Camera's

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Eric Hvisc on November 4, 2008 at 7:41am

Actually most of my still come from prints. my specialty is to take family photos and turn them in to stories. I find it amazing that some photos from the first half of the 20th century have more depth then some from the second half,

Permalink Reply by Leslie Lowes on November 5, 2008 at 10:09am

Eric,

Could the ones with more depth have come from glass plate negatives?

We deal with quite a lot of archive stills held by our local museum, which has a huge collection - Shetland being very photogenic, as many islands are, has always been blessed with a lot of good stills photographers. The museum have all the original glass plates, but have made dgital copies available for researchers, film and TV companies and so on.

The quality of the original print really become obvious if you zoom right in close in to a small feature in the original picture and it is as clear and crisp as the whole print. Really wonderful resolution, fine and detailed, you would never realise it was a close up portion of a much larger photograph unless you were told. The quality of image seemed to drop quite markedly in comparison when roll film had been used as the photographic medium. Fine at full resolution, getting blurry quite quickly when you start zooming in.

If you would like to take a look at their photo library you will find it here: http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/
If you enter the search term "Ratter" you will get acces to 121 of the images of JD Ratter one of these early Shetland photographers, who certainly had an eye for a good photograph and was a master of black and white exposures.
Take a look and let me know what you think of his photography.

Leslie Lowes

Permalink Reply by Gordon Lamb on November 5, 2008 at 10:16am

I would guess the depth is coming from the large format, either 4 x 5 or 8 x 10. When I was in college I got to work with a 4x5 camera and I WISH someone would come out with a good digital one. I know they have scanner backs but it's just a regular 4x5 with a scanner on the back. I'm talking a true digital large format camera with bellows and some ridiculous amount of mega-pixels.

Permalink Reply by Bruce Paul on June 17, 2009 at 4:35pm

I personally don't think it's the camera, but more the artists eye (i.e. the photographer).

Considering that it isn't megapixels (HD frames are only 1920 X 1080, about 2MP) and you can scale, crop, color correct, etc... quite well in PhotoShop, Paint Shop, NLE of choice, etc... I feel the most important piece of the puzzle is the artists creativity

I've taken some very bad video footage and edited it into something usable. I've also taught a room full of folks with high priced cameras that I can do better than they with a sub $100 model.

Just MHO (I used to be a pro in a prior life and have had major newspaper front page photos, credited) but I think we, as professionals and enthusiasts alike, need to drive ourselves to be more creative - willing to push envelopes beyond where they are each day - follow time tested rules and break them when necessary (or if it just works).

All that said, I shoot film with a Canon F-1 (yes - still love it); digital with an Olympus SP500UZ and Sony HDR-SR11 (video camera with a 10MP still imager) and Olympus 1030SW (for underwater stuff).

What do others think?