A Picture of Innocence

[Iggy]

This afternoon during the football break, I was just flicking through the TV channels at 1pm and by chance landed on ITV3 that was running Midsomer Murders.
The story line in "A Picture of Innocence" (S10, E6) was about two camera clubs in the sticks, where there was some ruckus between the film and digital groups.
So I watched this dated show instead of going back to the exciting football.
It went on for 2 hours, but was amusing enough.
You should be able to catch up for a laugh.

[Mike Farley]

Thanks, Iggy. I saw this episode some time ago and, as you say, it harks back to the beginning of this century when there was a lot of argument about the merits of film compared to digital. The letter pages of Amateur Photographer seemed to be about nothing else for several months, as I recall. Consequently, when I joined our club in 2004 I expected to be entering a bastion of silver halide. Nothing could have been further from the truth and virtually everyone was already shooting with digital. Canon had recently released the 6mp EOS 10D which was the first "affordable" digital model and some people were using that. It cost £1,500 which is approximately £2,500 in today's money. Its predecessor, the similarly specified Canon D60, was priced at £3,000.

The club continued with slide competitions for several years to keep faith with the diminishing numbers still using film. We bought our first digital projector in 2005, running separate slide and digital competitions (as well as print). Some members who were no longer using film were having slides made from their digital files so that they could participate in both. Slide competitions were eventually discontinued when it became obvious that people were raiding their old material which was of lesser quality rather than creating new work. Nevertheless, our club persisted with slides for much longer than many others.

[Iggy]

Interesting bit of history there about the CCC and the move to digital.

Talking about conversions, there was just so much loss of detail in the conversion of slide to digital in last week's talk at the club!

[Mike Farley]

Talking about conversions, there was just so much loss of detail in the conversion of slide to digital in last week's talk at the club!

I would be hesitant to judge image quality from a Zoom feed since a lot of compression is applied to the video stream which means some degradation is inevitable. It is one of the reasons that we always supply judges with preview copies of the image files since we started holding competitions online.

[Iggy]

Thanks Mike.
Point taken.
Iggy