Nikon camera test: Forcing various film speeds.

Dec 10, 2008 at 11:04 PM

One of the many reasons I'm so excited about owning my brand-new Nikon Coolpix S550 is because it has so many manual settings, an important thing for me as a former fine-art photographer in film and paper form, as well as a photography major all through college in the late '80s and early '90s. See, these digital cameras have all gotten incredibly good now at automatically sensing all the conditions of that shoot, and automatically adjusting its settings to achieve the so-called "perfect shot" every time; but what artistic photographers do is deliberately tweak with those settings in ridiculous ways, for deliberate aesthetic effect. And so I've been itching to start doing some long-form tests of my new S550, to see to what kinds of extremes exactly I can push these camera's settings.

For example, the three things that actually determine the quality of a photograph are the shutter speed (how long the lens is open), the aperture (how wide the lens opens in the first place), and the film speed (expressed by either the American standard ASA or the European one ISO). See, the way that film actually used to work was by getting coated with photosensitive chemicals, and then adding tens of thousands of tiny flakes of silver that would turn black when exposed to light in these chemicals; that literally defines the shapes in your image, your "negative," that when projected onto paper produces your positive "print."

How "fast" or "slow" a type of film is, then, reflects how many of these grains of silver are embedded in that film; a low number like 64 will have just an insane amount of almost microscopic grains, while a high number like 2000 will have a lot less grains, much bigger in size to make up for the difference. So the less grains you have, and the bigger they are, the less light needs to be exposed to them to turn them black; and so that's why films with high speeds like 2000 are used for low-light situations, also sports situations, but why they always seem so grainy to the human eye when viewing them. And then conversely, the more grains you have, the longer an exposure to sunlight they need to face, but the finer the picture; and that's why it's known as "slow" film to begin with, because it usually requires slow shutter speeds to work, in order to allow enough time for all that sunlight to expose all those tiny little grains, which means that you can usually only use such film under very sunny conditions.

I can manually set this film speed on my Nikon, actually; although of course with this all being digital, what I'm really doing is telling my camera's computer chip to electronically adjust itself in a way that mimics the way physical film works. So to begin with, I thought I'd see what would happen if I deliberately used a high-speed setting in a low-speed situation, a fairly sunny morning in my neighborhood under an ISO of 2000 (2000! sheesh). And as the above photos show, sometimes I got the exact desired look I was going for -- a very gritty, grainy, urban look, the same thing that slick magazine photographers do when wanting to attain an edgy "city" look.

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But then here you see the problem with forcing a high-speed film in a low-speed situation; that since such film needs such profoundly less light, it tends to get severely overexposed in bright situations like the sky. That's why one generally uses slower speeds in daytime situations, because the grain of the film is more suited for bright surroundings, and thus you're given more leeway for capturing a richer range of grays.

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And then just to drive the point home, here are a couple of sky shots from the deliberately high ISO of 2000, compared to the same situation at a film speed of 100, a dramatic difference.

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So then if you want to compare all this to the wonders of the modern world, these next several shots were all taken under the fully automatic mode; where I simply ran around pointing the camera at crap and pushing the trigger, and the camera itself in a tenth of a second would instantly analyze its surroundings and adjust all its settings for what it thinks is going to be the most aesthetically pleasing combination for human eyes. And you know what? My little freaking camerabot ain't that bad! All of these photos here, I think, are just astounding in their complexity; a much richer range of graytones than I was usually ever able to coax out of my physical film, back in the '80s when I was a photography major and developing my own film in the student darkroom every evening. plus with the perfect amount of light let in each and every time. Why would anyone complain about these functions on modern cameras, when in the old days you could easily waste half of your entire roll on pictures that didn't have these exact right manually determined settings?

So then, that night, the opposite test; forcing a film speed usually used in bright daytime situations during a night shoot, in this case an ISO of 100 because 64 was just too low to even register. And again, as you can see by this next little run of photos, there were indeed a number of shots that came out exactly the way I meant by deliberately using this setting; high in quality, rich in grays, with a deliberate blurriness to the moving elements since the shutter speed has to remain so slow with such fine-grain film.

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But then as these photos show, there's a problem with this as well; that since slow film needs so much extra light, using it at night means sometimes insanely long shutter speeds, meaning lots and lots and lots and lots of blurry, jittery photos, especially when running around without a tripod. Again, that's simply the tradeoff, and why one usually shoots instead with much higher film in such situations, at least an 800 ISO when outside at night, if not more like 1600.

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Ah, but none of this takes into consideration the best option of all, the one that didn't exist when I was a photography major in the '80s, and that we would've killed for; the ability to just open these photos in a piece of software and tweak the damn thing yourself long afterwards! Astounding! Check out all three of these photos, for example, all of which came out less than spectacular when first out of the camera (two too bright, one out of focus), but that I was able to fairly easily save simply by going into Photoshop and playing with the settings afterwards. Remember, though, that any digital manipulation done after the shot is the literal permanent playing with pixels, degrading the quality more and more with each tweak; always better to get as close to the shot you want right within the camera itself, so that as little digital darkroom work as possible needs to take place afterwards.

Thanks for sticking in there with this extra-long report!

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