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
- Sid
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
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
