D850 vs 8x10 film

[Andrew Garrard]

Ed speaking of images lost, I wonder how many folks in the early 2000's stored images on floppy discs? I wonder how many of those have been lost or have no means to be viewed for the owners?

 

I'm unsure how much of the stuff I archived onto CD in the 1990s is still readable; I've certainly got a lot of stuff on floppy disks still, but no idea whether they're still readable. Currently I'm concerned that I may not have backed up some images from a very elderly laptop that I own, so I'm going to have to rearrange furniture until I find the laptop and then pray that it fires up successfully.

 

Normally I try to buy a backup disk that's at least twice the size of what I've been using so far, and just transfer everything across to the new storage. This may or may not continue to be viable. It would do me a lot of good to get better at throwing out the obvious discard shots among my photos - I rarely go through and prune, so a significant proportion are blurry or incorrectly exposed, or just of my feet when I accidentally pressed the shutter release, and are never going to get used.

[Dieter Schaefer]

stored images on floppy discs

None for me. None on ZIP discs either (still have one drive and a few discs, but it has been a while since I tried to read those - anything that's on them should be backed up elsewhere anyway). Nothing on CD or DVD either - I just don't trust them since I have a few instances where a CD or DVD burned on one computer wasn't readable in another.

 

In order to maintain digital archives, it is necessary to update the storage method in a timely fashion.

I agree that is key. I just looked at 6 (of initially 8) hard drives that I have taken out of rotation quite some time ago - I am now wondering how many of them still work (stuff on them is backed up on newer ones though).

 

This may or may not continue to be viable. It would do me a lot of good to get better at throwing out the obvious discard shots among my photos - I rarely go through and prune

My problem too (although I am getting better at cleaning newly shot stuff out) - I have a huge backlog of images to go through and clean out - never seem to be able to work on those consistently and hence a lot of backup space is wasted. One issue with that sort of very belated clean-up is that it takes time and effort to propagate it through onto the more recent drives - there's no point cleaning up an old drive and then have it fail before the clean-up could be propagated through to the newer backups.

 

Aside from images (where I am fairly certain I have not lost any significant number), I am sure I have other stuff that I may no longer have access too (and most of it I luckily wouldn't need to anyway).

[Andrew Garrard]

Usually I agree, Dieter. My current cause for concern is that I was looking for more images of my recently-departed cat, some of which were taken on my original digital camera (Agfa ePhoto1680 - somewhere between the serial port interface and the SmartMedia card I'm not inclined to use it much these days) and transferred to the windows partition of a laptop that I normally used in Linux. I've got the Linux side backed up, but I'm struggling with any photos from before I started using a DSLR, in early 2004. The longer I leave the investigations the more trouble I'll have getting at them, though - already I was struggling to get data off a "backup" disk which seemed to be failing.

 

I must get more backups. "Jesus saves" as the story goes.

[ben_hutcherson]

Interestingly enough, a co-worker has given me two compact Macintoshes. Each had quite a rare and unusual external drive-the Apple HD20-which connects to the floppy port. These drives are notoriously unreliable, but both still work.

 

She has some items on them that are truly priceless-including things that her daughters wrote when they were young, and letters from her husband(who is here in body but not in mind as he's in the late stages of Alzheimers).

 

Most were written in a Macintosh specific work processor called Nisus. I have a current version of Nisus, but the "old" files are unreadable by the current one.

 

Fortunately, aside from printing(which I've already done and have given to her) there are a couple of non-destructive ways to get those files, but unless you have access to an older Macintosh running OS 9 or earlier and EITHER with a serial port or built-in floppy drive(or both) you may be up a creek.

 

The easy way is to the computers to a newer Mac running OS 9 or earlier via a serial port, bring the files in over Local Talk, and then work with them. Provided that up to this point you've kept all volumes in a Macintosh compatible format, you have a couple of options. Ideally, you'd track down and install Nisus on the newer computer(it will run) and then can open and resave them as a more friendly modern format(I'd have to check what options are available). Barring that, though, provided that you've stayed on Macintosh formatted volumes, you still have the files in what's known as a "resource fork" and "data fork" format. For a Nisus file, the text is in the data fork and can be opened as an ASCII document with most any program. The resource fork contains the formatting.

