John Lind writes:
> Latitude is the difference between how much light creates "pure white" and
> how little creates "pure black" on the film. It is the ability to capture
> detail in both highlight and shadow. The wider the separation between the
> two (higher contrast), the wider the latitude required from
> the film to maintain detail.
> [and a whole lot more info saved away in the 'learn from this' folder, as
ever]
Couple of things, though:
> Transparencies can be easily "duped" to create a negative or another
> transparency.
> [...]
> Transparency film can be pushed,
> [...]
> It's just the opposite. Transparency has narrower latitude.
> Images will be higher contrast. This demands much more accurate
> exposure setting! Under nearly all conditions there's zero room for
> error; a 1/3 stop error can make an otherwise excellent photograph
> into garbage.
Okay, so just to make sure I've got my head straight, the reason people say
that slide film is less forgiving is because if you misexpose things you'll
end up with too much of your image off one end of the range and there'll be
chunks of solid white/black where you actually wanted to get
highlight/shadow detail; negative film gives you more 'room' between black
and white.
And I guess this is why slides look more impressive, because they make the
world look as if there's more range of colour going on. So this means that
if I took a photo of a grey flat-lit day with slide film the slide film
would 'stretch' the range of light in the world more than negative film
would, so slide film makes things look more "interesting" because it doesn't
all look so grey and middle-ish.
I guess what I was missing is that there's no guarantee that the range of
light in the world is "accurately" represented by the range of shades on the
emulsion (positive or negative), because there's only so much range of
light/dark that the film can show, so you have to make sure that the range
of light you want to end up is somewhere in the range of light that the
film'll support. (and presumably the same thing applies to printing stuff,
but it's the range of light that the paper'll give you)
Hm.
This all sounds terribly familiar, somehow.. I should really go buy those
Ansel Adams books and pay more attention this time through.
thanks! It's almost scary realising how little I actually know about what's
going on..
-- dan
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