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.
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.
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.
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
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, 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
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.....
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, 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
Leon
K.M. Ryan was the name. Either you bought hypered film from there or you had the Lumicon hyper-sensitising kit and forming gas.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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]
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
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
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!
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? It has only turned out to be my favourite comet pic of all time!
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.
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.
loved using it, and processing it.
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.
It has only turned out to be my favourite comet pic of all time!
