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This was the title of Brian Bower’s evening with the club on Tuesday 28th February. Members will have been fascinated to follow Brian’s gradual conversion to Digital over the years. Indeed it is always a difficult transition from a technique that one knows well and has mastered over the years to an alternative system in which one is a novice. But, as many of our club members have realised, the sooner one makes the transition the sooner one can master the new system.. But why bother to make the transition at all? All these points were made by Brian during his presentation. He began with prints and noted that the results from the latest ink-jet printers were becoming indistinguishable from those produced in the dark room, now that eight inks were being used by some printers. Also his film scanner allowed a realistic transfer of the film image to digital form.. His Panasonic Lumix 5 MegaPixel camera allowed him to produce superb A3 prints, such that he saw no need to greatly increase the pixel count of the digital camera though this pixel count did not come near to that he could get from scanning film negatives with his film scanner. Above 6 Mpixels other considerations became important such as lens quality and Noise (which, though different, is often equated to Grain effects of film.).

Brian confessed to not being au fait with the technicalities of the Histogram and Curves but made constant use of bracketting to ensure that his highlights were not burned out. A quick check using the screen can indicate which of the images can be immediately deleted. As a devotee of slide film he stuck to one or two films and got to know them well. Likewise when printing digital images he restricted himself to a couple of papers whose performance he could rely on.

It seems we get fussy about small things when we know we can change them, but, Brian noted, we were happy to accept, for example, the well saturated Velvia Green, knowing that that was the way the film was and there was nothing the photographer could do about it. The digital process allowed so many new adjustments to be made that folk were in danger of forgetting that one should expect to get the exposure and composition right at the taking stage. The ability to change the effective sensor speed over the typical range 50 to 1600 ISO was a great boon. His slight worry with the new digital revolution was that photographers could overwhelm themselves with images and subsequently erase most of them, some of which, in the decades to come, they may wish they had kept. And if they stored them on CD would they still be able to read them then?

After the interval we were treated to a slide show of his visit to Chile, that long thin country with a surprisingly high standard of living and great scenery.

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		This was the title of Brian Bower’s evening with the club on Tuesday 28th February. Members will have been fascinated to follow Brian’s gradual conversion to Digital over the years. Indeed it is always a difficult transition from a technique that one knows well and has mastered over the years to an alternative system in which one is a novice. But, as many of our club members have realised, the sooner one makes the transition the sooner one can master the new system.. But why bother to make the transition at all? All these points were made by Brian during his presentation. He began with prints and noted that the results from the latest ink-jet printers were becoming indistinguishable from those produced in the dark room, now that eight inks were being used by some printers. Also his film scanner allowed a realistic transfer of the film image to digital form.. His Panasonic Lumix 5 MegaPixel camera allowed him to produce superb A3 prints, such that he saw no need to greatly increase the pixel count of the digital camera though this pixel count did not come near to that he could get from scanning film negatives with his film scanner. Above 6 Mpixels other considerations became important such as lens quality and Noise (which, though different, is often equated to Grain effects of film.). Brian confessed to not being au fait with the technicalities of the Histogram and Curves but made constant use of bracketting to ensure that his highlights were not burned out. A quick check using the screen can indicate which of the images can be immediately deleted. As a devotee of slide film he stuck to one or two films and got to know them well. Likewise when printing digital images he restricted himself to a couple of papers whose performance he could rely on. It seems we get fussy about small things when we know we can change them, but, Brian noted, we were happy to accept, for example, the well saturated Velvia Green, knowing that that was the way the film was and there was nothing the photographer could do about it. The digital process allowed so many new adjustments to be made that folk were in danger of forgetting that one should expect to get the exposure and composition right at the taking stage. The ability to change the effective sensor speed over the typical range 50 to 1600 ISO was a great boon. His slight worry with the new digital revolution was that photographers could overwhelm themselves with images and subsequently erase most of them, some of which, in the decades to come, they may wish they had kept. And if they stored them on CD would they still be able to read them then? After the interval we were treated to a slide show of his visit to Chile, that long thin country with a surprisingly high standard of living and great scenery. Bill Chadband
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