Large Scale Central

A really good example of "Panning."

Model Photography
#1

While wandering through some photos of NKP 765, looking for something to illustrate a discussion that I was having with JD Gallaway, I stumbled upon this photo by Ron Flanary. It is of NKP 765 disguised as C&O 2765 for reasons I’ll let you read about. The photo was shot in October 1993, using Kodachrome 64, a slow speed, full chromatic film of yesteryear. To get the short at all, Mr. Flanary had to pan (move the camera, keeping the locomotive centered in the lens while the shutter was open).Right click on the photo, select “View Image” to see the full photo.

Read the comments to get the full flavor of the shot. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.

I miss Kodachrome.

#2

Steve, great shot, or so it would appear if I could see all of it. Unfortunately, I’m offered no no “View Image” option when I right click on the photo. I have “View Source,” but when I clicked on that I got a screen full of programming jargon.

As for missing Kodachrome, yeah, I love some of my old images made on K64 (K25 too), but I don’t miss film at all. As digital continues to evolve, it makes film look pretty crude. Take this photo, which I realize is probably a copy. I see very little shadow detail, a situation that’s easily remedied in your average digital image processing program such as Photoshop Elements. There are other “fixes” you can make and once you get into full blown Photoshop CS6, you can composite an image to look any way you want. They even have programs that replicate (I hate that word!) the look of many film emulsions (Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Fujichrome) and even convert color to black and white and add grain.

Then there’s the convenience of digital. When I was shooting film both professionally and for my own enjoyment, I’d take along 20 rolls, which equals 720 images, on a shoot that often involved air travel and all that implies–airport x-ray machines. Some screeners would hand check your film so that it didn’t have to go through the machine, but others, especially in the British Isles, insisted on x-raying the whole lot. I can’t say as I ever experienced any damage, but the anxiety and aggravation did not make for a pleasant trip. With digital, there’s no worries. Plus the capacity of CF and SD cards is staggering. I shoot both RAW and jpg, which eats up a lot of memory. But with a 32 gig CF card, I still can squeeze in more than 1,000 images. And I can store them on a portable hard drive or on my laptop, so that even if the CF card is damaged, I have backup.

Here and there I see articles about film photogs (mostly the artsy-fartsy kind) who shoot film. But I think it’s an affectation.

Sorry to rain on your parade, although it is Memorial Day weekend and we all know that it often rains then. And if it makes you feel any better, I still have my Nikon F2, Hasselbald 500C and 3.5 Rolleiflex–just in case. :slight_smile:

#3

The better digital cameras of today deliver perhaps 12 mega pixels of information.

The average 35mm camera shooting K-64 delivered 100,000 mega pixels of information.

Digital has a long way to go.

It is raining, isn’t it, Joe. :slight_smile:

#4

Steve, Better ck your facts, I’m not going to start the Digital vs film wars. But the color pallet of a Cannon 5D far exceeds any film in any format. The exposure range in F/stops Far exceeds any film. The clarity of a 40 x 60 print from a 5D far exceeds the clarity from any 6x9 Neg or slide, and I would put it up against most 4x5 0r 5x7 size films, As I owned and ran a custom “wet” lab for years, Using pro grade Chromaga large format enlargers, and Nikor and Schneider glass, vacuum easels etc. I have the prints to confirm my observations. I have high end film scanners that will give remarkable scans. At incredible resolutions, but the problem comes when you scan at a res that is finer then the dye clouds in the layers of the emulations, as the dye clouds are not uniform in density or color, and the scanner reads thru the edges of the “Cyan” dye cloud.

Any one want to buy 4 RB67s with some remarkable glass?

I’v now traded the lab for 2 Epson Style Pro 9900 42" printers, Remarkable machines.

#5

Dave, I think that you are trying to compare apples to oranges, here. Yes, your high end pro equipment can out class a 35 mm film (or digital) camera any day of the week, It always has been able to do that, and always will be able to do that.

How will your high end digital do against 8 X 10 K 25 or K 64 film? Or, against 16 X 20 film. Compare high end against high end, or 35mm K 25 and 64 against 12 mega pixel. That is only fair.

