Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Scottish fall

A picture I took in 2000, when I lived in Edinburg.
Pleasant picture, but I can't get over the improvements in digicams since then.
1: This was a huge step up from my first digicam, Nikon Coolpix 700.
2: The camera, Coolpix 900, was rightly regarded as one of the best digicams available at that time. And yet:
3: This is the full camera resolution, 2MP.
4: And not even for that size is it very sharp or good. It's just fuzzy.


The quality improvements sneak up on you like writer Steve Hynes said to me. He said he'd looked at old slides of his in medium format, and really they were not as hot as he'd thought.

I saw a line in an interview in the brand-new issue of Professional Photographer. A guy, a pro, said that he thought that digital had "diminished picture quality" or words to that effect. I don't know what universe that guy lives in, but it's not one I'm familiar with. The pictures from my breast pocket sized Canon 960 are at least as good as most work I've seen from huge, expensive medium format film cameras. Shocking.

7 comments:

Alex said...

If that was Scotland, then it would be autumn.

"diminished picture quality" The physical quality, all that saturation, grain and what not they go on about, or the content with any Tom, Dick or Sally putting their dross on the web?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

That would be the first one, it seems. He mentions blown highlights in pictures in magazines. (And he's not talking about the wind blowing in the hair of a model with highlights in it, I guess.)

He also admits it surely not an issue to the general public.

Anyway, for quality one would have to use slide film, and that has even less dynamic range than digital cameras.

Anonymous said...

Quality or no, I enjoyed seeing this photograph as I think it was taken from your apartment window? The street looks familiar, that is where you lived when we visited. Thanks for the memory. Beth

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

That's exactly right. Nice little place.

That apartment though was *so* much more expensive than this one, though I'm not sure why.

Peter Knight said...

It has charm of its own. I did have a Coolpix 950 (until it was stolen) and am also astonished at the huge leaps in improvement over time.

Anonymous said...

I really like the stone walls. The building looks like it's been there for a long time, and will be there long after we're all gone.

Of course, maybe that's just Facade #17B from the builder's catalog, and the building was put up in 1995.

I like it anyway.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

No, that's for real. Scotland is all stone. And central Edinburg has houses with were built 600 years ago!