Negatives, Positives and Pixels

Since about age eight I've been interested in photography, off and on; mainly,I must admit, as a holiday snapper. I was given a Kodak Brownie box camera, which were very popular: as basic as you could get, with a fixed focus lens and 120 roll film, just point-and-shoot. In good weather they gave excellent results, of which the following are some contact prints, made in the 1940's and 50's.The films used to be developed and printed by Thomas Knott, the chemist (ie pharmacist), at his old shop on the corner of Commercial Road and Loop Street in my home town. They were good sharp prints, and would stand up to some enlargement. I should think millions of families around the world used Kodak Brownies for their family and holiday pics. The founder of Kodak, George Eastman's slogan was "you press the button, we'll do the rest".

This little beach holiday snap dates from about 1954: apart from some dirty spots and colour cast in the top corners, it's in remarkably good shape.

Cleaning, and tweaking the colour a little produces this image, not bad after 50+ years

Later on came the Kodak Instamatic, a more compact fixed focus camera, loaded with a prepared cassette of 35mm film, which was easy for novices to use. The negatives printed in a square format; this one was taken in 1962. The colour has been very slightly enhanced, otherwise this 40-year-old print is good, considering the simplicity of the equipment.

The Instamatic black and white prints were not really sharp enough for "action" pics, but quite effective. This is a digitized image that has been slightly sharpened using digital software.

The date would be in the 1960's, and the photo also gives a good impression of angling along the Indian Ocean coast of Natal.

Having spent some busy years studying engineering full-time, I could take up my pastime again and I bought a secondhand Zeiss Ikon camera for R70. It was a neat little rangefinder model, robust and easy to operate. In those days I favoured using colour positive film to make slides: The slower films, Kodachrome 2 and Agfachrome, made very sharp pics with the excellent Zeiss lens that I had. This slide of the River Ness in Scotland has been digitized and slightly enhanced.

In 2005 I got my first digital camera, a Fujifilm S3500.

This picture from Germany is unretouched.

And the PIXELS? Well, I tried my best to blow up a small piece of digital image to illustrate how digital photos differ from the old prints, but the software stubbornly refuses to show it! To see "pixelation", crop a small piece out of a digital image, and use the Zoom button (ie magnifying glass) to magnify it a few times, you will eventually see it open up into a grid of little squares; each square carries a bit of the digital information that, put together, makes up the whole image. The old analogue image of silver halide and/or dyes, is made into computer-speak, just as the old analogue LP records are now converted into a digital form, it's a rather similar process. However, I'm no camera or computer fundi, this is really a Beginner's Blog!

So as not to break the continuity of the Ian's Place pages, this photo discussion may continue on another page, as I continue my self-tutorship.......

"For when the Profit with the Pain doth meet,

Though the gate be hard, the Gain is sweet"

(Ben Jonson; from memory!)