I have yet to see a digital print with the depth of expression of one of Ansel Adam’s original prints.

I agree that digital is coming along, but it ain’t there, yet.

#6

Steve Ansel cheated… he had a secret zone, the mythical “AA Zone”.

Spend some time at this site.

http://www.piezography.com/

The modern “inkjet” printer using the piezography carbon based ink set, reproduces more gradients of tonal value, then any “wet” process photographic paper is capable of reproducing under any conditions. It is simply a matter of the silver halides restrictions in the photographic process.

It is simply a matter of controlling and manipulating the process, as Ansel discovered early on. John Cone is advancing the B/W process into yet another level beyond that which Ansel left off at. If you ever get a chance to see some of the new generation b/w prints, you will be amazed at the tonal scales that are now available to print to.

His and others prints are now using gradients that were Un achievable using the film/paper process. Little known: The photo papers that are printed to, can not reproduce all the tones (or Colors) that the film has. its outside their capacity using known modern papers. The printing color gamut for wet process is greatly smaller then the gamut for modern inkjet printers.

The Canon 5D mk ll/lll is a full (35mm) frame camera that shoots a 23Mp RAW file, it opens in PS as a 60+Mp file at 16 bit color depth. Apples to Apples

#7

60+Mp is still not 100,000 Mp, though, is it?

#8

Steve, Where did you get that 100,000 mp figure? That # seems to me to be not quite right.

#9

I read it in one of the main line digital photography magazines several years ago (less than 5 years). Sorry, I can’t give you an exact reference.

#10

Heh, heh! I just realized that Steve slugged this thread “A good example of panning,” and that’s what we’ve been doing–panning Steve. :slight_smile: Sorry, bud.

Dave is way outta my league on this tech stuff, but I do know that the 35-mm size DSLR with the highest megapixel count is the Nikon D800, a full-frame camera with 36 megs. Not too pricey, as such things go.

If ya go up to Hasselblad or Mamiya-size cameras (2-1/4 x 2-1/4 for the Hasselblad, slightly larger for the Mamiya, because it’s a rectangular format), you can fit your body with a Leaf back which has 80 meg. Of course, it’s $30 grand, but if you’re doing ads for the big boys, what’s money? Unfortunately, the Leafs and other studio backs aren’t very fast, ISO wise, but then, neither was Kodachrome. Speaking of ISO, another plus of digital is that most cameras offer ISO ranging from 100 to 6,400 and can be pushed, albeit not without a noticable increase in noise (grain in the film world). I’m too lazy to look up the specs, but the top-of-the-line Canon and Nikon can do over 100,000 ISO.

Dang it! I got myself into italics and can’t get out.

Steve, the rain reference was for you and others on the mainland. It is sunny and hot in 96761, where I don’t have access to my modeling stuff and have to pick on guys like you. :slight_smile:

#11

Well, I mispoke again. The Leaf back cameras are not slow as their ISO ranges from 35 to 800. The format size is 53.7-mm x 40.3-mm, which means nothing to me as I am neither a science major nor Canadian and deal only in inches, feet, yards and miles.

I will say, the Mamiya 645DF is one sweet rig and if I had money to burn I would have one.

Here’s what she looks like–

http://www.mamiyaleaf.com/mamiya_645df+.html

#12

2.11 x 1.58 inches.

#13

Ron, thanks. I coulda Googled for the conversion but that would involve work. So the Mamiyaflex is not 2-1/4.

Speaking of Mamiya, when the brand first came out I was working in a camera back east where some folks couldn’t figure out how to pronounce the name. Some called it Mammy-flex. Honest!

Steve, I went back, clicked on the comments attached to the photo and noticed that opinions are pretty much as expressed on your thread: i.e. there’s the nostalgiacs (I made up that word) and the modernists. Being a “mature” person (I hate being called “old”), I used to side with people who believe that digital will never be as good as film. But after drinking the Kool-Aid (pixel juice?) my feelings are as expressed here. I view a lot of photo web sites and watch many webinars sponsored by software manufacturers and the stuff you can do in Photoshop boggles the mind.

