A Question of grain

I received a comment on my last posting to which I did a rather lengthy reply. Following that my friend Sid, the same person who asked me the question, emailed me and said that I might like to post the response to the blog, which I'm doing now.

I spent some time looking for another image to accompany the blog posting but couldn't find anything really relevant at the moment and so the post will have to do without. There are enough examples in previous posts, particularly some of the infrared stuff, to illustrate the point I think.

I'm going to post the comment and response as they appeared. The names have not been changed because nobody's innocent.

 Sid Plested said...

How do you feel about the lack of grain per se in digital images? (I say "per se" because digital images can have noise and other phenomena which make the image less perfect, but I don't equate that with grain.)
- Sid

January 11, 2012 6:51 PM

 Cloin said...

The digital world, as I'm sure we both realize, is a different medium, at least in camera (there's a small joke in there). The process and the printed result are not the same.

Because it has something to do with images that are caught in a device we call 'a camera' we think even now that the whole photographic shooting match is the same as before but, again, it's not. It used to be both a mechanical and a chemical process before and In its infancy was even pre-electronic. It once had to do with silver nitrates and dye couplers and their reaction to light. Today much of technology is electronic and has a computer and a software component which has led the field into the vastly different realm. Inherently you play with the images in a different way.

Hey, and regarding them ole photographic days, didn't I hear that the great yellow box, Kodak, has filed for bankruptcy? How the once mighty have fallen.

So, digitally speaking, photography now has a pixelated rhythm of it's own and as such it has to be thought of differently and treated differently. Grain (unless introduced through a further digital process) is dead, for good or ill. In answer to your original question, I don't really spend much time lamenting that fact or even thinking about it, I just note it and move on. Well, mostly.

But there's another factor at work here too which both the article and your comment may have triggered; I used to love the darkroom magic, probably still do, and so I am a bit nostalgic about the whole process and thus more likely to spurt out comments like this. The training and the discipline certainly gave me a different perspective on many aspects of photography; including playing with the grain structure of film to produce a pleasing or meaningful result. (I was just going to say 'pleasing' in that last sentence but then I thought of some war reportage that I have seen where grain was integral to the impact of the image but it certainly wasn't pleasing in that sense.)

So digital noise isn't quite the same thing and yes I don't equate it with grain either, it's too, ah, noisy.

I might as well wheel out my soap crate here for a moment and make another comment. As in many other fields, the length of time that an image requires to be manifest from capture to print has shortened appreciably. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason why I sometimes feel that photography has been cheapened by the fact (hell, photography used to be a much more laborious process, particularly if you did a lot of it yourself. Now'a'days many of us take photographs using a damn phone).

Sorry, that's a topic for a different discussion (or rant if you will).

Okay, another analogy. It's like the change that happened to music after the invention of the CD; the music is still there but it has changed in some of its fundamental characteristics (which certain audiophiles lament). It has changed the way music is in our lives and even how it travels with people.

I wonder what the next wave of changes will produce in both fields.

I think you hit a tender spot there Sid.

Has my comment gotten longer than the original post?

Cloin

January 12, 2012 11:49 AM

Oddments

And welcome to the New Year.

I thought I would start off the year by finishing up or building on a few bits from the past postings, kind of like leftovers from the photographic fridge (and I really did keep film in the fridge way back when the great yellow box Kodak was king).

My last postings were mainly about aspects of photography; what I did on my vacation, where I like to shoot and what I like as subject material (which as I said can be a lot of things). Also I think of myself a funny guy (maybe I should say a guy with a sense of humor) and that sense can apply to things I see and photograph.

Here’s an example, I took a photograph of a beautiful old MG on the street. I really liked the car, the photograph turned out well too. But there was something more in the photograph that I don’t think many people see. If you look closely in the chrome you’ll begin to pick out lettering. Now this is backwards but if you look you’ll see TOYOTA. When I shot this I was, as I said, on the street and across from a Toyota dealership.

MG on Queen Street, Toronto, ON

I haven’t been as much into infrared photographs as I once was. Part of the issue with me is that I usually don’t carry around a tripod when I’m oot and aboot on hikes and the filter required to take ‘digital’ infrared photographs requires extremely long exposures, way beyond my capacity to hand hold the camera. I thought I’d include a couple infrared photographs here partly to hang up a couple images on the digital wall and partly just to revisit the images.

Schmendrick

One image I like very much (and a copy of it used to be in a bank in Barrie, ON of all places) is of a cat I had by the name of Schmendrick.

Ties and Weeds

The other infrared image I’m including here was taken in a vanished space, the old railroad yards in downtown Toronto. It’s just a bunch of ties and a weed growing up against it but because of the infrared effect it makes it almost magical to my mind and the gap in the ties becomes a window to a different reality.

Tree at the rim of the Grand Canyon

I’ve talked about my love of the black and white photograph in past postings and I’ve included a couple of images from the vault that I’ve always liked. The first is of a tree that was situated at the side of the Grand Canyon. I think this may have been the shot I was taking when I lost a lens cap over the edge.

Montezuma's Castle

Another area that fascinated me, like many other archeological sites, was the area called ‘Montezuma’s Castle’ (although as I recall the big ‘M’ never actually was there). I would have loved to be allowed to wander through the dwelling but never had the opportunity to do so. Here is an overall view of the site.

Canyon Country

Another image from the American west is basically a landscape portrait. This features another aspect of  the photograph that I liked to play with, grain. In many of the infrared photographs I’ve already included in the blog you can see how grain plays an integral part in the creation of mood. I used grain for much the same reason in more ‘normal’ black and white photographs as in this instance. I used particular developers when I developed the film in order to enhance the effect. Images don’t always have to be, well sharp or clear doesn’t exactly cover what I’m attempting to say, they can also be, hmmm, I guess I’ll just have to say textured. I hope that works.