Film Dynamic Range

The image at left is a digital capture. The image at right was taken with a 30-year-old Olympus OM-2N, Vivitar 300mm lens (with fungus on the front element!) and a 2x teleconverter, using Kodak 800MAX film.

The thing that bugs us a great deal about digital capture is its lack of dynamic range. This is clearly illustrated here where the dark-to-light transition on the moon in the digital picture is very abrupt, and the light portion has been completely blown out to white. The film capture, with its 10 to 12 stop dynamic range, holds detail in both the dark and light portions of the moon. If we were able to drum scan the film, instead of using our old desktop scanner, we would have extracted much more detail. There is also a great deal of chroma noise in the digital picture. The film picture is quite grainy (it is ISO 800 speed film, no less!) but we can get rid of most of it by running the picture through 'Neat Image', which we haven't done in this case.

Digital users attempt some Photoshop tricks in order to overcome dynamic range limitations by combining 2 identical pictures taken at different exposures. Hence, in the above case, there would be one exposure for the shadows, and one exposure for the highlights. These would be combined to form a well-exposed composite. Naturally, we film users require just one shot. Did somebody say that digital was 'advanced'?