LF quality survives TV transmission

[david_carlisle1]

While watching a documentary yesterday about a Tasmanian LF photographer I was struck once again by the fact

that the quality of his photographs, the look that only large format negatives can give, survives the TV transmission

process with its limited resolution.

 

Any suggestions as to what's going on?

[michael_gilday]

Not too surprising; he, presumably, provided high-quality originals to the documentary crew, who had both the skill and equipment to showcase them to their full potential.

 

I've had photos on television several times; never LF, but a lot of 35mm, and a number of MF images - all of which were provided to the station(s) as high-resolution film scans. Most of the time, they looked pretty darn good, but that's not too hard to achieve: even full-screen HDTV is only something like 1000dpi from 35mm, or ~300dpi from 6x7. It really depends on the skill of the people producing the footage, though; I've had a few photos used on really short notice (once as little as 90 minutes ahead of airtime) for "breaking news" kinds of things, and when the production is rushed, it shows. (Having a beautiful long nighttime exposure on slow slide film of a local landmark in the news: A couple bucks. Having production staff make your beautiful image look like a posterized lith print: priceless.) A friend had some images used on local television, and they <shudder> shot some mounted prints with a television camera; the results were about as bad as you'd expect. On the other hand, one station I worked with had about two weeks' lead time on a feature, and were able to get everything of mine looking wonderful, and I certainly can't complain about the quality of the photo or two of mine that are in a documentary released last year.

 

I have no doubt the guy's photos (do you have a name? link?) are amazing, but I'm equally convinced that a large part of what you saw was due to competent production from the documentary producers and technicians.

[Ed_Ingold]

At 480x720 pixels (0.3 MP), could you honestly tell the difference between pictures from an 8x10 view vs. a camera phone? Some people will believe anything they hear.

[tim parkin]

Perfect optics, wondrous colour and a well balanced mix of light and location can give the impression of intense clarity even at low resolutions..