K-7 now £799!!

I wiki’ed and found the fuji film (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_ISO ); not 3200 though is it.

As for the Tri-X that is ISO 400; I am not going to get Boots to push it to ISO 1600 – assuming they still developed film - am I?

But of what relevance is the application of specialist development processing techniques for *black and white* film to the discussion about what is possible and desirable with a dslrs?

The reality is that in terms of current practice it is merely a load of meaningless techno-babble, injected by Gartmore to bolster a position otherwise totalling lacking in substance.

Have we squared a circle?

K-7 now £799!! becomes a debate on densitometry!

Shaky, yes, you can. Anywhere that can process black and white film can "push" a film for you. All you need to do is make the instruction to do so. Just tell then +1, +2 stops or whatever you want.

There's nothing specialist in this, photo labs do it routinely. I am assuming that you have never used film as an enthusiast and are therefore unaware of the origins of much of the digital technique that is used today.

Photoshop is effectively a digital darkroom, based on traditional darkroom techniques.

The relevance is that push-processed film was used to obtain results under "difficult" lighting conditions, which the users accepted.

The grain effects of ISO3200 on dslrs are much less noticeable.

Therefore the high ISO capabilities of the K7 are much better than anyone exposing film at the same ISO was able to achieve? I presume to suggest that the difference between K7 & competitors is much less than between dslr & film.

I never went higher than ISO800 with Ilford (can't remember now, not FP4, the faster one..HP5?). For many, the grain effects of fast film were very much intentional for artistic/atmospheric effect.

As for democratisation of high end photography, there may well be "equality of opportunity" (by making high end dslrs more widely available) but there is by no means "equality of outcome".

My position is.....sat at my desk at work, far too late in the day!

Regards
Peter

There are now fifteen times as many "Wedding Photographers" in my area as there were five years ago!

This is what my computing lecturer used to call "creeping featurism". When SLRs first got in-built lightmeters people went "wow", now we have 64 segment zone metering with more computing power than it took to get to the moon (and it still goes wrong), single stroke film wind-on, then motordrives, now lightening fast burst modes, and so on. One can see the same with cars (how much of the technology in your average Beemer is actually necessary?) and mobile phones (blimey, you can talk to people on them too!). Whatever piece of kit we have, half the world wants it better, faster, flasher and the other half remember the "good old days".

I think we should just settle to accepting that we all have different desires and thankfully there are enough choices in this world that most of us can be happy. I'm just hoping there is an old manual focus 200mm prime waiting for me when I get home and that it really is "near mint" and not some fungus infected old dog.

Best wishes, Kris.

Good grief is that true? And the market must be diminishing with less couples getting wed. A heads up to all those who fancy a pop at pro photography.

Mike

I'm considering setting up a dating service catering to wedding photographers in the hopes that they'll get married, and get at least a couple competitors to hire me at a time...

Make it an iPhone app

You're absolutely spot on here.

Thankfully I can remember that it is possible to survive without a mobile phone, whereas my younger sister would struggle to cope if her phone didn't have a camera, mp3 player, etc,

I do believe that increase functionality does come at the expense of quality. Sure it's great to have a "do everything" device like an iPhone, but I've increasingly found myself moving towards devices which do one thing, but do it very well (this was after using an iPhone only to found it did a lot of things well, but "phone" wasn't one of them!).

A few years ago I used to use Fuji NPH and NPZ (which, I think, became Pro 400H and Pro 800Z), and, more regularly, Superia 1600. As I recall, NPZ gave a lovely creaminess to skintones, but sadly 800 speed film was always in between what I really needed (either 1600 under theatre lights or 400 for general purpose photography).

In fact, my first published photo was taken on Fuji Superia 1600 (with a Z-1p) - it was used for a Youth Justice Board conference at Tate Modern. With a bit of clever wording I can make that sound a lot better on a CV than than it actually was (serendipity played a large part!)

If I was comparing film grain to digital I'd say that 400 (possibly even 200?) film is comparable to 1600 on digital in terms of grain. (And when I talk about 1600 film I mean Fuji Superia, a very good film - I once had the misfortune to use some kind of Kodak 800 film, which I'd say equates to 6400 on digital.) This makes me wants to dig out some of my film scans to do a side by side comparison...

Jonathan

Grain and noise is not the same thing though, is it? For some photographs, grain can add to the feeling of the shot, whereas digital noise usually just looks ugly. We have, for example, software that adds film-like grain to digital photos, but other software to remove noise. Silver Efex Pro (if I got the name right) comes with built in functions to make the image look like something shot on Tri-X at 1600, or whatever.

Completely off topic, but does anyone use Silver Efex?

K.

Digital noise doesn't look so ugly, and looks more like film grain, if you remove the chroma aspect. That can be done without loss of detail.

Add Noise is one way to great grain, gaussian monochromatic for me.

Now £777 at Misfuds although SRS seem to have a free battery offer with theirs.