Film & Digital -- Live Music Assignments

"Paul Furman" wrote in message
...
William Graham wrote:
"Richard Polhill" wrote
Colin_D wrote:
Summer Wind wrote:

Another easily missed point is that the film camera was fitted with an
80B filter, i.e. a tungsten to daylight conversion filter, while the
Canons had no filter. You might think, with all the hype about white
balance for digital cameras, that no filter was necessary, but in actual
fact, for light that is grossly different from daylight, the response of
the Bayer filter array would be the same as for film, i.e. reds
overexposed and blues underexposed. With film you're stuck, but digital
allows you to adjust the balance by altering the gain of the individual
color amplifiers - to a point. Reds will be blown out in the
highlights, while blues will be lacking in shadow detail, and noisy
because of the greater amplification applied. The result can be rather
unpleasant color. I have used an 80B filter on my 300D in such lighting
conditions, with improved results over no filter. There's an exposure
hit with the filter, the same as with film, but the results are worth
it. Remember that the faster exposure without the filter is at the
expense of unbalanced spectral response in the digital, just the same as
with film.

Fascinating, thank you. I'd never considered the use of colour correction
filters with a digital camera. It makes sense, particularly as, if I am
correct, the sensors have lower dynamic range than film typically does.

Not a lower dynamic range, very similar or even better.

I'd really love to see some comparisons if you have them.

Pardon me for interjecting a comment here, but it would seem to me, with
all the money they charge for those digital cameras, that they should
have a "daylight-incandescent" switch that you could throw to adjust the
color sensitivity of the CCD to compensate for incandescent lighting. -
Of course, you can do this in Photoshop too, but not everyone wants or
can run their photos through a Photoshop compensation adjustment. You
should be able to point your camera at a white card in whatever lighting
environment you are in, and press a "light compensation" button, and the
camera should adjust the relative color sensitivity of it's CCD
electronics so all the other pictures you take in that environment are
correctly color compensated.....Otherwise, just what are you paying your
two thousand plus dollars for? (just my 2 cents on the matter...:^)

The D200 lets you do just that and store 5 presets. You hold down the WB
button & press the shutter to update or add (& some menu diving to switch
apparently).

This is a good idea.....You might commonly be in unusual lighting
environments, so these presets would come in handy....(Like if you commonly
traveled to the planet Venus, where you would need a blue comp, or Mars,
where you might need a red comp, or take pictures underwater, or some such
thing....:^)

Richard Polhill wrote:
William Graham wrote:

I'd really love to see some comparisons if you have them.


Pardon me for interjecting a comment here, but it would seem to me, with all
the money they charge for those digital cameras, that they should have a
"daylight-incandescent" switch that you could throw to adjust the color
sensitivity of the CCD to compensate for incandescent lighting. - Of course,
you can do this in Photoshop too, but not everyone wants or can run their
photos through a Photoshop compensation adjustment. You should be able to
point your camera at a white card in whatever lighting environment you are
in, and press a "light compensation" button, and the camera should adjust
the relative color sensitivity of it's CCD electronics so all the other
pictures you take in that environment are correctly color
compensated.....Otherwise, just what are you paying your two thousand plus
dollars for? (just my 2 cents on the matter...:^)



No, that's white balance. We're talking about the sensors' saturation
levels being different for different colours, so using colour correction
filters at the front end helps improve the appearance of areas at the
extreme ends of the latitude.

Refer back to the poster earlier who helpfully pointed out that you can
apply different characteristic curves who also completely missed the point.
I have a tungsten to daylight filter so I gave this a quick try. I
shoot under incandescent lights with the filter both on and off. Once
the white balance was adjusted I could see very little difference in
the two images.

Note I was shooting at ISO 100, I can't imagine putting this filter
on if you had to shoot at anything higher then ISO 100 as you loose a
lot of light with it.

Anyone who wants to take a look at the raw files they can be found
here.
http://www.sewcon.com/filter_test/

Under even lower color temp lights there may be more of a difference, I
will try this tonight when it gets darker and I can use the dimmer.

Scott

Scott W wrote:

I have a tungsten to daylight filter so I gave this a quick try. I
shoot under incandescent lights with the filter both on and off. Once
the white balance was adjusted I could see very little difference in
the two images.

Did you shoot high contrast scenes with blown out highlights? In context
we were talking about shooting live rock music where the generally dark
scene is punctuated by bright coloured lights.

Apparently, as the sensor is designed to roll off evenly at the upper
limit of its response curve in daylight, the response rolloff varies
slightly across the spectrum when given a warmer light so that the reds
and yellows blow out slightly before the blues. Correcting the colour in
the traditional manner may be able to improve the look of the
highlights, accepting that all recording media have their limits.

Note I was shooting at ISO 100, I can't imagine putting this filter
on if you had to shoot at anything higher then ISO 100 as you loose a
lot of light with it.


Well under the circumstances you'd be typically shooting at much higher,
say, ISO 800.

