Saturday, January 14, 2012

Silver halide film, ghost begone!


That's an ad I just got.
Isn't it a wonder that after, what, 170 years of photography, we finally get rid of the limitations of silver film, we can now make pictures look like anything digitally... and some people want to emulate "the magic of silver halide film". It's also one of the follies of the otherwise wonderful camera company Fujifilm (perhaps because they used to make film and they miss it), their cameras always have these stupid "film simulation" settings. You can't even get out of them, at best you can set it to "Provia/standard". I don't even know what "Provia" is, I've never used one in my life.
 I'm sorry, I think film looked like shite if you weren't lucky. It was so grainy and blotchy, and getting tones and colors right was a constant battle.  For me this is like being nostalgic for the era of medical healing of anything by bloodletting, or curing mental problems with lobotomies.

Update:
Pop said:
Now look what you made me do. I re-awoke my blog to post this on it. I can hear it grumbling in the next room…

3 comments:

Pop! said...

Now look what you made me do. I re-awoke my blog to post this on it. I can hear it grumbling in the next room…

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Funny, well done.

I think I could use the tear-and-tape filter.

I never had a VGA camera, but my first digital camera was an SVGA (600x800) Nikon Coolpix 600. (Imorally they called it 1-megapixel, I think.) And even per pixel the quality was just gawd-awful. Though at the time we thought it was great. Samples here.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

... Wikipedia says it was XGA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_Coolpix_series

Does not seem like me to have scaled down those pictures. Maybe I had the camera set on 600x800 by accident. In those days even the immediacy of a digital camera was dead-esciting in itself.
... Ah, I finally found some files from it, yes it was 768x1024px.