2 posts tagged “snow”
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.
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?
Thanks for sticking in there with this extra-long report!
Oh, did I not mention that this new digital still camera of mine actually shoots full-motion, full-sound, low-light-capable videos too? It does! In fact, with the 4-gig memory card I currently have in there, I can technically shoot a full half-hour of such video before having to sync with a computer, at a quality even higher than what you're seeing here (but more on that in a moment). Yes, I know, ever since getting this camera, I've been raving about stuff that a whole lot of other people now take for granted with their digital media devices (and I'm sure to keep doing a lot more); but all this crap is new to me, damnit, and I'm simply astounded by the quality these tiny little decently-priced little devices all have! What you're looking at above, for example, is WAY MORE than enough quality I need for most of the amateur videos I will be shooting in my life -- artistic events, holidays, little mise-en-scenes like you're seeing here -- a quality at least as good as old tape-based videocameras from the '90s, back when they were the only home option available; and since you have just an insane amount of manual controls over that video image as it comes in, too, plus a device that automatically makes a series of "smart adjustments" to whatever conditions it's in, technically you're actually recording a better-quality video than most '90s tape-based cameras, not simply equal.
All us multimedia artists were dying to each own such a videocamera back in the '90s; and the lucky friends of mine who actually did ended up shelling out $500, $600, $700 or more for the privilege, and of course don't forget still with no way to actually edit such videos at home. So how absolutely mindblowing, I think, that this ability now essentially serves as a little-advertised freebie fringe benefit of purchasing what is mostly advertised as a still-image camera, with photographs that are literally five times higher in quality than what you're seeing here; and now combine that with the fact that all these functions all wrapped together in one device still costs less than $200, and can be slipped into your pants pocket. And now add to THAT that you can now cut all these videos together on your home computer, in a way almost as professional as full-time studios, with software that comes for freaking free when you buy the operating system. BLERGH. Careful, don't slip on all my brain pieces splattered across the floor.
If you're under 30 and take all this stuff for granted; SHAME ON YOU, or I guess congratulations for living in a wonderful brave new world of the arts, and how I wish I could put you in a time machine and bring you back to the '80s when I was in high school and college, and access to even the most basic professional equipment was such a privilege and rare pleasure and something you would literally beg, borrow, steal or whore yourself to keep getting to use. No wonder there are tens of millions of people in this country now releasing their own short videos and movies on a regular basis; I guarantee you there'd be that many doing it twenty years ago too, if simply all this technology had existed then as well.
*Oh, and the technical note I was going to mention as well: For those doing research about the S550 and who have come across this randomly, know that the camera originally outputs videos in a Quicktime/Mac-friendly AVI format, 640 x 480 pixels, at a fairly high 1 megabyte per second of footage; the 33-second video today, for example, was originally 33 megs in size when first coming out of the camera. I then not only compressed it into an MP4, but also lopped off the top and bottom to make it 16:9-friendly; that brought the total size down to a much more reasonable 6 megabytes, but of course also dropped the quality quite a bit. I don't mind so much, because I knew I was only going to distribute it as a much smaller streaming video online; but do understand that this video looks dramatically better when watching the original AVI on a television screen.
