Clean and dirty

Here are two pictures from the old monochrome archives. They both come from my film era and the first dates from about 1980. This shows a Halifax back street in winter and I went to some trouble to preserve the grainy look of the original negative. 




Grain was always part of photography, and was a character building component in gritty black and white images of the 1960s.


The second picture comes from 1997, taken on XP2, a rather more modern film. In this case compressing the picture for the web has removed what little grain there was. One could argue the smooth picture of a storm damaged barn in the Cotswolds represents industrial decay while the grainy image of Halifax hints at a vibrant community, however the grain seems to say otherwise.




So grain and noise in a picture does affect how we see the image. The question is: In banishing it from modern digital images, have we made the world look more or less realistic? 


Answers on Quark please.

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