While the photo you posted represents panning, another technique, which the motion picture guys call a “trucking shot” produces a similar effect and imparts the feeling of movement. When I get home where I can access my slides, I’ll resuscitate this thread and post a photo of Strasburg Railways’ 2-10-0, which I took from a car pacing the loco on a parallel road.

#14

Sorry, Steve, but 35mm film is NO WHERE near that resolution. Depending on the grain of the film, you’re looking at 12 - 20 mp max. There’s widespread argument about how to “measure” the effective resolution of film, with the film buffs clinging to methods that naturally gravitate towards numbers on the high end of the scale, but even then, they’re not looking at 100,000 mp (100 trillion!!! pixels)

But consider this: movies are edited digitally at 2K pixels across. (roughly 2000 x 1000, depending on aspect ratio) Some are 4K, but that’s high-end stuff, akin to 70mm film. Since 35mm movie pixels are perpendicular to the film, and 35mm stills are parallel, that gives a 35mm still frame an effective vertical resolution of about 2K pixels tall. Even at 2:1 aspect ratio, that’s 8 mp max.

Maybe you’re getting that resolution from fine-grain large-format film, but not 35mm. Not by any stretch of the wildest imagination.

Later,

K

#15

Kevin, I can only report on what I read.

I wish I had written down the magazine, article and author, so y’all could argue with him, instead.

It was one of those things that stuck in my mind. The author was a digital aficionado who was of the opinion that digital had a long way to go to fully emulate K-24.

It is possible that I misread the article, and substituted 35 mm for large format, but that is doubtful.

The discussion is about K-24 and K-64. Professional movies are rarely shot in Kodachrome, as I think that it is just too expensive to do that. If you take a frame from a 35mm movie print and blow it up to anything beyond 4x6 inches, it looks horrible.

In any case, K-24 fully qualified as “fine grain.”

I looked on Wikipedia, and it says that color transparencies of 24x36mm size (35mm) have roughly 20 mp of information. That seems to lump in everything from K-24 to Fujichrome-400 (not sure if that was ever made) but does not specifically state the resolution of K-24. Perhaps I misremembered the article and the author was talking about K-24 in large format.

I’ll fall on my sword tomorrow. I’m busy tonight. :slight_smile:

#16

Heh…whatever. I just wish I had a digital camera years ago. My 24 exposure rolls lasted over a year! Now, I can take 100 pictures a day and not be worried about it.

#17

I still have 3 exposed rolls of K-64 in the freezer. I’ll leave them to my kids and let them figure out what to do with them.

#18

Last time we had film developed, Walmart lost 20 some rolls.

The store manager said it was our fault for turning in so many rolls at once.

What a moron. Certainly one of anything is easier to lose than a large quantity :wink:

Never got so much as a coupon :frowning:

So ya, I kinda of prefer digital :slight_smile:

Ralph

#19

And the beat goes on. Actually, Steve, one of my photographer idols is Greg Heisler, who has done numerous covers for Time Magazine. You remember “Time,” right? Anyways, my favorite shot, taken at dusk, is of fomer NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, standing on this rooftop ledge with New York City and the Empire State Building behind him. It’s very dramatic, beautifully lit. And shot on film with an 8 x 10 view camera. If you Google around I’m sure you can find it. The funniest part is Heisler recounting the shoot and the reaction of Rudy’s security detail when he told the mayor to stand on that ledge. “No way,” they said," but Rudy hopped right up onto the ledge. Truly, there was a balcony two stories below, so he didn’t have far to fall. Still…

So there you are, Steve. Film lives!

#20

Steve, try these:

http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/emg/library/pdf/vitale/2007-04-vitale-filmgrain_resolution.pdf

http://www.rags-int-inc.com/PhotoTechStuff/DigitalFilm/

These studies put 35mm film on the order of 6 - 30 or so mp depending on how fine the grain of the film is. Most “common” 35mm films are in the 10 - 20 mp range.

Later,

K