I've bid on a much better one on Ebay. Actually there are many to choose from I discover. However my "Blase Photo" has now crashed!
I have taken a bunch of shots with both the Leica and the Canon digi just lately, of the Spring tree blossoms etc so I will be able to compare them. Going in to the city shortly, so I'll take more shots on both, and also get another (Fuji) film.
I like that I can throw the slides up on my big roll-up screen though.
Looking through the slides I did come across a nice sunset one, so I'll put it up when back in action.

[crfriend]

Looking through the slides I did come across a nice sunset one, so I'll put it up when back in action.

I have no idea whether it's survived the ages, but at one point back in the mid 1980s I took an absolutely spectacular photograph on Kodachrome of a sunset from Boston's Hancock Tower (the new one) looking past Trinity Church towards the Old South Church. Aside from a blasted TV aerial on a distant building the thing would have been positively timeless (nowadays the thing would just be airbrushed or Photoshopped out but those tools were unavailable to me at the time).

Damn, I miss Kodachrome....

Jack -- Some of those scanned shots look blurry where they shouldn't (and I'm assuming that you had the focus bang-on with the chemical kit). Are you scanning at the highest possible resolution and then resampling down for presentation on the Web?

[Jack Williams]

Yes, not all that keen on the resolution of some myself. I put them at max pixels for Flickr, but down to 1200 and 1300 for Skirtcafe, which is about a max depending on content.
I'll try a couple more, if me "Blase Photo" will work today..
...no, doesn't work, but the results are not good enough. I'm getting another, hopefully better, scanner, we'll see if that helps, although I have my doubts. I do know they all look great projected on a huge screen.
No "Blaze Photo"... Why do I bother?
I wonder if "Blaze Photo" is the only one. Are there any others? This (if working) starts out with insanely huge brightness, and by the time one dimms it down it still looks wierd.

Of course I could just do what a friend does: Project 'em onto a screen and then take photo of same with digital camera. Problem solved.

[crfriend]

This (if working) starts out with insanely huge brightness, and by the time one dimms it down it still looks wierd.

This sounds like a sensor-sensitivity issue and you might consider turning the gain on the scanner's sensor down a bit. The reason it's looking strange once you've tried "correcting it" is that by the time you've got the washed-out portions reasonable you've lost a fair bit of information in the luminance portion of the signal and you can't get that back no matter how you try. If your scanner supports it, try manually reducing the gain (or brightness) when scanning and see if that helps.

As far as the focus issues go, is the scanner optically in focus? If the slides look nice and sharp on a screen and are blurry in the scans the image may not be reaching the sensor in focus (and at the scales we're talking about between sensor and original even a minute imperfection will have a large effect).

Of course I could just do what a friend does: Project 'em onto a screen and then take photo of same with digital camera. Problem solved.

That works, too.

[Sarongman]

Resolution quality in digital camera technology is improving in leaps and bounds, with high megapixel counts appearing in cheaper point and shoot cameras which were only in the realm of high end DSLRs a few years ago. The only limitation with the point and shoot is the cheap mass produced lenses. With slide film, the slow speed Kodachrome had the finest grain and could produce remarkably crisp, sharp slides. For both slide and negative film, increasing the speed increased the graininess. I haven't had much of a chance to see if increasing the speed in a digital camera increases the pixellation, but I tend to think it could.

The biggest problem with digital is the rapid obsolescence of technology. A bit over a decade back, I digitised a lot of negatives to floppy disk and, with the latest computers, have no easy way of accessing them now.

[Big and Bashful]

On a digital camera, increasing the sensitivity increases "noise", the sort of background speckliness which looks rather like graininess, caused by the electrical circuits, the sensor itself, tell you what, here is wikipedia's take on the subject

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise

[Uncle Al]

A bit over a decade back, I digitised a lot of negatives to floppy disk and,
with the latest computers, have no easy way of accessing them now.

You need one of these 3 1/2 inch external floppy drive - - - -

External Floppy Drive 2013-09-16.jpg

which can be found HERE for under $21.00 US.
They only come with a USB plug so they will work on any computer with USB ports.
The drive gets its power, and upload/download data, via the USB plug/port.
In one word - Simple

TigerDirect.com may ship to Australia or New Zealand but I don't know
if the shipping charges would be greater than the cost of the item.

I'd check your area (google search) for 3 1/2 inch external floppy drives.
You may get a good deal that way

Uncle Al

[Sarongman]

Thanks Al I have looked on eBay and found they are available here for comparable prices $19.50, with free shipping.

Another point where digital has it over film is colour rendition of unique colours. The Jacaranda tree flowers are a case in point, they never came out true to life and, if the lab. rendered the flowers true, the rest of the colours went berserk.

[crfriend]

Another point where digital has it over film is colour rendition of unique colours.

Something we may be forgetting here is that photography -- be it chemical or digital -- is a poor substitute for human vision. Chemical processes are limited by the chemistry and dyes they work with, and digital is limited by its available dynamic range; those reasons are why we have photographers who are either trained, or innately know how, to make the absolute best use of light possible. It's possible to produce very fine photographic images indeed, but it's important to recall that the camera does not "see" in the same manner that humans do.

The Jacaranda tree flowers are a case in point, they never came out true to life and, if the lab. rendered the flowers true, the rest of the colours went berserk.

That's likely down to the dyes or film in use. Some films are better at capturing colour than others; this, for instance is why I loved Kodachrome so and so reviled Ektachrome -- Kodachrome had a wonderful "warm" look to it (it was biased somewhat toward the red/orange end of the spectrum) and Ektachrome, by contrast, was (and probably remains) strongly biased towards blue. The two just mentioned are both transparency films, but print films exhibit similar characteristics, not just in the film itself but also in the paper used to produce the prints (recall that the print you have in the photo album is a second "photograph" made from the original that you exposed in the camera).

There's also the matter of how we perceive colour. I sincerely doubt that everybody perceives a given wavelength of light as the same colour as everybody else; we're pretty good, so we get close, but we're not perfect. Heck, I have one eye that's red-biased whereas the other produces a bright, but somewhat colour-flat view. Go figure.

[Jack Williams]

Yes, I also noticed the Ektachrome was not as colourful as Kodachrome. That was the one where you paid for the processing with the film, and posted it in.
I used to like the colour of the Agfa film better actually. I have a lot on that, but the mounts are too thick to fit through this scanner!
Getting another slide/negative scanner this week. This one can be bettered I'm sure. Even fitting thicker slides would be a start.

[crfriend]

Yes, I also noticed the Ektachrome was not as colourful as Kodachrome. That was the one where you paid for the processing with the film, and posted it in.

Yes, that was the stuff. The process was very complex as the dyes were actually embedded during the processing phase not as part of the original emulsion as is, I believe, the case with Ektachrome. There were never more than a handful of labs that could develop the stuff, but the wait was usually worth it!

Even fitting thicker slides would be a start.

Careful with the thicker slide-mounts -- you may wind up with an optical focus problem on the scanner because of it.