The Electrical Engineer

If you shoot film, the worst part of the entire process has to be getting the images into a computer. While there might still be some purists who preserve a completely analogue workflow between capture, development, print.  I respect people who do that, as it's becoming a much rarer art form itself. Most people these days want their photos to exist on a computer to edit and/or share. There are a few options to accomplish this, but the traditional method was to scan with a dedicated scanner. And scanning is its own entire subject with its own considerations separate from simply taking the photo. There is an entire process you have to learn for any given scanner to get results you can be happy with. I actually put together a short piece on that about a decade ago on my minor annoyance with people comparing scanners more-so then the film: Mindful of Film Scanning Which to bring this all back around is to say, scanning and scanners are really annoying, fiddly, and generally the worst s...

As a general rule, your camera shouldn't have too much of an impact of the look of your photos if you are shooting in RAW and should reflect what you are trying to accomplish. The one exception in my experience has been the Sigma Foveon based sensor cameras. ( Samples ) The reason being that because they infer color quite differently than the normal Bayer pattern cameras and there is generally more room for them to not get the same color under similar conditions. They seem to be less accurate, but sometimes in ways that I find desirable. That said, in most situations this should be mostly compensated by editing choices. As a matter of practice, I figured I would try and match my two most commonly used cameras at the current time. My Panasonic S1R and the Sigma SDQH What's actually interesting about these two cameras is that the Panasonics effective 47mp, and the SDQH's 38mp (Stacked) should work out to have a similar performance in resolving details as the Bayer pattern giv...

What is Halation Halation is an effect in film photography where light reflects off the back of the film/film plane and re-exposes the image. In most film it's typically very controlled, and it's a subtle effect you sometimes notice. The below photo has a bit happening on the brightest spots. I honestly never really thought much about it, as while you would see it on very bright objects, it was very tame, and just part of the natural look of film. This is a trend for very bright edges in a film image to bleed into the surrounding area. It tends to be reddish due to how the effect happens. We can make some general observations from this photo. It's reddish in color It's soft and blurry It's only around the brightest highlights It's more pronounced between highlights and much darker parts of the image. With that in mind, it helps to consider what is happening in a simplified cross section of color film. Color film generally works by having 3 light sensitive layer...