Richard Polhill wrote:
Scott W wrote:

I have a tungsten to daylight filter so I gave this a quick try. I
shoot under incandescent lights with the filter both on and off. Once
the white balance was adjusted I could see very little difference in
the two images.

Did you shoot high contrast scenes with blown out highlights? In context
we were talking about shooting live rock music where the generally dark
scene is punctuated by bright coloured lights.

Apparently, as the sensor is designed to roll off evenly at the upper
limit of its response curve in daylight, the response rolloff varies
slightly across the spectrum when given a warmer light so that the reds
and yellows blow out slightly before the blues. Correcting the colour in
the traditional manner may be able to improve the look of the
highlights, accepting that all recording media have their limits.

Note I was shooting at ISO 100, I can't imagine putting this filter
on if you had to shoot at anything higher then ISO 100 as you loose a
lot of light with it.


Well under the circumstances you'd be typically shooting at much higher,
say, ISO 800.

If you are shooting at ISO 800 or higher putting on any filter that is
going to block light is likely to be bad for the images. The filter
loss was close to two stops, this means if I need to shoot at ISO 1600
with the filter I could drop back to 400 without the filter.
So then the comparison should be between a ISO 1600 shot with filter
compared to a ISO 400 shot without.

Scott

Scott W wrote:

If you are shooting at ISO 800 or higher putting on any filter that is
going to block light is likely to be bad for the images. The filter
loss was close to two stops, this means if I need to shoot at ISO 1600
with the filter I could drop back to 400 without the filter.
So then the comparison should be between a ISO 1600 shot with filter
compared to a ISO 400 shot without.

Yes. Remember that the filter blocks lots of light at the red
end, but hardly any at the blue end, so it is not implausible
that 1600 with filter might have a cleaner blue channel than
400 without. It would be interesting to test. I don't have
a DSLR so I can't test it myself, but it would be interesting
to know.

Peter.
--

Peter Irwin wrote:
Scott W wrote:

If you are shooting at ISO 800 or higher putting on any filter that is
going to block light is likely to be bad for the images. The filter
loss was close to two stops, this means if I need to shoot at ISO 1600
with the filter I could drop back to 400 without the filter.
So then the comparison should be between a ISO 1600 shot with filter
compared to a ISO 400 shot without.

Yes. Remember that the filter blocks lots of light at the red
end, but hardly any at the blue end, so it is not implausible
that 1600 with filter might have a cleaner blue channel than
400 without. It would be interesting to test. I don't have
a DSLR so I can't test it myself, but it would be interesting
to know.
I will leave that testing to someone else. I would seem that balancing
the color makes sense but a quick test did not show any real gain,
under normally lighting.

I have been pretty amazed in fact how low in temp the light source and
get and still get a good white balanced photo. I have shot down to the
2000 range and still the photos look good, and I don't think I could
stand 2 stop of light loss when the light get that dim.

Scott

Scott W wrote:
Peter Irwin wrote:
Scott W wrote:
If you are shooting at ISO 800 or higher putting on any filter that is
going to block light is likely to be bad for the images. The filter
loss was close to two stops, this means if I need to shoot at ISO 1600
with the filter I could drop back to 400 without the filter.
So then the comparison should be between a ISO 1600 shot with filter
compared to a ISO 400 shot without.
Yes. Remember that the filter blocks lots of light at the red
end, but hardly any at the blue end, so it is not implausible
that 1600 with filter might have a cleaner blue channel than
400 without. It would be interesting to test. I don't have
a DSLR so I can't test it myself, but it would be interesting
to know.
I will leave that testing to someone else. I would seem that balancing
the color makes sense but a quick test did not show any real gain,
under normally lighting.

I have been pretty amazed in fact how low in temp the light source and
get and still get a good white balanced photo. I have shot down to the
2000 range and still the photos look good, and I don't think I could
stand 2 stop of light loss when the light get that dim.

Scott

The result would depend on the dynamic range of the subject. Reasonably
flat lighting as in a room lit with incandescent light doesn't have the
contrast of stage - or in my case party - lighting with colored
spotlights giving bright spots of light among darker areas.

The exposure hit is the same as with film, so if you're going to use
film and a filter, digital and a filter is no worse.

Colin D.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Summer Wind wrote:

Popular Photography http://www.popphoto.com/ is running an article called
Live Targets at its Website. It's This Weeks Highlights article #2 and it
includes an image gallery. The author uses both film and digital for his
live music shoots and the film, both color and B&W, looks better to me. The
digital shots have the typical video frame look that makes me leary about
moving to digital for my still-lifes.

If you bring your film images to the cheapest lab in town you won't get decent
prints. If you shoot raw and do proper raw processing (which is almost the same
as proper darkroom work) you'll be able to get similar results. Although I've
never seen digital black and white prints look as superb as tmax3200 on ilford
paper and never seen any high iso color film image I really liked .



--
Jan Keirse - +32 (0)485/089.786
http://jankeirse.free.fr