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

[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.