![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pathology_docI have quite a few leisure interests, and one of them is photography. Because I have small children whose growth I want to record and because I do quite a lot of photography in my day to day work (especially when I have a lot of coronial autopsies), the camera has recently been getting quite a workout.
Back in the days of film, I started out with the usual addiction to Kodacolor Gold 100. It was cheap, available, and you usually got a "free" roll built into the cost of your photo processing. That was until I pushed my mother's little instamatic way, way beyond the level of what it was really meant to handle and got quite a few underexposed shots.
And so I discovered high ASA. 200, then 400 (which I stayed with), and rare forays into 1600 whenever I could get my hands on some. As time went by, I got myself a good SLR camera (a Minolta Dynax 3xi), and then (oddly enough) I went back to a semi-manual Pentax (P30T, I think), with which I had a hell of a lot of fun. And because I had a way wide open (f1.7) lens for it, my hunger for higher and higher ASA film ratings went away quite a bit.
Cut forward quite a few years and (after many twists and turns) I became the proud owner of a Pentax *ist-DL digital SLR. Cool beast, only 6MP, but it accepts the older lenses (and even gives me in-focus indications, though I have to do the actual focusing myself) and does everything I need it to do. The only thing, of course, is that it has a 3200 ASA equivalent setting for the sensor, and so the old disease took over - mostly because the lens it came with was no faster than f4 or thereabouts, and because a later lens (a do-everything 18-250mm) is a horrid f6.3 at full zoom and those high shutter-speeds are really important to prevent blurring.
Just the other day, I pointed it (fitted with a 40mm f2.8) out the window and took several shots at the various ASA settings, then expanded them to see what the "grain" was like. First, here is the 200 ASA shot (taken through flyscreen, unfortunately, which is why you will almost certainly see a "gridded" effect in the sky).
Now here is the same shot, cropped down to focus on a wheel of that nearest, dark car, which we shall take as our "expansion gold standard".
Now here is the same shot, roughly the same crop, at 400 ASA.
There might be some difference, but on a quick skim-through at webpage resolutions, I think you're squinting to see it. So I moved up to 800 ASA...
Things are a little bit blurrier here, and I think you can start to see the grain compared with the 400. There's a definite deterioration from the 200, though. Onwards, therefore, to 1600ASA...
No doubt about the grain in this one. I think it's objectively there, even at a quick scan, and any attempt to crop and expand on a broader shot would quickly run into trouble. But why stop there? Let's go all the way up and see what happens at 3200...
I suppose if you want that grainy early 70's look on blowing up your prints, this is the way to go. But if you were trying to focus on one detail in a larger field or to use expansion as a substitute for a zoom lens you weren't carrying, you would soon run into terrible trouble. The Pentax K-5 is said, after updates, to be able to handle a blistering 51,000 ASA. Sounds fascinating, but even with eight years of advances in digital image sensor and in-camera processing technology, I shudder to think of what the grain on that would be like. On the other hand, it would also be able to do things on the slower side - and having a 100 or even 50 ASA setting would provide some really crisp shots on those days that I have enough light to use it.
On the Gripping Hand, I almost never print anything bigger than a 6 x 4 glossy (sometimes I go up to 5 x 7), and the biggest laptop I or anyone in my family has is about a 15" screen. So even at 200 ASA, my resolution and grain are probably never going to be enough of a problem to go up to that juicy K-5 and its 16 megapixel sensor...
Back in the days of film, I started out with the usual addiction to Kodacolor Gold 100. It was cheap, available, and you usually got a "free" roll built into the cost of your photo processing. That was until I pushed my mother's little instamatic way, way beyond the level of what it was really meant to handle and got quite a few underexposed shots.
And so I discovered high ASA. 200, then 400 (which I stayed with), and rare forays into 1600 whenever I could get my hands on some. As time went by, I got myself a good SLR camera (a Minolta Dynax 3xi), and then (oddly enough) I went back to a semi-manual Pentax (P30T, I think), with which I had a hell of a lot of fun. And because I had a way wide open (f1.7) lens for it, my hunger for higher and higher ASA film ratings went away quite a bit.
Cut forward quite a few years and (after many twists and turns) I became the proud owner of a Pentax *ist-DL digital SLR. Cool beast, only 6MP, but it accepts the older lenses (and even gives me in-focus indications, though I have to do the actual focusing myself) and does everything I need it to do. The only thing, of course, is that it has a 3200 ASA equivalent setting for the sensor, and so the old disease took over - mostly because the lens it came with was no faster than f4 or thereabouts, and because a later lens (a do-everything 18-250mm) is a horrid f6.3 at full zoom and those high shutter-speeds are really important to prevent blurring.
Just the other day, I pointed it (fitted with a 40mm f2.8) out the window and took several shots at the various ASA settings, then expanded them to see what the "grain" was like. First, here is the 200 ASA shot (taken through flyscreen, unfortunately, which is why you will almost certainly see a "gridded" effect in the sky).
Now here is the same shot, cropped down to focus on a wheel of that nearest, dark car, which we shall take as our "expansion gold standard".
Now here is the same shot, roughly the same crop, at 400 ASA.
There might be some difference, but on a quick skim-through at webpage resolutions, I think you're squinting to see it. So I moved up to 800 ASA...
Things are a little bit blurrier here, and I think you can start to see the grain compared with the 400. There's a definite deterioration from the 200, though. Onwards, therefore, to 1600ASA...
No doubt about the grain in this one. I think it's objectively there, even at a quick scan, and any attempt to crop and expand on a broader shot would quickly run into trouble. But why stop there? Let's go all the way up and see what happens at 3200...
I suppose if you want that grainy early 70's look on blowing up your prints, this is the way to go. But if you were trying to focus on one detail in a larger field or to use expansion as a substitute for a zoom lens you weren't carrying, you would soon run into terrible trouble. The Pentax K-5 is said, after updates, to be able to handle a blistering 51,000 ASA. Sounds fascinating, but even with eight years of advances in digital image sensor and in-camera processing technology, I shudder to think of what the grain on that would be like. On the other hand, it would also be able to do things on the slower side - and having a 100 or even 50 ASA setting would provide some really crisp shots on those days that I have enough light to use it.
On the Gripping Hand, I almost never print anything bigger than a 6 x 4 glossy (sometimes I go up to 5 x 7), and the biggest laptop I or anyone in my family has is about a 15" screen. So even at 200 ASA, my resolution and grain are probably never going to be enough of a problem to go up to that juicy K-5 and its 16 megapixel sensor...