Compare and contrast ...

[ellarien]

I've been looking at and printing photos this evening -- my own, and my father's. Here are a couple of side-by-side comparisons of similar shots taken with different cameras.

	Mam Tor from Lose Hill, September 1978 Scanned from a slide taken by my father; lightly photoshopped for dust and contrast.
	Mam Tor from Lose Hill, August 2007 Taken with a Sony Cybershot P-73, unaltered.

Things have changed along the Mam Tor ridge in thirty years; the road fell off the mountain for the last time in 1979, and Back Tor, (the bump on the right) lost two of its last three summit trees but gained a whole little wood lower down. (Also, the path along the ridge is paved for most of its length now, after becoming nearly impassable due to the erosion of so many walkers, but that's not so obvious in these shots.) Even with the film grain, I think I can tell when I look closely that my father's prized SLR (a solid 1960's Praktica with no electronics whatsoever, which is probably why it still works today) took slightly sharper pictures than my little Sony, at least for landscapes. I uploaded the full-resolution versions, so if you're really interested in the pixel-level detail and have bandwidth to burn you can click through a couple of times and judge for yourself.

	Barrel Cactus Flower 28/08/08, with the Sony
	Barrel Cactus Flower 29/07/08, with the Canon Cybershot S5 IS

Yesterday the light was a bit hazy and I had the Sony; today was crystal clear and I had the Canon. It's hard to tell how much of the difference is light and how much is the Canon's better lens and more pixels, but there is a difference. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the Canon; it's a two-handed job to use and a noticeable lump to carry about, so I don't bother with it every day and I haven't taken it anywhere yet. It would have been an embarrassment in rainy Sheffield these last weeks, anyway.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Interesting to compare the landscape shots!

[ellarien]

My mother and I have been finding it fascinating. Compared to the urban landscape, the Peak District has hardly changed at all, but things do change in thirty, forty, fifty years, even in a National Park. Woods appear and disappear; a main road becomes a byway; the trains go from black things trailing plumes of steam to candy-bright two-car diesel units. The oldest shots we have of Back Tor are from the early 60s, when it still had a slightly ragged mane of pines all the way up.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to compare the Mam Tor pictures. I have hundreds of slides to scan and many are scenic views of North Wales. They haven't changed much if at all either. I really wish I'd taken more around my old home in Manchester because that is completely unrecognisable now.

Just as a matter of interest, what type of scanner do you have? I'm still not sure whether to persevere with the 80-quid one I have or whether to invest in one of the better Nikon CoolScans. Some photos of mine have scanned well, but the ones with large dark areas are very disappointing.

[ellarien]

It's a Plustek 7200, mostly because that was what was immediately available on Amazon when I wanted it; it was about 125 quid, I think. As the name implies, it has 7200 dpi resolution, which seems to be plenty for our purposes, but it isn't very fast at high resolution. Allowing for the time it takes to boot my mother's computer, loading and unloading the holder, previewing and fiddling and occasionally swapping reminiscences with my mother, I was averaging 3-4 minutes a shot. It didn't do well with the badly underexposed slides, but it's been so long since I saw those projected that I don't know if there was any detail there to be salvaged.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. I think the cheapest Nikon Coolscan is around 300 quid, so I don't want to plunge and then find it doesn't do any better on the dark slides. :(

Unfortunately, I did have a slight tendency to underexpose when I used slide film because otherwise you lost the detail in the light areas (eg sky) and when projected, the strong light showed the dark areas OK. By holding the slide up to the light and looking through a magnifying glass, I can see the detail is there, but it just comes out reddish black in the scan.

But as I say, some come out beautifully. (See icon)

[ellarien]

The ones I had real trouble with were the ones my mother took of my PhD graduation -- a cloudy mid-December day in Birmingham -- and some indoor baby shots, and to a lesser extent some very dark ones of Kinder. The subsided Mam Tor road, though, has plenty of texture even though it's mostly black.

Mam Tor road, 1979	Back Tor, 1963

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Your scanner is definitely making a better job of the dark areas than mine is. I must give this matter some thought...

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

If you could find a computer shop, you might simply take a slide and try out several. This is one area where mail order falls down.