IMO, (don’t worry, I’ll get to a factual question in a moment) it is very annoying and terribly distracting to have all the loud clicks and flashes of light from cameras at graduations, weddings, news conferences and other public events.
I’ve been wating patiently several decades for the technology to improve that they’ll no longer need flash and that they’ll invent the quiet (if not noiseless) shutter. My hope has been spurred by the development of digital cameras.
And yet, even digital cameras need their flash and make their noisy clicks.
C’mon, we’re talking about a techology over half a century old and the only impressive improvement is that the flash bulb is now reusable (you see, kids, in the ol’ days, photographers used to use little light bulbs full of filaments that made a bright flash – and then burned out! Each bulb was one use only!).
So, why is it (and here’s my GQ) that we don’t have working flashless (and I mean for indoor use, of course) and quiet cameras? Why hasn’t film advanced in light sensitivity in 50 years? Why isn’t digital imaging improving in light sensivity every 18 months (a la Moore’s law)?
Or has it, and so called professional photographers are lazy bastards who won’t update their equipment?
Because fast films (ISO 800 and above) are grainy. There is no way around this. So, if you’re using ISO 200 or 400 in low-light conditions, you need a flash. A very fast lens, like an f1.8, will alleviate this a bit, but they are also extrememly expensive, especially for longer focal length telephoto or zoom lenses.
you could get a film to work in very low light, but thats all it would be useful for. So when you went outside into daylight it wouldnt work. Its not lazyness, its physics.
I don’t think the response time of LCs is fast enough for bright light conditions or motion-stopping. Considering shutter speeds of up to 1/8000th second are common on high-end cameras, i don’t think we’ll be seeing LC shutters.
[nitpick]The D in LCD stands for Display…since this isn’t a display, the D gets omitted.[/nitpick]
:wally
Look at the crowd at a big night event of any kind and watch all the pictures with “flash on” trying to improve on what they will get at long distances. Flash is only good for close up work. :smack:
To be fair, a number of P&S cameras have no way to disable the flash, and many users don’t know how to turn it off, or don’t think to do so when taking a spur-of-the-moment photo.
On many lower end camerias, using the flash will also lenghten shutter time. I remember reading the manual saying to turn on the flash for low light even if you are taking distance pictures for this very reason, also back to the old disposiable flashes, I recall the manual stating to save a old flash bar, and use it in the above situation, there will be no flash but the shutter will be open longer, as the cameria doesn’t know the flash won’t work.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Q.E.D. *
**Because fast films (ISO 800 and above) are grainy. **/QUOTE] OK, this is the “50 years behind” part I’m talking about. It was like this long, long ago. <cliche alert> We’ve put a man on the moon since then. They’ve haven’t fixed this yet? Is there anyone even wanting to fix this?
We’ve went from pinhole cameras to cameras the size of pinholes. Why can’t we have sensitive and non-grainy film?
It’s to do with the chemistry of the film. The photosensitive medium is grains of silver halide, usually silver iodide. Regardless of the size of the grain, only a few atoms of each crystal need to be sensitized by a photon in order to make that grain developable, for want of a better term. Being physically larger means a grain has a larger chance of having enough photons sensitized within a given time period to be developed, hence fast films are more grainy than slow films. Nearly two centuries of effort have failed to find a better chemistry than silver halides. The technology is as good as it’s going to get.
As far as digital, eventually it will at least equal film in quality.
A few magazine editorials have suggested that the Canon EOS-1Ds, with its 24 x 36 mm 11.1 megapixel CMOS imaging sensor, has met celluloid film resolution.
links:
Another minor nitpick. This is due more to mechanical limitions of cameras at the time, than film. High speed films weren’t practical because shutter speeds couldn’t be made fast enough not to overexpose the shots.
But, high speed films can also be used in extreme low light situations. Which is what most of us were after in years past when pushing film.
FTR, I’ve used 1600 speed film (pushed Tri-X) in my 50 year old Leica M3 with no problems at all. The mechanics of cameras aside, films have come a long way. Period.
Agreed. Especially since the first tintype process which took minutes to expose. And people have trouble getting their kids to sit still for a portrait now!
I made some copper film once (at film camp ), and built a pinhole camera to use it in.
8x10". Effective aperture something like f/256, effective film speed about ISO/ASA 6.
Bright-ish sunlight. (like 2 steps down from Sunny 16 Rule™)
Did exposures of 10 seconds to about 4 minutes.
I seem to remember that the minute exposure ended up best. (The math doesn’t work out for that, I know. I must have varied the developing somewhere down the line. This was 20 some odd years ago.)
Bottom line: Conventional photography has developed nicely in the past half century. With cameras like the EOS-1Ds already here (at $8999.00), imagine what digital will be like in 50 years!
), and built a pinhole camera to use it in.