111–120 of 166 posts
My first job over a decade ago was managing a photo lab. The x-ray machines would often damage film that people traveled with. Amateur photographers just weren't aware. The damage typically looks like white fuzzy diagonal lines across the image. It's not enough to completely destroy a picture, but it'll ruin it. The most common widespread damage we saw were people that bought like 50 disposable cameras for their Cari…
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There are companies like Silbersalz ( https://silbersalz35.com/ ) selling ECN-2 cinefilm stock in 35mm cartridges. You have to return the film to them for processing, rather than take it to a C-41 lab - and they warn that if you send them to a C-41 lab, you can damage the lab's equipment and ruin everyone else's photos as well as your own. I don't know how paranoid the warning is, but that seems like it could be pret…
> There are companies like Silbersalz ( https://silbersalz35.com/ ) selling ECN-2 cinefilm stock in 35mm cartridges. To be fair, anyone buying that likely knows what they're getting into. Tri-X was sold next to C-41 film in every store, so a lot of people would just grab it when they wanted B&W thinking it was the same thing to develop as color film. (Yes, there is B&W C-41 film as well)
True, I'm just dwelling on the possible consequences. I have some Silbersalz film myself that I haven't used yet, and I'm actively imagining everything that could go wrong.
> Yes, there is B&W C-41 film as well
Ilford XP2 - it looks a bit different from typical B&W film, with very flat whites.
I used to love XP1, which came out sepia when processed C-41.
I have been traveling with a Filmguard bag. Sometimes they take it out and ask for a hand inspection, sometimes they don't they rarely insist on scanning the films themselves outside the bag. Regardless never check-in your films. Nothing can protect them from the powerful scan for check-in luggages.
When a TSA x-ray operator sees an opaque bag on the screen, he/she just turns up the exposure until the contents are visible. Not much help there for your film.
What about those full body scanners? I always opt out due to health concerns. Does anyone known anything about the actual radiation levels involved in those and the safety standards the machines must live up to?
What about those full body scanners? I always opt out due to health concerns. Does anyone known anything about the actual radiation levels involved in those and the safety standards the machines must live up to?
I came to the understanding that they're quite harmless; even considering the radiation doses you get while flying after (because, radiation is additive of course)- However using them many times per day can cause damage to the skin over long periods of time.
Regardless, Opt out anyway; if people choose to opt out the economics of the devices will stop making sense and perhaps they'll be a little less invasive in future.
I will always opt-out, even when I'm being threatened or condescended to (as was the case in Gatwick airport some time ago).
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Don't SSD have some kind of cyclic redundancy check?
I posted the same comment yesterday and for some reason got downvoted to oblivion. SSDs do not rely on bits being correct. Raw bit error rates in multi-level flash are generally over 1%. In other words if you read a 4K page you are guaranteed to get several wrong bits. The only reason a of it works at all is because of sophisticated error-correcting codes.
Probably because of the "90% bit error rate" part of the comment. Obviously SSDs can't tolerate anything close to 90% bit errors.
If that kind of error rate could be corrected in the general case, it would have profound implications for information theory in general, not just hard drive manufacturing. It would be equivalent to a data compression algorithm that could crunch anything by 90%.
Basically the only way this could work would be if the SSD's actual physical capacity were several times larger than specified, so that the vast majority of its space could be used for redundant encoding. I'm sure that's true to some extent, but I doubt a 100 GB drive is actually a 1 TB drive with 90% redundancy.
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> Buying a 100 megapixel digital camera would cost me ten thousand dollars minimum. Hasselblad makes some nice ones. https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/
Yeah, they're marvelous. But the digital back by itself is $26,000. A full camera is around $35k.
(I know, I know, only $3-5k, what a deal. Better than the "cash payment for a pretty nice car" range though.)
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You’re getting all kinds of answers but a key one, for me, is that film is unavoidably slow and expensive. Digital cameras teach you that each frame is cheap and throwaway. That encourages some kinds of photographic/artful thinking while obscuring others. Old masters of large format film photography have a workflow and thought process that’s vastly different from modern digicam shooting. When you have just one or two…
This, this and this. I've consistently found my keeper ratio to be much higher when shooting film, as the memory cards are small and single-use only. That forces you to think your composition through, take an extra second or two to ensure the exposure is good - it basically enforces self discipline. (Which reminds me I've got a few rolls to develop after my latest outing with the Texas Leica - a Fuji G690BL; the 6*9…
It's the paralysis of choice. Less is literally more, and I personally don't find an evening of spending a couple hours paralyzed by choice and analyzing minute details to be enjoyable. At all.
And yes, film makes you think a concept through fully and optimize everything before you press the shutter. My 'hit' rate is much higher with film than digital.
I have so many cameras I don't have time to use them all, but my Fuji cameras and LF lenses are definitely among my favorites as well. Very underrated, Fuji didn't do a good job of advertising in the west at all. My general purpose camera is a Pentax 67 though. Looking forward to trying a new Polaroid rangefinder that was converted to 4x5 as well. Just bought some Velvia for a cool $2 per frame.
Genuine question: Why do people still use film anymore? I know some big movie studios do sometimes use it (The Hobbit comes to mind), but I don’t understand why anyone would use film when we have DSLRs that can have resolutions over 30 megapixels. EDIT: added “why” at beginning
Genuine question: Why do people still use film anymore? I know some big movie studios do sometimes use it (The Hobbit comes to mind), but I don’t understand why anyone would use film when we have DSLRs that can have resolutions over 30 megapixels. EDIT: added “why” at beginning
I still use and travel a lot with film, including ISO800 and ISO3200 film the latter of which is totally destroyed if it goes through the scanner, even in an film protection bag. Megapixels are unimportant, there is a look to film you can’t reproduce no matter how many VSCO plugins you use :)
Film protection bags are to protect against fogging from radiation at higher altitudes, not the scanners.