The Electrical Engineer

  As I've been revisiting using a Digital Camera as a film scanner, I thought it might be interesting to see if using a Foveon Style sensor would have any advantages. While it only has 25 effective megapixels, for 35mm scans and smaller, the extra color information and sharpness of the foveon sensor should be more than enough under ideal conditions. One note is that the shutter slap on the sdqh isn't great and made getting sharp scans more difficult than a mirrorless with an Eletronic shutter. But what I am interested most in is if the color response would appear to offer any advantage.  For this setup it's more or less the same as my latest venture into film scanning: DSLR SCANNING sdqh with 105mm macro lens While there are three kinds of film I could test, I think slides make for the easiest comparison as they result in an image without any additional processing to compensate for the color base or being inverted. Because of the greater shadow noise of the sdqh at the same...

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...

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...