Comment by actionfromafar
3 years ago
The old school scenes were sometimes more incorrect, but less wrong than modern dark scenes.
Thing is, the eye adapts to dim light very well. So an old school scene "night" scene may actually better represent what it feels like being there.
While a modern "night" scene might look what a dim area looks like the first 10 seconds before your eyes adapt: dim, gray-ish.
Curve-ball:
what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
> what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
Depends what you're after and what digital camera you are using (and even which ISO you are using on that specific camera). But more broadly IMO digital has reached dynamic ranges that are "good enough" so you don't have to worry about it in most situations. And if shot correctly digital can look exactly like film.
The major difference for me is the way you work with the material. Actors and everybody else tends to be a tad bit more concentrated when the know how many €/s is running through that camera unless you have an infinite amount of film stock and the funds to develope and digitize them.
But whether that is truly worth the stress of changing a roll of exposed film in the wild during bad weather and praying the material survives is another question.
>what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
You should actually overexpose digital (without blowing any highlights) to maximize dynamic range.
Our eyes perceive brightness logarithmically — given something emitting P photons perceived as brightness B, something emitting 2P photons will be perceived as brightness B+1, while something emitting 0.5P photons will be perceived as brightness B-1.
Image sensors are linear and discrete. So going from R,G,B=1,1,1 to 2,2,2 represents a doubling of photons captured, and thus be perceived by the eye as going from B to B+1. But 2,2,2->4,4,4 will go to B+2, 4,4,4->8,8,8 to B+3, etc.
Thus, there is only one bit of dynamic range going from B to B+1, 2 bits of dynamic range from B+1 to B+2, 3 bits from B+2 to B+3, and 2^N bits from B+N-1 to B+N. That’s why you want as much brightness information as possible close to saturating the sensor, since that’s where the most bits of dynamic range are.
This is called “exposing to the right” [0].
[0] https://digital-photography-school.com/exposing-to-the-right...
While it’s true you should in theory expose to the right, it’s realistically a little riskier unless your environment is well controlled or you’re willing to potentially clip some highlights. So for landscapes that you spend a while composing and metering, it makes sense, but for street photography or something where there’s a ton of contrast, I wouldn’t recommend it because you’ll overexpose more often than not and unlike with film, it’s harder (and maybe impossible) to recover detail from highlights.
Since storage is cheap, I’d rather just bracket my shots that need it than expose to the right, reducing the potential of losing a good shot by losing some highlight detail.
> While a modern "night" scene might look what a dim area looks like the first 10 seconds before your eyes adapt: dim, gray-ish.
And that's if you're watching it in a theater-like setting. If you're in a living room with any lights on, the screen is so dark that little comes through but the reflection of the room. After all these years I still do not understand why glossy screens are so popular.
> glossy screens
if its glossy, you can move so the reflection is completely out of the screen
if it's matte, it'll always look a little frosty, right?
reasonable tradeoff either way, but for home theater, i can see why sleek black sells (not to mention how garbage matte would look in a bright store)
> if its glossy, you can move so the reflection is completely out of the screen
What? That's really not how reflective surfaces work. When the screen is dark, I can see the walls, the ceiling or the floor, the bookshelves... moving around does not help, it only changes what's in the reflection.