Was photographic film better

[Pinwheel]

I was just wondering was film Superior to CCD or DSLR astrophotography. No I'm not comparing speed or convenience of the new electronic digital medium, just the final product.

Example If I wanted a 24" x 20" colour wall print to frame, can digital do it equally compared to a print from a colour negative.

[cometcatcher]

Bog standard film, no it was pretty average. To make it worse they changed the emulsion sensitivity of Ha all the time. I'd find a good one and they would go and change it. Hypered film, especially the Ha sensitive ones like Kodak TP-2415 were very good. Right up there with DSLR's IMO. Fine grain, you could enlarge it quite a bit. But it was a monochrome film. I never found a colour film I was happy with that could match TP-2415. I have a couple of boxes (hundreds) of 10x8" prints from TP-2415. Fuji 800 was reasonable, for a while until they messed with it.

The drawbacks of film are many. Poor efficiency, reciprocity failure - the effect of losing speed the longer you expose, can't stack multiple exposures unless scanned and digitised, the wait of days to get it processed to see if the exposure even turned out. Because of that the learning curve was painfully slow. Exposures had to be long and mounts had to have perfect PA.

If you want I can scan a few.

[Pinwheel]

Scan a few I'd love to see the quality.:thumbsup:
Why I ask this is you don't see large prints anymore & I was wondering if it's due to a digital downfall.

[astro744]

Aah! Technical Pan 2415. Beautiful film! The ISO was variable depending on what developer you used. I remember HC-110 and D-19 gave vastly different contrast results. TP-2415 was great for landscapes and buildings but for deep sky astro-photography you had to hyper-sensitize it (not so for planetary or Luna).

You could enlarge a TP-2415 print to wall size and it would still be sharp!

I do not think any current digital imaging person would go back to film even if it was available since digital imaging is more about processing than capturing.

[raymo]

I loved 2415; generally around ISO 25. memories of long cold nights
manually guiding, and going home with a crick in the neck. My memory is failing, so I can't remember it's name, but in the late 80s Kodak came out
with an ultra sharp colour negative film. It only came as 25 or 1000 ISO, and was brilliant, although the colour was a little muted. If I remember rightly, 2415 was equivalent to approx. 30 Mp, so only high end DSLRs
could equal it. My 1100D at 12.2 Mp can't compare with 2415 as far as
blowing up to poster size is concerned.
raymo

[leon]

Ahhh, great memories came flooding back with the mention of TP 2415, I used to get it Hypered from a place near Sydney, the place has actually escaped me, :rolleyes: loved using it, and processing it.

I'm sure once i press the submit button on this post it will come back to me. LOL :shrug:

Leon :thumbsup:

[Merlin66]

The resolution of the current CCD's is up to 4 to 16 times better than the ol' film.
Even with 2415 you'd be lucky to get 20 micron resolution, compare that with a 5 micron pixel.....

[astro744]

K.M. Ryan was the name. Either you bought hypered film from there or you had the Lumicon hyper-sensitising kit and forming gas.

[Bassnut]

Ive tried to blow up astro images, its hard. I suspect you dont see many because the data has to be very, very clean and sharp indeed for close viewing that size, unless its tarted up for "art".

Film has so many disadvantages for astro its not even comparable anymore. Youd get far better results using digital images upscaled with fancy software to match high resolution film (in resolution only that is, if indeed film does have resolution higher than big CCDs or full frame DSLRs).

[cometcatcher]

Give me a little while, it will take some time to scan them.

[leon]

Yep that is right, it was KM Ryan, thanks for that.

Leon

[cometcatcher]

Yes, K.M. Ryan is where I got my pre-hypered film from. Used to get it express mail, then it went straight into the freezer for keeping until shooting night.

Um... my scanner is on the fritz and not playing ball. But here's a couple of wide fields with Fuji 800 from 11-09-1995. So little light pollution then...

A note on the back of the print says comet Hale-Bopp is in the pic centered on Sagittarius.

I'll do some more when I sort this scanner out. And there's a gap in the clouds so I'm outa here for a bit! Back later...

[noeyedeer]

they look so natural Kevin .. nice pics! I think with digital a lot of things get over processed. a friend at work over processes his landscape images and I keep telling him to use the camera to make the picture .. instead of taking a pic and post processing the guts out of it.

matt

[cometcatcher]

Thanks Matt, they could look better if I scanned the negs, but I only have a print scanner atm. What we got back from the photo lab was lotto whether the print would be any good or not. I had a dark room for the B+W stuff.

Eta Carina from Jan 1 1996, Fuji 1600. One with a 300mm F5 lens and the other with a 135mm F2.8 lens, 20 and 13.5 minutes. The tele's were usually piggyback on the main scope.

