Can't Do That Shooting Film

[drg]

Yes, I change ISO a lot. Depending on the lens used, it will have a known 'sweet spot' in aperture and since so much of what I shoot professionally has to be very high resolution and readable, with the Canon's I can go way up the scale and still get what I need.

I won't tell you the first PC I worked on but you can extrapolate one of the few choices, perhaps, from this, the first computer I worked with extensively was a DEC VAX 700 with an additional 128k of memory and a 64k Matrix Processor. I worked with digital imagery on the first Mac's and on the Lisa (anybody know what that was??).

As part of what is arguably the first full micro controlled TV station, I lived with IBM PC-AT serial number ... 32.. for nearly a year. Had number 34 as the test unit for switching software. This was 80286 technology. Lots of cool video gear floating around at that time. Now all that stuff is beyond primitive.

One serious advantage, even with early DSLR's was not having to carry two or three bodies just to have different film loaded. Even with noise issues it was a big step.

[WillCAD]

I'm new to the digital SLR, and I have found that in my casual type shooting the ability to change ISO on the fly is a Godsend.

When I shot film I tended to use Fuji 400 all the time, but now I can switch the camera down to 100 for outdoor shots and go up for indoor shots. Using 1600 lets me get hand-held indoor shots with no flash that would have been impossible even with 1600 film - and with far less grain.

[another view]

I had a Pascal class in college. We would go to the computer lab, work on a program, send it to the compiler and wait... There - now you know exactly how old I am...

One thing about higher ISO settings - I notice at 800 and 1600 that images have more contrast. Seems like the higher you go on the ISO scale, the less latitude there is. I don't notice a real difference between 100 and 400, but higher than that starts having a different look.

[Loupey]

Our labs were in Fortran. But similiar scenario

I've been testing out my 10D and ISO 100 and 200 are similar but I can really start to see noise at 400 and up.

I will be shooting the interior of a 17,000 sf house in an hour and a half for the designer. I'm afraid that I will have to shoot at at least ISO 400 and pull out all my tricks - wiiiiiide angle, remote release, multiple lighting, and heavy tripod.

I'll try post a few results when I get back.

[SmartWombat]

Huh, punch cards, paper tape and 8Meg disk drives the size of a washing machine.
Does that make me an ancient geek?

[readingr]

Huh, punch cards, paper tape and 8Meg disk drives the size of a washing machine.
Does that make me an ancient geek?

Which came first paper tape or punch cards - I must be so old I can't remember.

I remember the old DEC RK05's 2.5Mbytes on a disk with a circumfrance bigger than a washing machine drum, and writing assembly code in all manner of clever ways to save a few bytes of storage on both disk and memory.

Those were the days! - I can't believe I just said that.

Roger

PS I change my ISO to suit the needs of the photo but try and keep to the slower settings for quality. However using canon slow is very fast compared to film

[Loupey]

Hey, Drg: Huh?! Can't say I recall those machines

Paul: I seem to recall teachers showing us (in elementary school) punch cards as the "wave of the future" type thing

Charles: All this new technology sure has changed the way photographs are captured.

The book that first got me involved in photography during high school was the black, Time Life series titled, The Camera. I must have signed that book out consecutively from the library until I had it memorized. Although the principles are unchanged, the techniques explained seem so simple compared to today''s whiz-bang technological state.


So I guess that we all agree that we are holding, in our hands, the 486's (possibly 486DX2's) of our digital evolution? But the 486's sure were great before the first Pentium showed up.