 

In any case, that's going what I'd call the easy way with Apple Talk/Local Talk.

 

The floppy("sneaker disk") method is actually a bit more complicated. You first have to FIND blank disks or disks that can be erased, and hope that the drives work(I can fix them most of the time, but for someone just trying to get the files off it can be a nightmare). These computers have 800K "low density" disk drives. A 720K PC disk will generally format with zero issues to a Macintosh 800K disk, but the much more common 1.44mb disks are a different matter. "Virgin" 1.44s are usually okay, but formatted ones are VERY iffy and even if they format to low density often have a short "shelf life." Once you've written files to an 800K disk, reading them is another matter. The ability to fit 400K/800K(as opposed to the 360K/720K of PCs) on a disk was one of Steve Wozniaks brilliant implementations. The "logic" to do so, however, is in a special controller called the "IWM"(integrated Woz machine) or "swim" in later computers. You CAN NOT read a Mac 400K or 800K disk in a USB floppy drive-you must use a Mac with an internal(or at least controlled by the logic board) floppy drive.

 

There is a third, more obscure alternative that is more PC friendly and that is to connect the hard drive to a Mac that has 1.44mb HDDs and an external floppy port. You can then put them on easier to read 1.44s. Offhand, only the SE FDHD and SE/30 come to mind.

[ilkka_nissila]

Kodachrome had better longevity in dark storage but Ektachrome in projection.

[bob_bill]

Ilkka, got an interesting comment on my "Kodachrome yellow" t shirt from Dwaynes Photo indicating they made history 12/20/10 when they developed the last roll of Kodachrome. I was told it was a roll from Steve McCurry. Now need to get a couple of rolls of MF film off to them for development.

[m_allegretta]

Color Film 8x10 will capture more colors than the D850, and a view camera gives you movements, which translates to technically superior images. The D850 is compact, faster, lighter, and less fragile than 8x10, you can toss it around without a care in the world, without critically damaging something fragile like a bellows. So, buy the D850 and get something closer to a 6x7 film camera.

[kevin_beretta]

Ah .. we went from cameras and resolution to storage. As long as your stuff is in 0's and 1's, there are a host of good options these days. Multi offsite mirroring and a local NAS provide all the backup you need... and these days it's dirt cheap too ($10/month for limitless offsite storage).

[rodeo_joe1]

"Color Film 8x10 will capture more colors than the D850"

 

- Evidence for that assertion please?

 

Looking at 2 dimensional colour space diagrams (of dubious authorship) may show better green saturation than the sRGB or Adobe RGB spaces, however, those deep greens are only obtainable at high dye densities on the film - i.e. very dark areas. Colour reversal film is incapable of highly saturated and bright greens; due to the requirement of mixing cyan and yellow dyes with very little white-light contamination. Likewise with saturated blues and reds.

 

Beside which, there are almost no viewing systems - screen or print - capable of showing those dark and saturated colours.

 

Large format film wins out on detail resolution, but that's the only parameter where it betters digital capture - and it may not even excel there for much longer.

 

"There is a third, more obscure alternative that is more PC friendly and that is to connect the hard drive to a Mac that has1.44mb HDDs and an external floppy port. You can then put......"

 

- Why the **** would you ever do that?!

Why not just copy the disk content to a contemporary medium?

Edited February 28, 2018 by rodeo_joe|1

[Ed_Ingold]

Color Film 8x10 will capture more colors than the D850, and a view camera gives you movements, which translates to technically superior images.

I have been largely unsuccessful matching film colors with a digital camera for an original capture. Film is often redder, greener, brighter than digital. There is one oddity though. If you copy reversal film with a digital camera, paying due diligence to white balance of the light source, exposure and focusing, the results are nearly indistinguishable from the original. It's not that digital capture can't duplicate that of film, rather the designers choose not to, in favor of objectivity.

 

As extracted from film data sheets, color reversal film has only a 6 stop dynamic range of capture, but has high contrast in the results, from nearly opaque in the darkest areas to nearly transparent in specular highlights. Color negative film has a much wider dynamic range of capture, but lower contrast in the resulting image.

