“SAME DAY” BLUES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT WAS JUST A HEARTBEAT AGO that I posted an appreciation of the current generation’s crop of camera sensors, trumpeting proudly how much easier it has become to capture high-resolution images, hand-held and on the fly, in greatly compromised lighting situations. I went on at some length (as I do) about how noise reduction, coupled with greatly expanded ISO ranges, had made it possible to salvage images that, just a generation ago, would have been lost, and I posted a shot taken within an extremely dark museum gallery that demonstrated my point.
Then I remembered this picture:
Same day, same inky black museum interior, nearly the same technical specs. To refresh, I was shooting that day on a Nikon Z5 full-frame mirrorless (so, a pretty recent camera) with a fully-manual, 24mm F-mount Nikon lens from the 1970’s. It’s attached to the body via a generic F to Z adaptor, so no information flows between the glass and the rest of the camera. The picture was taken wide open at f/2.8, just like most of my other shots for the day, and just like the humble-brag shot I posted several weeks ago from the same museum tour, which was remarkably noise-free and fairly sharp. Similarly, both shots were taken at 5,000 ISO.
So why is this take so much softer and…I dunno, smudgier? Well, that’s the kind of “what happened?” question that keeps one up at night. Lessee, there may actually have been less light to work with than in the first shot that I was so happy with. I could have mis-dialed the manual focus. Have I mentioned the possibility of gremlins or unclean spirits, i.e., a ghost in the machine? Meh. I can excuse the shot due to its general feel and composition, and perhaps pass it off as “painterly” which is a voguish catch-all alibi that loosely translates to “I screwed up but perhaps I can make you believe I did it with some higher purpose in mind”. Ah, well, as they say at Bowlero, set ’em up again in the next alley. Maybe next time I can make the 7-10 split….
thenormaleye 