Wedding Photographers in Cornwall Blog

Posts Tagged ‘kodak’

In  film cameras, the amount of detail achievable depends largely  on the iso film speed rating of the film. This governs the films sensitivity to light – the higher the film iso number the greater the sensitivity to light and the darker the conditions you could shoot in. However, there’s a trade off between film speed and the grainyness of the image – high speed films capable of shooting in darker conditions at higher shutter speeds add a lot of grain to the image. In the digital world the grain has been replaced by digital noise and, just as with film, the higher the iso setting on the camera the more noise will be introduced. However, digital technology is getting better and better at reducing the iso to noise ratio and the modern Digital cameras are capable of shooting at almost unheard of speeds related to film.

So what’s all this got to do with wedding photography? Most of the wedding photography takes place in largely uncontrolled and frequently volatile lighting conditions. Lighting in many churches is rather subdued to say the least and vicars and priests are not terribly keen on their service being disrupted by flash photography. This means that film photographers rarely managed to get comprehensive coverage of the ceremony itself because they were required to either use very slow sutter speeds which resulted in camera shake, motion blur … or a combination of both, or to use a faster film they which means having to carry an extra camera preloaded with high speed  film or to use special processing to “push” the speed of the film up. Either way, once loaded, the speed of the film in the camera dictates what you can achieve with the camera. A camera set up to record the events in a dimly lit church might struggle severely once the wedding party moved outside into bright sunshine.

In digital photography things are different. They still use ISO speed settings to control the sensitivity of the sensor but, unlike film cameras, this sensitivity can be altered for every single shot. This means that the cameras can quickly respond to an enormous range of lighting and shooting situations without having to change film midway through a shoot. It’s perfectly possible to follow the bride and groom up through the dimly lit church straight out  into glorious sunshine with minimal effort.

Another big advantage of digital is that you get instant feedback so that you can see straight away if there are any problems with exposure levels or even with the camera itself. It used to be somewhat scarey in the days before digital when I’d be shooting off roll after roll just trusting that the camera was doing its job ok. The processing of the film was always a nervous time too – you’d hand your rolls over to the colour labs and just hope that they woudn’t have any technical problems. Problems did happen from time to time and there was little that could really be done to rescue the film successfully. With digital cameras cards can get corrupted from time to time but software is available that can rescue most information from the memory cards even after they’ve been reformatted.

Digital photography has changed the way photographers work. Developing and printing colour film was a specialist area so the end result hinged very much on the skill and judgement of the Colour Labs who processed you film. Any extra artistic were extremely difficult to implement. With digital technology the photographer has regained control of his images with Digital imaging software like Adobe’s Photoshop and lightroom. These are incredibly powerful  tools for retouching and enhancing the images and, in the right hands, can transform the photographs into stunning artworks. Skilled photoshop experts can remove blemishes, objects and even distracting buildings from the photograph . The program can even help to transform a size 12 into a size 8 figure, whiten teeth and smooth out wrinkles.. I’ve even been asked to put a thoroughly convincing smile back on someones face . This all has to be done in an expert way so that the transformations still look natural and with our vast experience in this area our customers, other than to be completely flattered by the result, find it impossible to spot exactly which images have been adjusted or what has been done to make them look so stunning.

In my opinion, digital has transformed the world of photography and given photographers  the ability to be truly creative. Along with digital imaging has come a new breed of product providers who have given our customers ani nicredible level and  choice of  services never before available on the high street. There will be those that see digital photography as the “anti-Christ” but, all in all, I think the digital revolution has set a new benchmark in quality which has now far surpassed what was available in the era of film.

Robb

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Just a very few years ago, the majority of professional photographers did all of their work on film but, over the past decade, there has been a move towards digital cameras. Is this a good move or does the quality of the final result suffer? It’s the  new versus old technology arguement and there are always going to be people who swear by film and will never entertain the tought of changing, but from my experience there is only one winner – and that’s digital, and at  Iconik-photography our photographers use exclusively digital single lens reflex cameras  (DSLRs) for our wedding photography.

So what’s the difference between film and digital cameras?

When photography first became popular,  the earliest cameras used glass plates coated in a light sensitive emulsion to capture the image. These were large and very fragile and required the photographer to process the plates in a series of chemicals to fix the image. The Euipment was cumbersome and the plates took a long time to expse so Wedding photography at this time usually consited of a few formal shots often in a studio.. not exactly spontaneous.

In 1884 George Eastman developed a dry gel on paper film which meant that photographers no longer needed to carry around the fragile glass plates and chemicals, and in 1888 Eatman released the first Kodak camera with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”. This opened up photography to a whole new group of people and 1901 saw the release of the legendary Kodak Box Brownie which introduced photography to the mass market. In 1925 Leica introduced the 35mm camera which beacme the standard format for photojournalists and this format remained the preferred format for the majoritry of camera and film manufacturers right up until recent years.

In a digital camera, instead of the light from the lens being focussed on photo sensitive film which then has to be  chemically developed, it is focussed onto a lightsensitive digital sensor. This information is then stored digitally onto a flash memory card as a file which can  be transferred easily and  directly onto a computer for viewing, adjusting and printing.

The first foray into digital photography came with the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD) in 1969, but it was quite a while before digital cameras became comercially available and even longer before they started appearing in the hands of the serious photographer. The first digitals were low resolution and compared unfavourably to the clarity and definition available on film. When enlarged digital photographs soon started to show pixelation (everything looked like it was made of lego!)  and the images lacked the quality achievable on film.  Digital technology has moved ahead in leaps and bounds over the past few years and it was Kodak again that developed the first real megapixel sensor. These days  even consumer level cameras are reaching resolutions of 15 mega pixels and over. The number of  mega pixels relates to the level of detail that a camera can achieve, so the higher the number the better the definition – 15 megapixels equals 15 million pixels… that a lot of detail. That might not seem signifigant but when it comes down to getting high quality images it is a major factor. It was when the big camera players like Canon and Nikon started to produce digital versions of their SLR cameras that things really started hotting up and, with the combination of high quality lenses and camera build with ever increasing levels of resolution, digital photography finally started to be taken seriously .