 

A view camera is obviously superior with regard to movements and the Scheimpflug Effect. However it is easy to restore parallelism in digital post processing. The Scheimpflug Effect can be obtained using a tilt-shift lens on the D850, or you can use focus-stacking on static subjects.

[ben_hutcherson]

"There is a third, more obscure alternative that is more PC friendly and that is to connect the hard drive to a Mac that has1.44mb HDDs and an external floppy port. You can then put......"

 

I was rambling, but you didn't bother to read my post. There's no way to directly "Why not just copy the disk content to a contemporary medium " in this situation. The fully context-if you'd bothered to read that post-was to use the 1.44s as a bridge medium to get the files onto something more modern(CD/DVD, flash drive, hard drive, cloud, etc). I know you love to blow your top about stuff like this, but sometimes it's a good idea to actually know what the heck you're talking about in the first place before doing that. In this case, you don't.

[BeBu Lamar]

I am late to the digital so I never use floppy for images but had 5.25" disks and drive up to 5 years ago and I still have 3.5" drive and disks today.

[Bill C]

I have been largely unsuccessful matching film colors with a digital camera for an original capture. Film is often redder, greener, brighter than digital.

 

There is so much variation in film types, shooting conditions, processing quality, printing (or scanning), etc., that I don't think this means too much.

 

I spent a lot of years making a living in a business that used professional portrait/wedding color neg films optically printed on the appropriate pro papers. We had well controlled systems from the studio lighting all through print production.

 

Something that often surprised visitors in the lab was how well test photos matched original colors (when we tested new films and papers, we included, with the human subjects, various colored clothing and other fabrics). We could lay the actual fabrics in a color booth on top of the prints, and visually they almost always were very close. Now, I'm sure the matches wouldn't hold up under all light sources, but in our specially lit booths they did.

 

We could get the same quality of matches with digital, but again, we used well controlled systems. If you don't have well controlled setup parameters and production systems, including good ICC profiles in today's workflows, it's not gonna happen.

 

Film is often redder, greener, brighter than digital.

 

This may be true; in fact, I'd probably expect it if you compared amateur film work vs professional digital work. But it would probably switch if the film work was pro and the digital work was amateur.

[mike_halliwell]

I'd guess a truely monochrome D850, ie BAYER removed, AA removed and internal software told to not invent colours etc would be quite comparable, res wise, to 5 x 4 atleast. Each pixel can be one of many thousands of distinct tones. How film determins details as tones is a bit more variable..... but ISO 3 dryplates seem a bit limiting

 

Were Howard Carter's plates orthochromatic? Guess that would help with a badly colour corrected lens! If the plate can't record it, it cant be OOF in another plain.

 

Monochromatic photography is the best way to go res wise.... There's just no colour info!!

[ben_hutcherson]

Were Howard Carter's plates orthochromatic? Guess that would help with a badly colour corrected lens! If the plate can't record it, it cant be OOF in another plain.

 

I've had many conversations with aspiring LF and even MF photographers about older lenses. Sometime in the 1930s, color corrected lenses became common, although sometimes you need to dig a bit into the names to figure out what is and what isn't. Fortunately, by the 1950s, color corrected lenses were the norm.

 

I would say that many LF photographers only shoot B&W....cost and emulsion availability drive that. I do both, but certainly shoot a lot more B&W and am VERY selective in my use of color.

 

The fun conversation to have, though, is why a color corrected lens is important even for B&W. Unless you specifically look for it, modern films are panachromatic. About your only readily available exceptions are Acros, which is on its way out in sheet film, and is considered "orthopanochromatic" due to its reduced red sensitivity and Ilford ortho litho film. Iford does publish information on "taming" its litho film to continuous tone, although it's still a bit higher contrast than most. The plates I use have a spectral sensitivity similar to paper, but I'd consider them a specialty item.

 

In any case, using a non-color-corrected lens with panochromatic film is a sure recipe for loss in sharpness.

[Andrew Garrard]

In any case, using a non-color-corrected lens with panochromatic film is a sure recipe for loss in sharpness.

