Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/09/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 10:19 AM 9/17/2006 -0700, you wrote: > > And in conditions that really taxed digital, and my skills. Even > > shooting > > RAW. I really wish I'd been shooting color neg film for these two: > > http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/MagParkDogs/P9161965-web2.jpg.html > > http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/MagParkDogs/P9161972-web.jpg.html > >G'day Peter, >would you please explain why you say this? > >>And in conditions that really taxed digital, and my skills. Even > >>shooting > > RAW. I really wish I'd been shooting color neg film for these two:<<< Ted: Sure. And if you have suggestions for how I could do better, I'm all ears. I'm still a relative novice at digital, and I've never been a sports shooter. Chasing dogs around a lakeshore dog park qualifies as sports in my book! :-) This was a situation where the dynamic range issues of digital bit me hard. I'm not showing all the pictures I took by any means--I shot about 75, but I only posted links to the ones where the content was reasonably good and the exposure was acceptable. Even then, several took a lot of work. (I also posted a few shots for some dog owners who asked if they could see the pictures. Those weren't really meant for the LUG). Essentially, color negative film is more forgiving than digital. Bright highlights are often easily burnable. With digital, when you hit the brightness ceiling, that's it. Splat! Color neg film would have given me less worry about exposure and more time to concentrate on content. And there would have been a higher percentage of usable shots. We've discussed before how digital is like slide film. Sometimes you have to choose between the highlights and the shadows. The pictures were taken in the very late afternoon, between about 5:00 and 6:00 PM. There was bright sun, deep shadows, blue water, reflections off the water, even brighter reflections off the foam and spray, plus black dogs and white dogs and brown dogs in between. Contrast city. Normally, what we do in high-contrast digital situations is to shoot RAW, let the specular highlights blow, keep detail in the important highlights, and bring up the shadows in RAW development or in the initial 16-bit TIFF after conversion. But my current digital camera, the Olympus E-1, is notorious for shadow and low light noise. It also doesn't have true matrix metering--its supposedly equivalent "ESP" mode is not well documented, and I've never met anyone who knows how it actually works. I've found it unreliable. Your DSLR, the Canon 20D, would have done better in this situation. It has better matrix metering, and much less shadow noise. But neither cameras have the dynamic range of color negative film. So I chimped a lot, and used what seemed to work best. Which was center-weighted metering, and try to lock the exposure on a brighter midtone on the fly. As you say, KISS. This was action shooting, with the subjects in wildly differing light from shot to shot, with no time for careful spot metering or contrast range gymnastics. I ended up with many shots that had OK highlights, but the shadows were too muddy to bring up without a lot of noise, even at ISO 200. And then there were times when the highlights blew despite my best efforts. The sunlit side of the white dog's face in the second of the two pictures above is blown beyond repair. I had to just let it go glare white in post-processing. Even so, the shadowed side of the golden dog is a bit muddy. I like the picture enough that I posted it anyway. >http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/MagParkDogs/P9161972-web.jpg.html I had the opposite problem in the first picture, the black dog. The foam around the dog is OK, but the shadow side of the black dog is down in the mud. I brought it up a little in processing, and I "dodged" the dark side of the face to bring out the eye and jaw. It makes an OK 5x7 print, but if I look closely, I can see speckly color noise on the dark side of the black dog. http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/MagParkDogs/P9161965-web2.jpg.html Here is a more extreme example (bad shot, I'm just showing for illustration). http://users.2alpha.com/~pklein/temp/P9161954-temp.jpg There's nothing I could have done about this, short of an assistant in the water with reflector, or a BIG fill flash. Get any texture on the black part of the doberman, even more of the wave would have been totally blown out. With those ugly yellow spotches on the edges that are characteristic of blown digital highlights. Get the wave within the brightness range, all there would have been would be a silhouette. One thing I could have done, which I didn't think of, was auto-bracketing. But I was trying to get the dogs at the exact right instant, and auto-bracketing spreads those instants out over time. Manual exposure might have helped. But I've never gotten very good at changing speed and f-stop quickly with a digital camera. With the old fashioned manual diaphragm rings, I can. So you can see why I found myself wishing for color neg film. It has a lot more latitude. I could just find a decent exposure for the shadows and midtones, shoot away and let the highlights take care of themselves. They could be easily burned in in post-processing, and it would have been a lot less work. Example: Consider this photo. It's a flatbed scan of a 4x6 minilab print from before I owned a film scanner: http://users.2alpha.com/~pklein/italy/avemaria.htm On the negative, I can actually see the colors of the stained glass window on the left. So if I ever rework this picture, I could get some detail in the window despite the sunlight glare (whether I want to is another matter). Color neg film can handle that level of contrast, so it certainly could handle the bright side of a white dog vs. the dark side of a black one. :-) --Peter