DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

The ever-increasing capabilities of using a higher and clean ISO does matter. It just adds more flexibility to the exposure triangle.

Photocraig

What Sharpie is telling you, in a well illustrated way, like Wayne Gretzky and others have said, you miss ALL of the shots you don't take.
Camera processors and sensors are getting better all the time, Post Processing capabilities can eliminate a great deal of noise.
I haven't used 5 or 5-figure ISO, but I would if I needed it. I also spent to the top of my budget for the camera with the best and newest In Camera Processing version, specifically because it handled noise better.

Bipod

Sensors do have sensitivity. Why isn't it measured and expressed for sensors as it is in other
electronics?

Normally, sensitivity is defined as the minimum input signal (in this case, exposure or
irradience-seconds, measured in Watts/sq m-s) required to produce a certain output level with
a certain signal-to-noise ratio.

The definition of ISO for film cannot be applied directly to sensors, nor can it be easily translated.
It's like asking how many miles-per-gallon a bicycle gets.

Measuring film speed turns out to be very difficult. The problem is that film speed tries to
express the film's characteristic curve (density-vs.-exposure curve or Hurter Driffield curve)
in one number. Also, development has to be taken into account.

Originally, each film manufacturer had it's own system (e.g., Kodak). A number of standards
came and went before ISO: Schiner, DIN, BSI, Weston, GE, original ASA, 1960 ASA, and GOST--
just to name the best-known ones.

During this time, film got a lot faster, and most switched from thick emulsions to thin emulsions--
changing the H-D curve and necessitating changes in the film speed standards. Also, initially
film speed was delibrerately under-stated, to provide a "margin of safety" for exposure. Eventually
this was dropped.

Of course, the biggest difference with film is that grain is never white dots and never shows up in
shadows. Sensor noise doesn't behave anything at all like grain.

But the biggest difference of all is that it was easy to compare films: you just loaded a different film
into your camera. That kept film (and camera) manufacture's honest.

Today, the company that spends the most on marketing always has the "best" camera.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Exactly.
I took the following photos with my $400 55-300 lens mounted on my $700 Pentax KP.
Again, not perfect, but sending these to my family was more dramatic than saying
"We had an animal in our backyard last night, but because of darkness, I had to take a photo to be sure it was a raccoon.

At ISO 204800


at ISO 819200



https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-579631-1.html#9906056

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

The point is that you may not need an expensive heavy f2 lens to photograph grandkids playing basketball - a standard zoom lens mounted on a $800 camera with high ISO capabilities may be perfectly adequate.

I took the SOOC photo below in a dim church - ISO 25600 with my Pentax KP - just a few weeks after I got the camera. Yeah, there is noise if you zoom in, but a typical person doesn't put his/her nose against a photo to look at it, and the camera still maintains colors.

(Download)

Bipod

It comes down to how much noise you will accept. It's a race to the bottom.

Meanwhile, state-of-the-art digitial cameras are cryo-cooled and so nearly
eliminate thermal noise.

There's technology ..... and then there's consumer technology. Two
different things.

Bipod

Then you have a noisy, amateurish photo you can treasure forever
(or until the ink fades and paper digests itself).

Tomcat5133 Loc: Gladwyne PA

This is a great shot. I can see a little blur in his hand etc but it adds to the photo. Don't see much grain.
Lighting and exposure is great.

jackm1943 Loc: Omaha, Nebraska

Thanks Tom. I'll usually take about a thousand pics using manual plus auto ISO then wean them down to about 20-30 for processing. It takes a little PS work, including a little noise reduction in most, but not too bad.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Most of the photos we have are not fine art - they are of events. Some are of interest only to the participants, some are of interest to descendents of the participants, and some are of interest to those who study people and their activities. Today few photos become prints, but digital work will last as long as there is someone around to periodically refresh the storage medium.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

...or until the relevance of the image fades. VERY FEW images are worthy of printing and/or saving outside of family collections.

User ID

Like this:

The base ISO of Tri-X might be ISO 80.

Then some chemical gain and chemical
noise reduction is poured into the mix
of the emulsion and the mix of the dark
room chemicals so that cooking it long
enuf to reach ISO 400 will not produce
unusably grainy results and also so that
the dynamic range will remain printable
on normal paper. It's actually analogous
to "raising the gain" in digital imaging.

I generally process my Tri-X to ISO 160
or 250. At that processing level I had a
whole truckload of latitude and loooong
tonal gradation.

Add some grain solvent and some high
light restrainer to the dark room chems
and you can push the gain to about ISO
1600 with minimal compromises.

The base speed of TMZ 3200 is waaay
below 3200. The nominal speed is about
1200 and the base speed is likely to be
well below 800.

Chemical imaging and digital imaging
are hardly as different as the arm chair
experts would have you believe.

One day while I was printing someone
came by with a little chromed switch and
needed a product shot for a data sheet
right away. I popped of a coupla sheets
of Tri-X at a guesstimated exposure then
diluted a bit of my printing developer in
a small tray and cooked the Tri-X for a
guesstimated time and temperature. The
chrome had gorgeous tonality. The image
was the grainiest thing I'd ever seen but
it would only be 2" long on the product
data page. That was Tri-X near base ISO
with no chemical noise reduction ! Film
is actually electronic. Much of chemistry
is about the behavior of electrons. Silver
halide is a substance that allows photons
to cause electrons to socialize :-)

.

Bipod

That was the situation of all photography --- just keepsakes and reportage -- prior to the 1880s.

It took the work of at least two generations of brilliant photographers (Steichen, Stieglitz, E. Weston,
Strand, Adams, etc) to get photography accepted as an art form. In 1937 Edward Weston was the first
photorapher ever to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.

But of course, we are free to decide that's not important and throw it all that away.

Bipod

Digital work will last exactly as long as other digital records--until it's lost in a disk crash
or a bankruptcy.

I've been making backups for 50 years (beginning on mainframes), but my oldest surviving
digital data is from the 1990s. Even if you somehow save the media and it's still readable,
you can no longer buy a drive that will read it. Digital is ephermeral--and keeps gettting more so.

SD cards and SSDs die before floppy disks and hard drives. And hosted data dies when
the company operting the servers goes out of business. Used disk drives have no resale
value so get tossed into the dumpster by the creditors or landlord. Any contract you had
with the defunct company is null and void.

"But wait, my data was on The Cloud!" No it wasn't. It was a disk drive that just got
drop kicked into that dumpster over there.

Of course, computer companies, service providers and .COMs never go out of business.....

Anybody got the phone number for Control Data Corporation? DEC? Digital Research?
How about Sinclair, Acron, Altair, Commodore, Victor, Atari, PET? Or NeXT Step Corp?
VA Linux Systems? Where are they now?

Same place as WorldCom, MCI and Global Crossing.

Indian clubs stay in the air as long as the juggler keeps juggling--which is never very long.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

I have a few 'documents' that began "life" as Lotus and/or Word Perfect files on 5-1/4" disks, but I have periodically copied them to new media, and at some point I converted to MS-compatible formats. Our daughter is a librarian - she understands all this, and as long as she periodically copies my JPEG files, they will "live".