[raymo]

Matt is absolutely spot on, but I would go further. Most film imagers were
experienced observers who were trying to produce realistic images of their favourite objects. Things have changed; we still have some of those
people, [thank goodness], but we now have a seemingly quite large percentage of newbies that know little or nothing about the night sky, and just decide that they want to photograph it. They buy all the gear and proceed to produce images, and then process and sharpen them until
they look more like abstract art. As I said in another thread recently, there were four images of NGC 253 in a row in the beginner's
astrophotography forum, and they were all totally different colours.
By all means produce artistic images, but please post them on an art
forum. Sadly, it is self propagating, because some of those newbies get
some images under their belts, and then start telling new posters how
great their images are. I sincerely hope that I haven't offended too many people, but I just feel so strongly about this .It's so sad; you might as well go into the PS selective colours tab and adjust the colour sliders to
suit yourself. No doubt I'll have stirred up another hornets' nest. Makes
for interesting reading though.
raymo
[ I'm just an old man having a rant]

[raymo]

Lovely Kevin, Sadly, we were burgled just after moving house a few years ago, and all they took was a suitcase. Even more sadly, that case contained every one of our prints, slides, and negs. My mother in law died
young, and my wife has almost no recollection of what she looked like, and needless to say, the only photo of her was in that case.
raymo

[noeyedeer]

I'm by no means a photographer in any aspect .. but my eye can see what looks natural and what doesn't. your pics Kevin look awesome from film. the rosette looks(lol my bad) better then some of the pics I've seen on here. some are blown out .. some look fake etc. that looks spot on.

I'll agree with renato .. it happens with all aspects of photography .. not just astro. sadly

matt

[cometcatcher]

Ah jeez Ray that's awful. :( My pics are scattered everywhere. I don't even know where many of them are myself. Most of these colour ones are in one album. These are print size by the way.

M8 and M20 with a 6 inch F5 Newtonian, 20 minutes on Fuji 800. No coma corrector for it back then. I only got one last month! :eyepop:

Many of these film pics have a story and Comet Hyakutake has one too. See, it was my all time favourite comet. Taken in March 1996 through a 400mm F5.6 Tokina telephoto, Fuji 800 20 minutes exposure. As newbies might not be aware, back in the film days we tracked manually (I still do) with a guidescope or OAG. Comets move fast near close approach to Earth. Not a problem now, just take a bunch of 30 second subs and stack them. Not back then! If the comet had a bright enough nucleus we could place it in the cross hairs of the illuminated reticle eyepiece and very carefully track on it. That's what I did for this comet, with a home made crosshair glued onto an old binocular eyepiece, placed into a 68mm guidescope. I only recently bought a genuine motor drive for that mount. Back then I used a geared tape recorder motor varied in speed with a variable potentiometer, with the 6" scope precariously balancing on an old Tasco mount that came with an 80mm refractor. DEC corrections were done with a steady hand via a slow motion control! How did I ever get this pic? :question: It has only turned out to be my favourite comet pic of all time!

[noeyedeer]

awesome stuff .. sorry I mixed up eta carina earlier, should've read the post instead of looking at the pics lol.
I see why it's your favourite comet pic, it's a text book shot and excellent indeed going by how you captured it. the tail is mindblowingly detailed too.

matt

[Terry B]

I think the one thing that film still does better is star trail photos.
Stacking many exposures with digital images just doesn't give as smooth trails over many hours. I know there are smoothing techniques that can be used with digital images but I still like the film ones better.

[leon]

Raymo, I happen to agree with you, I, as you, and I'm sure others see it over and over again, heavily processed images which really start to look more like art work rather than a digital image, straight out of the camera.

I think I actually posted on this subject a couple of years ago, and if I recall it wasn't received that well, cant really remember.:shrug: to be honest.

Leon :thumbsup:

[cometcatcher]

Star trails were very nice with film.

Three images with a 4" F 5.6 achro refractor. Actually it was a "telephoto" lens but same thing. All taken on the 28th July 2000. Some of my last film pics before I went to video.

M7, 15 minutes on Fuji 800. Still in Scorpius IC4628 Prawn nebula, 20 minutes Fuji 800. NGC3532 10 minutes Fuji 800. For some reason film was more tolerant of achro refractors. I got a shock when I went digital with the amount of CA that digital shows with an achro.

[LightningNZ]

Nice photos guys. I used to use Fuji 1600 with very pleasing results, a little green maybe but rich colours anyway.

The Kodak Ektachrome 800 was a great film IIRC. I also took some shots with Konica 3200 b/w and pushed it 6400. Some shots were okay but I was never that thrilled with my black n whites, they looked lifeless.

One thing to remember with film was the no one ever stacked images, so what you took was what you got. Without hyper-sensitising, film sucked after the first minute of exposure, so collecting today's 4-hours worth of subs, let alone mega-data (multiple days worth of imaging), just didn't exist.

A lot of people these days have too much "processing" power at their fingertips and they push images too hard. Linearity goes out the door, or they do things like equalisation that has no darkroom equivalent. The light doesn't get any respect.

Of course there are some great photographers here who create some beautiful works too, which are decent representations of what is really out there - though everyone it seems wants to go deeper, and show more (myself included). We have the capability now, so where do we draw the line?

[raymo]

Ripper job Kevin. Great stuff.
I've just remembered the name of the 25 and 1000 ISO film that I mentioned earlier in the thread.
It was Ektar, absolutely razor sharp.
raymo

[doppler]

A bit of nostalgia for us old timers hey. Here are some scaned photo's of Comet Hyakutake 50mm f2.8 and 135mm f2.8 fugi 400 film, piggybacked on my 8" cave scope.