 

Not that my lenses aren't reasonably corrected (with a life -long hatred of LoCA still only partially mitigated), but on the admittedly rare occasions I've shot monochrome film, I've often been doing it through a colour filter. Which you'd think would help with any dispersion-related issues in the glass.

 

The A7RIII has sensor shift that has nearly the D850's resolution but with RGB at each site over multiple shots. Not always useful, but I'm mildly envious. Both Leica and at least one medium format back manufacturer have a monochrome option. Long enough back, Kodak made a monochrome F-mount DSLR (well, for a slightly DIY definition of "made"). I'm not giving up colour, but I still vaguely like the idea.

[ben_hutcherson]

but on the admittedly rare occasions I've shot monochrome film, I've often been doing it through a colour filter.

 

It would depend on the filter you're using.

 

Here's a chart from Hoya with the transmission of various common filters used for B&W.

 

HOYA | The Difference is Clear

 

If you use the ubiquitous medium yellow(Y2) the spectral cut-off is between 450 and 500nm. You're essentially only cutting off blue, which means that the lens still needs to focus green and red in the same plane.

 

Go all the way down to deep red and you do only need to worry about red(at least with a good quality filter-cheapies sometimes have "notches" of transmission at shorter wavelengths). I don't use red all that often, though, as it's a bit over the top for many situations. As long as I can get some definition in the sky, for example, upping the contrast 1/2 or 1 grade when printing can often darken it more if that's the effect I'm looking for. Or, in a really extreme case, I can always burn the sky a bit.

 

In general, with digital I'd rather start in color and then use the channel mixture or a tool like Silver Efex to select the filter after the fact.

[Andrew Garrard]

Yes - while I'm aware of the limitations of the three (usually) standard colour filters on a sensor (well, I say standard, I'm fairly sure there's variation at least between manufacturers and likely between bodies), I usually live with them. I blame them for what's happened to bluebells when I've tried to shoot them digitally compared with Velvia. Most colours are rendered fine, although I've seen spectacular differences in near-saturated blues under other circumstances (I'll try to dig out an example).

 

Theoretically I could use a narrow band filter, but to be honest I never bother - the only non-protective filters I use on digital are a polariser, an ND, LPR filters for astronomy, or IR pass filters (not that my camera is converted, so they're fighting the integrated ir blocker).

[Andrew Garrard]

A quick example of the limitations of colour filters, since I was referring to it. A better example would be comparing some of my bluebell captures with Velvia and the DSLRs, but this one stood out at me and I had it to hand.

 

This is a shot of a lamp outside the Drake Hotel in Chicago (without the shadows boosted as much as I would have done if I weren't trying to make a point). On the left, the out-of-camera JPEG. On the right, DxO's version from the raw file as default (except with "smart lighting" turned off). The white balance is not far off - DxO was set to "as shot" - but clearly the renderers have done very different things to the light globe (whose colour, to my memory, seemed about half way between these). This isn't directly the fault of filters or spectral response, but if the actual spectrum of the light were being captured accurately (admittedly, near the point of saturation), there would be no ambiguity on what this lamp should look like. This was a D810, btw.

 

[JDMvW]

As an addendum, The marvelous and essential work on many issues of spectrum, color, etc. is

 

Margaret Livingstone 2014 Vision and Art.

 

 

Look especially at the section on non-spectral colors which lies at the root of the long recognized purple/violet problem.

 

On-line, there is a discussion at " Purple, the fake color "

[mike_halliwell]

If anyone pops over to UVphotography.com you'll find some interesting info about the cutoff wavelengths Nikon use in there sensor filter stack. Even though the bare sensor happily records down to ~340nm, the filter cutoff is around 400, so you cannot really record violet. The old D40 had a much 'happier' cutoff around 380nm and is a fav. for UV (and bluebell!) shooters.

I have a couple of modded DSLRs that i shall be shooting flower inc. Bluebells this Spring. They have no filter stack atall. I shoot RAW with a Colorchecker Passport.

[rick_jack1]

A few pros that I know switched from 8x10 film to digital MF simply because acquiring film, processing, scanning, and handling time no longer made sense. Comparing a D850 to 8x10 film does not make sense. Each is a tool that has it's limits. I shot film professionally years ago, I would not go back.