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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Casting a shadow

Image
Dismal dark depressing dull damp disappointing December. Hmm. Lets remind ourselves of summer when there were shadows in pictures. Lets concentrate on where the light isn't: Sometimes its the shadows that define a picture. Here are some of hard light examples from the Mediterranean, and each one will have needed some exposure compensation. The first images hints at a sunny day. This one gives you the evidence: A clear blue sky glimpsed between shadows. This third image, also from the much rebuilt and restored fort at Paphos , allows us to see more of the building. A pleasing succession of arches and the reward is the sunshine at the end And finally one last shadow picture: One for Arthur C Clark: The Monolith in Newbury Kennet Centre car park. Its been there for 4.2 Billion years. No one knows what it does.
Read more

The white stuff

Image
Here's a high key picture.  This splendid bloom is presented against a white background to captivate and impress.  This is not a studio picture, I found the subject in a garden we visited. In fact the method I used was to photograph the flower from below and I used the grey sky as a backdrop.  Suitable application of exposure compensation pushes the entire image towards white and gives it the high key look.
Read more