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But film grain isn't blocky; it's, well, grainy. Our eyes don't mind a little film grain here and there.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Why some kinds of pictures don't look good taken with a digital camera


April 22, 2001


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Do you have a typical digital camera? If so, some pictures are doomed before you snap the shutter.
    Chances are, the pictures that won't turn out well are views of distant scenes -- sunsets, for example. I like sunsets as well as you do, but I'm convinced that sunsets and distant landscapes are bad for your photographic health. They're always too far away from your digital camera lenses.
    The problem, of course, isn't really the distance. It's the size. Most digital cameras don't have enough resolution to show small objects. "Resolution" is the catch-all term for the amount of detail you can see in a picture. Cameras that use film usually have a lot of resolution; cameras that use digital techniques usually don't have very much at the present time. (They'll catch up in a couple of years.)
    If you look at the problem this way, you'll see why distant scenes sometimes turn out so badly. Everything is too far away to be picked up accurately by your camera. When things get very far away, they get very small, and that means they get indistinct.
    In a typical digital photo, trees might look like trees or they might look like tiny green and brown sugar cubes connected to brown sticks. (Our eyes are very forgiving. Zoom in on that prized digital photo and see if the trees aren't dead ringers for tiny green and brown sugar cubes. I know a lot of my own digital landscape photos look that way.)
    Sunsets have a different problem. We all know what clouds look like, right? They look like soft, puffy cottony things. Unless your digital camera has a lot of resolution, the clouds in your sunset photos might end up looking like collections of little ice cubes instead of like soft, puffy cottony things.
    Pictures taken the old fashioned way, with film, don't have this problem. Stick with me while I explain why.
    Film picks up images the way sand does. Drop a nickel in the sand, then pick it up carefully. You'll see an impression of the coin in the sand. In other words, you'll see an image of the coin. It will be full of details.
    It's not perfectly detailed, of course. Some details (a slight blemish, maybe) might not show up in the sand impression. But just about everything else will. You might say that sand is a high-resolution medium.
    That's how film works. Film has "grain" -- just like grains of sand -- and sometimes the grain gets in the way of seeing something. But film grain isn't blocky; it's, well, grainy. Our eyes don't mind a little film grain here and there. We even let our eyes confuse film grain with sharpness. (An old trick for making a digital photo look sharper is to add grain to it, using an image editor. Try it and you'll see what I mean.)
    That's one reason pictures taken with a good film camera can have a lot more detail than pictures taken with a good digital camera. Film has more resolution.
    Another problem with sunsets and other kinds of distant scenes is partly psychological. Our eyes like interesting things. We're drawn to them. In nearly every case, the most interesting things are people. People like to look at other people. If this weren't true, we'd be in BIG trouble. We'd end up romancing rocks and marrying trees. The human race would just die away.
    Pictures without people in them probably won't be very interesting to look at. They might be pretty or they might be impressive. But interesting? Probably not.
    So if you take a photo of a sunset, get Uncle Harry in it, too. Or show kids in the foreground. Or put yourself in the picture if no one else is around, using the timer on your camera. Make a pretty-but-dull picture into a pretty interesting picture by putting people in it.
    And make sure they're in the foreground, where you can see them. Everybody who has sight has seen a sunset. Most people haven't seen your kids. A picture of your kids playing in the park against the backdrop of a spectacular sunset might be a wonderful photo. But you can be sure that a picture of that backdrop, with nothing in the foreground, would be just another sunset.