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Photography Thread 2022

Two months to get through this roll of film, and there's nothing I really like on it; these are the best of a dull lot. I'm going through a stagnant period again. Also not happy with the quality of scans. I can pay about 6 quid and get usually decent but sometimes crap scanning, or closer to 12 and get consistently good; given how little I actually shoot, I suppose it's worth paying the extra.

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Two months to get through this roll of film, and there's nothing I really like on it; these are the best of a dull lot. I'm going through a stagnant period again. Also not happy with the quality of scans. I can pay about 6 quid and get usually decent but sometimes crap scanning, or closer to 12 and get consistently good; given how little I actually shoot, I suppose it's worth paying the extra.

View attachment 331331
I like the one of the ramp.

What's the difference between the £6 and £12 scans? 8bit JPG and 16bit TIF? Higher resolution?
 
Thanks. Both are jpeg, and they are similar resolution (2000x3000), but the cheaper ones sometimes look somehow rough (not grain, but a harsher tonality) - see the shadow areas below.

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Hard to tell without a direct comparison, but 3000px doesn't seem a very high resolution scan to me. I'd be expecting at least 4800px (3200dpi) and hoping for 6000px (4000dpi). Also saving as JPG means you're losing some of the tonal range. Most scanners work at between 10 and 14bits per channel, but JPG is only 8bits, which is why TIFs at 16bits per channel is preferred as it can save all of the scanner's range with a bit of headroom to spare.
 
Hard to tell without a direct comparison, but 3000px doesn't seem a very high resolution scan to me. I'd be expecting at least 4800px (3200dpi) and hoping for 6000px (4000dpi). Also saving as JPG means you're losing some of the tonal range. Most scanners work at between 10 and 14bits per channel, but JPG is only 8bits, which is why TIFs at 16bits per channel is preferred as it can save all of the scanner's range with a bit of headroom to spare.

Thanks Roy, I'll bear that in mind. Scans, I only use for instagram and flickr so I don't usually go for the largest, but I will try the larger next time. One place offers TIF, so I will also try that.
 
Do you know what sort of scanner they use...? 2000x3000 is typical of the sort of res you'd get from a flatbed scanner using a 135 adapter; "proper" film scanners tend to give much higher quality pictures - as Roy says, 3200-3500dpi is about the base and higher DPI appears on some (but I think much higher than that is beyond the revolving power of most film stock anyway, although grain detail is still a thing at higher DPIs).

Regardless of the bit depth of the finished image, the dynamic range of the scanner itself can be a big factor before you get to that stage - there's plenty of scanners (esp. of the flatbed kind) out there that might have a smaller dMax than the exposure you're putting through them, so of course you'll lose some detail regardless of whether you use an 8bit, 10bit or higher format. One (flatbed+adapter) scanner I used for some of my 35mm slides was unable to cope with a lot of my pictures (I seem to remember loads of my XP2 negs having a pretty colossal dynamic range - at least five or six stops) due to dynamic range limitations; I eventually spent a fair amount of money getting them scanned with a proper film scanner for archival purposes. If I still shot in film I'd weigh up whether it was worth buying a basic one myself - last time I looked there were several available for under £300.

Beautiful pic of the ramp at the railway station BTW. Oblique lighting like that is a godsend for B+W :)
 
Do you know what sort of scanner they use...? 2000x3000 is typical of the sort of res you'd get from a flatbed scanner using a 135 adapter; "proper" film scanners tend to give much higher quality pictures - as Roy says, 3200-3500dpi is about the base and higher DPI appears on some (but I think much higher than that is beyond the revolving power of most film stock anyway, although grain detail is still a thing at higher DPIs).

Regardless of the bit depth of the finished image, the dynamic range of the scanner itself can be a big factor before you get to that stage - there's plenty of scanners (esp. of the flatbed kind) out there that might have a smaller dMax than the exposure you're putting through them, so of course you'll lose some detail regardless of whether you use an 8bit, 10bit or higher format. One (flatbed+adapter) scanner I used for some of my 35mm slides was unable to cope with a lot of my pictures (I seem to remember loads of my XP2 negs having a pretty colossal dynamic range - at least five or six stops) due to dynamic range limitations; I eventually spent a fair amount of money getting them scanned with a proper film scanner for archival purposes. If I still shot in film I'd weigh up whether it was worth buying a basic one myself - last time I looked there were several available for under £300.

Beautiful pic of the ramp at the railway station BTW. Oblique lighting like that is a godsend for B+W :)

Thanks. No idea on the scanner, but you prompted me to check the properties of the jpegs; the better, more expensive place uses a Noritsu, but there is no data for the cheaper place.

Something I am tempted to do is digitising by photographing the negatives with a digital camera. JJC makes a fairly cheap kit for this, a copy of Nikon's kit. As I'm heading towards home developing again, this might be the future.
 
Brixton early morning walk - pics taken on my Huawei P30 pro

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Apparently this Phoenician ruin was the inspiration for Hendrix to write ‘Castles in the Sand’ - legend has it, he didn’t visit the Moroccan village of Diabat until 1969 when said song was written in 1967.

I so want it to be true that it was his inspiration.

“And so castles made of sand,
Fall in the sea, eventually.”591157D4-5DF2-4275-8587-7D716D0FBF61.jpeg
 
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