[cometcatcher]

The disadvantage of hypering colour film was a colour shift. Another trick we used to use was developing positive slide film as a negative. Only a couple of labs would do it as it needed a "dip and dunk" developing machine, otherwise it would mess up their chemicals. I used to develop slides and B+W negs in the darkroom. Colour negs were a bit too fussy for me temperature wise but I did print them.

[cometcatcher]

They're awesome Rick!

[doppler]

Thanks Kevin my favorite is the one with the shooting star (I missed it as I was looking through the guide scope, but I did notice the flash). I think the best film I used was hypered fuji 1600 transperency film. We used to get it posted from interstate, timed for friday delivery so we could go to our dark sky site 120 kms away for a weekend shoot.

[raymo]

Warms the cockles of my heart Rick. Splendid shots.
raymo

[Pinwheel]

Well I think my point is right, film was better, I don't know if any of you noticed how much depth appeared in those photos of Cometcatcher's. Depth of field I think it's called, you really can tell which stars are in the foreground & which stars are further back. I just don't see this in digital. Digital is flat depth wise.:question:

[cometcatcher]

It's an optical illusion. A bit like valves vrs transistors. ;)

Really, I found film hard going with the real faint fuzzies. It's okay for the bright stuff, but going deep was difficult to impossible compared to digital. I could never bring out much detail in IC2944, The Running Chicken nebula on film for example.

[Pinwheel]

Aw! Next you'll tell me Banana's are straight & coloured blue...:rofl:

[raymo]

Doug's on the money, optical illusion or not, the sense of depth
perception in the Prawn Nebula image in particular, is quite plain.
Stunning, in fact.
raymo

[Octane]

This is because of the sensitivity of the film. Faint stars remain faint while bright stars appear to bloat.

It's a bit difficult nowadays due to sensors being so sensitive. The effect can be emulated by taking shorter exposures for the stars and blending them in. Which some people do.

H

[cometcatcher]

It might also be an effect from the scanning process. Scanning a print has very bloated stars compared to scanning a negative.

This one of Hale-Bopp does look a bit 3D.

[MrB]

I recall reading a Kodak paper many many years ago describing an effect where non exposed silver halide grains adjacent to exposed grains were sensitive to those exposed grains and therefore partially exposed.
I guess with long exposures and very bright stars this 'bleed' could extend quite far.

Another very well documented effect is halation where scatter, refraction and internal reflections between the emulsion layer and various substrates will create a halo around point sources. Anti-halation layers reduced but did not totally eliminate the internal reflections. Scatter and refraction remained an issue.

It may make the stars look nice, but it is indeed an optical illusion.

http://chestofbooks.com/arts/photography/The-Fundamentals-Of-Photography/Chapter-XI-Halation.html

[LightningNZ]

You just don't get that "bleed" with digital sensors - especially CMOS. Also the linearity is near perfect across much of the brightness range while photographic film was far from linear. In a way, film gave a more "visual" likeness than modern sensors do. I guess it all depends on the effect you're after.
-Cam

[doppler]

I have purchased an adaptor to use some of my old 35mm film camera lenses on with my 1100d canon. The first pic was taken with a 50mm lens @ iso 400 at f2.8 on fugi chrome slide film and 5min exposure. The second pic is a stack of 4 x 30 sec exposures @ iso 800 at f2.8 with the same lens but on the 1100d.
Just waiting for the magellenic clouds to clear the trees and skglow to try the next comparison
Rick

[cometcatcher]

Both of those pics are reversed, but it's a good comparison. M7 for example stands out on film but is flat with digital.

There are times when I would like to replicate this effect with digital. I'm still working out the best way to do it. Anyone have any tips, other than a filter?

[gary]

Hi Doug,

Just wanted to take the opportunity to make a technical qualification if I may.

"Depth of field" in optics refers to the distance between the nearest and
furthest object that appears sharp around the point of focus.

The objects in this instance could more or less all be regarded to be optically
at infinity.

So the term "depth of field" in the lexicon of optics or photography
refers to something totally different.



Hi Kevin,

The 3D effect might simply be the chromostereopsis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis) illusion.

This illusion results in objects with different colours appearing to have
different depths.

Where it can be quite remarkable directly visually is if you ever get the
opportunity to look through a large aperture binocular Dob at an object
such as the Jewel Box. The different coloured stars plus the fact that
both the left and right eye receive light results in a dramatic and
visually pleasing illusion that you are seeing the Jewel Box in 3D.

Unfortunately this is not the case and it is simply the brain trying
to interpret the scene that way.

So perhaps you might have more success with using fields that have
objects with the types of contrasting colours that tend to bring
about the chromostereopsis illusion?

It is believed the illusion might in part be due to chromatic aberration
within the eye. But like the perception of colour, which in itself could
be thought of as an illusion, no doubt a lot of it takes place at the back
of the brain in the visual cortex and elsewhere.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis

It often comes as a surprise to some that how the human eye and brain
process colour is extremely different to the way film or digital cameras
work.