Steve Spencer wrote: gdanmitchell wrote: Steve Spencer wrote:
I just think it is unbalanced to say that it is better than even larger format film in every way.
Which is probably why no one actually said that.
Ok, let me be more specific. I think it is unbalanced to assume that large format film will show lots of grain under high resolution and that digital will do better with signal to noise ratio. I think that is still one of the advantages of large format film and Rob's statement (and his previous statements) do not seem to take this advantage seriously.
Clearly 8 x 10 LF will have very small grain.
Getting back to the "could you go back to film?" question, it seems that it could almost be more of a "could you go back to LF" question in that regard. 8 x 10 LF has its place, but it is a pretty darned small one these days. I'm glad someone still does it (again including a couple folks I know personally) but it is a pretty unusual thing and, in a whole lot of ways, probably not easy to compare directly to digital in any format. For example, one person I know may make only a small handful of exposures — sometimes not even one per day — when working with 8 x 10. Bless his heart for doing this, but such a thing isn't going to work for most folks, even most folks who are really, really good photographers.
But, yes, if you are looking for very low visibility grain in film work, 8 x 10 will get you there.
Film grain is an interesting thing. It has been suggested that one reason we "got away with" enlarging some 35mm film images way beyond what we would consider sharp enough today is because the sharpness of the "grain" somehow subjectively "read" as a sharp enlargement of an image that wasn't objectively sharp. For example, there are older photographs made with media such as tri-x that have have (what today we regard to be) huge grain when printed at sizes we don't worry about at all with digital.
By the way, that wasn't meant to counter the point about the low visibility of noise in 8 x 10 film... just another point about how different media do not necessarily work the same way. (As I wrote that I thought about the Galen Rowell prints I've seen at fairly large sizes. Initially I wasn't fond of them due to the significant visibility of the grain and their overall softness by comparison to what we expect today from digital images from similar-sized camera formats.)
Dan
Dec 25, 2016 at 05:18 PM
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