ISO and Sharpness are overrated

iso performance and sharpness are just massively massively overrated in today's world cam manufacturers look you might not want to hear this but i'm just going to tell you as it is it's in their interests it's in camera manufacturers interest that you become obsessed with sharpness and iso because these are the easiest things for them to upgrade and give you noticeable results on they've even got to the point now where people seem to think that noise or grain or whatever you want to call that i'm going to use those terms interchangeably by mean digital noise is the opposite of sharpness that's just not true it's not like you increase the sharpness and you lose noise and if it becomes more noisy you lose sharpness that's nonsense i'm going to prove some of this stuff to you by showing you pictures from harper's bazaar from the 30s 40s 50s and 60s i'm also going to show you kind of modern equivalents to go with it as well and then you can see what i'm talking about i'm going to demonstrate it to you and luckily i kept this edition of harper's bazaar from 2017 august 2017 this was a really interesting addition because what they did in this one was they put in some of their old pictures but they also put in modern interpretations of the old pictures as well so in some instances we can see directly on one side of the page something was done in the last decade versus something usually from around the mid to late 1950s or somewhere around there and we can see the difference i'm going to illustrate an older style picture from this magazine for you now on its own because i just want to talk about it for a moment so this is the picture i want to talk about this is from 1959 and it's grainy it's also sharp the grain actually helps if you notice when you look at it it seems to have this almost three-dimensional shape yeah do you see that are you very aware that it has a lot of depth to it that's partly obviously due to the lighting but that's also because of the grain that's in the picture but the grain is what gives you some of that shading so i want to talk about noise from a moment i'm aware also before the keyboard warriors get going the film grain and digital noise are not the same thing to a point but they have a lot of similar characteristics about them and one of the things that grain gives you or noise gives you as long as the camera isn't applying artificial noise reduction to the raw file because some manufacturers do that is it smooths out your gradations your tonal gradations and you know that if you shade something the smoother your transitions are between your highlights and your shadows the more rounded something looks and the more shaded it looks so you might have seen when in your own editing even when you get those artifacts in the sky because there's not much information add a little bit of grain to the picture and suddenly it holds up wise because it's smoothing out all of those transitions that picture was shot in 1959 and i don't think that i know many photographers that could match that now here i'm going to show you a direct comparison the up-to-date picture was shot on in 2013 and the older one was shot in 1947. i'll try and hold that up fully for you so that's the modern interpretation on this side here so we can see that the the modern version is definitely cleaner there's no question about that but do we care no why should we the modern version is also sharper do we care about that no why should we i prefer the older version i don't always prefer old versions of things but in this ins in many instances like this the ones that the pictures that last are the better of the bunch if you like and in this instance i prefer the older picture it's just more interesting the entire look of it is better you can definitely get this look from digital there's this isn't a film versus digital thing don't think that in these instances i'm going to show you more now the film pictures are far more heavily edited than the digital ones are the digital ones are much closer to out of the camera 2013 1958 so not only is the lighting dramatically different the pose stronger the styling is stronger but we see that again grainy and a little bit soft does it matter no doesn't matter why doesn't it matter because it's all about mood it's all about what you make people feel with your pictures because if you can't make people feel something it doesn't matter and these things that the camera companies want us to get really excited about such as the no grain and super sharp images don't matter a damn there are certain instances like for wedding photography where some of that stuff matters but for most types of photography this stuff just isn't important and if you're thinking ah is it no it's because you've been told to care about that stuff you've been told to i'm proving it to you now you can bet that these pictures that are from 70 years ago or 60 years ago are going to stand the test of time better than most of these modern ones because look here they are being printed and here's another one 1955 richard avedon most of you won't know who that is he was a famous photographer this next one's from 1949 and it's my favorite of the bunch there isn't a comparison modern pictures go with it but i want to make a couple more further points with this picture so i'll just show it to you now this picture is not particularly sharp at all it's soft even it's not properly in focus it's very grainy and it's full of mood and expression and atmosphere and the things that make a photograph if this picture was shot with a really clean iso cap performing camera with a super sharp lens and was tack sharp in focus do you think it would be as good i don't and the point is this is the imperfections that make things good it goes across a lot of things that we see we see beauty in the imperfections and things it's that roughness that makes things look better the vast majority of the pictures in this world that will stand the test of time have been taken on really old cameras that are not that sharp not that well-performing iso and don't necessarily have amazing dynamic range the bulk of what's out there that will change over time and i'm not saying you can't do amazing pictures on the latest gear but if you're chasing sharpness and iso performance because i think it's going to make your pictures look better i'm telling you that history is not on your side it really is not and the weight of the world of everything that the world loves and thinks is amazing and expressive and passionate and brilliant is not on the side of clinical perfection and you can see this across the board a lot of the best bands their live performances are better than the studio recordings why it's because it's more expressive it's got those little flaws those little faults it's more playful it's not having to be perfect for the recording why do people like records over cds they like that sound of that little hiss and crackle from the record it sounds better sounds more real i'm not saying to shoot film at all i'm not saying to ditch chasing the latest cameras no i'm not saying that i'm saying that when you're looking at something it's got to bring something to the table for you i'm filming this on the canon rp right now i love this camera i think it's brilliant it doesn't stop me producing work that's expressive my point of this video is to make sure that you're not chasing the stuff that the camera manufacturers want you to chase and that you're finding the things that are useful for you i think the stuff that's in modern cameras that is really really useful is the screens on the back now the electronic viewfinders and the autofocus systems that are in them they're fantastic because they really do make a difference and if you want to you can break out of that and use manual focus and get manual focus lenses and stick them on and they're easier to adapt things like that onto which i think makes them very compelling choices what i think is a terrible idea is just chasing massive megapixels silly high iso performance and big dynamic ranges because you think that that's going to be the best thing all the time for you and that's going to make a big difference it just is not and i say this on many of my videos if your picture doesn't make people feel things if you can't express a mood and atmosphere and make people stop and say wow that's amazing because in those pictures i showed you no one's zooming into eyelash to see if it's sharp no okay that's not expressive that's not what things are about people aren't looking at things like that people are looking at the overall impact it's the overall it's not the zoomed in view yeah it's always that overall impact that an image has does it make you feel anything at all later this year i'm going to be taking you along some of my portrait shoots some of my street photography shoots some of my landscape photography shoots as well and i hope you join me for that so give me a like and drop me a comment and if this video has triggered you stop for a moment and think about why has it done that because a lot of people have been fed a lot of information that suits companies but doesn't help the photographers themselves very much but in my own small way on this very small youtube channel i'm gonna try and help to change things a little bit if i can anyway see you again next video take care bye

Channel: Martin Castein

Views: 7,994

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Id: 2iNrNrqppg8

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022