Hi!
Thanks for the comments, however I must indicate that I do still shoot film, in fact I had five 120 rolls processed just last Friday :-)
Duly noted. I stand corrected and will try to memorize that :). However, among these five rolls how many were slide and how many were negative?
My wild guess would be that it was mostly slide :).
"how it might have looked like if shot on film?" A loaded (but very good) question perhaps, or maybe the product of a new digital obsession? Really it depends on the type of film I guess. If I shot the same scene using Provia 100F my guess is that it would have been write-off but maybe if I shot it with a classic wide latitude B&W film I would have been able to capture a somewhat more detail in the areas of specular highlights but of course I would have sacrificed the colour.
In my recent photo-life (which started a bit earlier than I subscribed to PDML ;-) ) I shot only one slide film. So I've no clue almost whatsoever as to how slide film behaves. My general assumption however is that *istD (or any other digital camera for that matter) behaves more like slide and less than negative film w.r.t. exposure latitude...
What I do know is that the scene pushed my *ist D to it's extremes WRT capture latitude. If I had reduced the exposure by 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop the shadow areas and the colour under the boats hull would have started to become quite muddy and the sky would have become unrealistically darker. On top of that the reflections were the product of a full midday sun on metal and water so I'm sure that the *ist D still wouldn't have managed to capture any significant detail in the highlight areas. The interesting thing is that I had the opportunity to reduce the intensity of the highlights however I actually wanted them in the shot, I feel that they provide a little dynamic to what would otherwise be a pretty static shot.
I was speaking particularly about the borders of the boat... But then of course I was looking at web-JPG...
The intensity of mid-day sun here makes me really unhappy. I wish the shades did not disappear by 10 am and until 4 pm :).
I should say that recently I've started to learn that *istD has wider latitude than I thought it would have. This however would greatly depend on the lens.
I've been battling with this phenomenon (I don't recall its proper name in English) when the strongly lit areas seem to bleed into their neighborhood... Having seen images from quite a few cameras based on same Sony CCD sensor (including *istD(S)) I've come to the conclusion that it is at least partly in the lens...
Nowadays when I go outdoor I set my *istD to -0.7 Ev compensation by default... Probably wrong thing do, but that's how it is for now...
My question back to you is; do you think that we ever that concerned about burnt specular reflections in film based images? And just to be specific I'm not talking about generally avoidable nasties like flash problems in portraits but metal or bright white objects reflecting full sun. Maybe a question for a new post and image?
I am not sure... I mean I cannot answer neither yes nor no. You see, I think that it has partly to do with that "bleeding" I mentioned above. On film, the transition from image "meat" to burnt "bone" is usually (perceived as) very smooth while on digital it is (perceived as) much more abrupt. Hence the burnt highlights on film are much less objectionable...
I hope I make sense... Boris
