Photokina Special: The Dom in Darkness
By
Mike Pasini, The Imaging Resource
(Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 03:30 EDT)
A digicam of the last century meets a cathedral of the 13th century. And pixels fly.
We took a walk one evening to visit Cologne's cathedral, where relics (gold crowned skulls, actually) from the three wise men have brought pilgrims since the 13th century. Our idea, though, was to take some tourist shots of the building in its dramatic night light.
The only problem with that is that the flood lights are not very bright and the ISO sensitivity of our old digicam maxes out at 400.
During our interview yesterday with Pierre Vandevenne of DataRescue, he noticed we were shooting the show with a Nikon 990 of the last century and confessed his affection for old digicams. He has a Nikon 950 himself and boast that even his 2-Mp digicam takes better pictures than some of these modern beasts with tightly packed sensors delivering a lot of noise.
He also pointed out Nikon made a rounding error in the firmware that will zap your card if you fill it. Modern cameras (and cards) understate card capacity a bit to protect you.
He demonstrated by setting his Canon to Raw mode and popping in a card small enough to accommodate a couple or three Raw images. But the camera reported the card was out of memory.
Then he popped another card in a reader and used PhotoRescue to check the card, showing errors at the end of the card, which is fortunately little used (and why card capacity is undermeasured). That's another problem itself, since flash memory is subject to wear level -- you can only write to it so many times and if you write to just the beginning of the card over and over, that will cause some cards to fail sooner than they might have if you used more of the card more of the time).
We never max a card out on the 990 these days, so we'd never seen the problem. The problem we were seeing that night at the Dom was very little light shooting in Shutter Priority mode at a hand-held 1/30 second and ISO 400. As we went back to the hotel, we had managed to capture no more than black thumbnails. Had we really shot blanks? Could anything be done with these underexposed, even unexposed, images?
Last night, the newsletter on its way a bit earlier than usual and our show report up, we played around with a few of the images. We used a simple technique, duplicating the image on another layer, setting the Layer mode to Screen. Each of these images (which were shot outside and inside the cathedral) got two full doses of that and one half dose (fading back the Fill to 50 percent). The effect can go too far. And certainly doesn't lend itself to much color correction.
And it does create a very noisy image, greatly magnifying whatever noise we started with. But that didn't seem inappropriate to this pitted old stone building. The technique rendered the scene not only as we remember seeing it, but as we remembering feeling as we explored that ancient wonder with our own. With some awe, that is.
It may not be a miracle or even magic. It may merely be math. Or the affinity of on old relic to an even more ancient one. Take a look for yourself at The Dom in Darkness.
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