Hi, Sunday, October 24, 2004, 10:19:08 PM, J. wrote:
> A single MULTICOATED ND filter is > virtually benign and I would venture > to say that you would be hard pressed > to see ANY visible difference in the > negs unless you wanted to throw in another > super rare "what if" like shooting right > into a bright light source. So lets review: > "If you are shooting at F2.8 or faster in bright sunlight > and and shooting into a light source, slower > film is better" OK maybe it is then, but for the other > 99.999% of the real world photos, it's worse. my 'super rare' what-if was sunny-16. Even in Britain that's not rare, let alone 'super rare', by any reasonable standard. You're now in the realm of special pleading. Your argument is that modern fast films are as good in terms of quality as older slower films - which may well be true, I'm not disputing that - so there's no point in continuing a line of slow films if there is an equally good faster film. But to make them usable in a very common situation - indeed in the _standard_ situation - you have to degrade the image quality, albeit slightly. Your argument doesn't stand up and no amount of special pleading or similar buttressing will help it. Bill Robb has made a valid point about filter stacking, and its worth remembering that the degradation from that is multiplicative, not additive. I will make the point that on some systems you can't stack filters. The Leitz Serie 7 is a case in point - even if I wanted to I couldn't use 2 filters, say an ND and a YG, on my 35/1.4 lens. As if that's not enough, there are some people, like me, who don't like changing lenses, let alone filters - it doesn't fit the style of working, and just adds complications. I'd rather carry 2 or 3 speeds of film and change that as the situation dictated. And of course, as Shel has pointed out, there is the inevitable darkening of the viewfinder in SLRs, which rather defeats half the point of buying those fast lenses we want to use at wide apertures. I would love it if there was a range of b&w films with speeds from say 25 to 800 which were of equally high quality and had the same look throughout the range. I wouldn't see the quality equality (!) as a reason to drop the slow speeds from the range - they give the photographer a chance to use his equipment in a wide range of situations, with equal ease and simplicity. I was very annoyed when Kodak stopped doing ISO 100 print film. -- Cheers, Bob
