Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon

Thank you

Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon

Interesting site

Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon

Thanks for sharing both the images and information.

Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon

Thanks for the information.

Bipod

Absolutely fascinating!

The nice thing about grain is that you can predict where in the image it will turn up, and you
have a certain amount of control over it (e.g., by using s silver solvent developer to reduce
grain size).

Although randomly spaced in any small area, it's not really noise, but rather an aspect of physical
development: literally, granularity. You may lose some fine detail, but you don't get colored speckles
all over your image or anything horrendous like you do with digital noise. It's just honest grain:
part of development.

Interesting tidbit: daguerreotypes do not have any grain: the crystals formed on the metal surface are
too small to be seen: about 500 nm. (By comparison, the pixel pitch on your digital sensor is 5 µm
(=5000 nm) So in 179 years, technology has managed to reduced the resolution of commerial
photographic sensors by factor of 10 (althought lenses have gotten much better).

Binh Danh "The Transamerica Pyramid"
daguerreotype, 2014.
https://prisonphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/bd-thetransamericapyramid-copy.jpg

James Slick Loc: Pittsburgh,PA

No Problem! As a collector and antique camera geek, I'm glad to hear that there is still interest in such things!

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

I did mean that grain is bad or totally undesirable. I am also aware that grain, as a characteristic of film emulsion is not exactly the same a "noise" that may be created by amplification in digital photography. A certain degree of granularity is part and parcel of the photographic film image and is more prevalent in high speed films and may become somewhat exaggerated when the film is push-processed beyond its intrinsic speed.

"Grainy" images became more acceptable in photojournalism. There was a time when "press" photography or photojournalism was done with large format cameras with flash as a main or augmented ligh source and gran was not prevalent or popular. Films were seldom pushed and the large format required lesser degrees of enlargement than smaller negatives. Before the erat of Tri-X and Royal Pan (long before T-Max), the fastest black and white films were Syppe-XX and Super Panchro-Press Type B. ISO (ASA) 200 and 160 respectively. Sheet film is more durable and less likely to suffer reticulation than latter day roll films. When the trend moved toward more available or existing ligh, less flash usage, 35mm formats and push processing, grainy images became omnipresent in photojournalism. Photographers and editors found the grainy images to be more "gritty"- perhas more authentic and canoted images made under difficult conditions. Perhaps some thought that fine grain or virtually grainless images were inauthentic or contrived. Besides, grain has certain artistic aspects- there are texture screens, used in the enlarging process, that impart additional textures to photographs.

I never minded good even and tight grain. Bad gran occurs with sloppy film processing. Temperature fluctuations and inconsistent temperature differentials between chemical baths, prolonged wet time, excessive acidity in the stop bath, over immersion in hypo clearing solution and forced heat drying caused excessive grain due to minor to serious reticulation, that is shifting of the emulsion off the base. This results in uneven clumpy grain and loss of acutence. Point light source and condenser enlargers accentuated grain while cold light or diffusion enlargers subdued it.

Meanwhile, back at Kodak and all the other film manufacturers, the scientists were busy developing films with finer and tighter grain structures and developers that maximized speed while minimizing granularity. Toward the end of the "film boom" T-Grain technology changed things radically- more speed, higher resolution and less grain.

The same progression is taking place in digital photography- larger sensors with more sensitivity and less noise.

As I recall, color negative and transparency films do have colorful grain that became apparent under high magnification. Some "profession"" black and white and color negative films included a retouching surface or layer to provide "tooth" that added more gran.

Bipod

The improvements to film, paper, developers etc. continue. As you pointed out, Ilford has announced a new reversal paper.

Certain kinds of random electrical noise (e.g., Johnson-Nyquist noise) simply can't be got rid of without cryogenic cooling.
It's not that nobody has figured out how to do it--it's a fundamental law of physics (the fluctuation-dissipation theorem).
They've been supercooling amplifiers in radio telescopes for decades. The sensors in the Hubble space telescope are
supercooled for the same reason. Applications that need to detect very small amounts of light (such as neutrino
detectors) use photomultiplier tubes -- not semiconductors.

The first rule of R&D is "never start a project that requires new science"--because new science can take a year, a decade
or a century--you never know. Sometime it has to wait a few centuries for the right person to come along (Galileo,
Newton, Einstein).

Darkroom chemistry isn't like that--it's technology, and there are a million ways to skin a cat. Somebody was always
coming up with something new. Your list of improvements that reduced graininess is a great example.

Anybody can mix up a new developer: but making a new large integrated circuit requires an investment of millions of
dollars--just for the design. A new fab facility now costs over $3 billion to build. TSMC's Fab15 300 mm wafer manufacturing
facility in Taiwan was just completed at a cost of $9.3 bn. As a result, only mass-market chips get made--and camera companies
are stuck with mass-market sensors: if they can't find a bunch of uses for it, they can't justify the R&D costs.

There seem to be only a handful of companies actually making image sensors for cameras--and most of those are for
industrial and security cameras. Since the camera market is declining or flat, I wouldn't expect any major influx of investment.

We can expect the processors in digital cameras to continue to become more powerful for a few more years (thanks to
"Moore's Law"). Unfortunately, the bottlenecks are moving data off the sensor, I/O bus speeds, SD card write rates, etc. not the
processor.

And the problems with firmware and complexity in digital cameras are only going to get worse. I can count on one hand
the number of times I've seen the software or firmware in a product get shorter or simpler. Generally, software grows
without bound until the company goes out of business. Chart the size of the Windows OS for example....
And Lockheed-Martin has had a devil of a time getting the software in the F-35 to work---too dang complex.

You won't find the best embedded system programmers working for a Japanese camera company. They'd have to
take a huge pay cut.

Two key technologies are missing: a global shutter that doesn't reduce resolution (or a fast solid-state optical shutter),
and a viewing screen that has high resolution, high contrast and low power consumption. Both have been under development
for decades without success. It takes about 5-6 years to get a semiconductor product to market. So you can count on
not having either for the next 5-6 years at least. Yet the industry is charging ahead with mirroless anyway.

What's funding it all is selling really expensive lenses. While digital camera unit sales have declined, lens revenues
have increased. It's hard to believe this trend can continue: fewer customer spending more and more on lenses.

Retina Loc: Near Charleston,SC

This is admittedly off topic, but I was glad to see ISO 3. When I shot Kodalith film with a Micro-NIKKOR at too many focal lengths to bother computing the correction factors for, I found ASA 3 to be a great way meter each frame. It gave great results.

rb61 Loc: Maple Grove, MN

Not only am I having fun and learning about the process, I just determined that this falling plate camera is a Conley and was originally made in Minnesota- about an hour away from home.

Tim Stapp Loc: Mid Mitten

You should also check out these sites: 1) "https://www.photrio.com/forum/home" and "http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/."

There are many there that would love to hear about your falling plate camera. By the way, there is a member there by the screen name of Nodda Duma that is producing fresh emulsion coated glass plates. Contact him and he will make you custom sizes to fit your camera.

Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon

Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon

Toby Cole Loc: Newport, Oregon