I have recently spent a little time using a point and shoot digital camera, and trying out some of the software options that are associated with this sort of photography, and I got to thinking about what would happen if the same, or similar, processes were applied to a silver image, - a kind of "imitation digital", - the opposite of "imitation film" !

Of course, to do this properly would need an exceptional negative to start with, but just for fun, I used a recent image of a friends car, taken with a 1948 Kodak Tourist, with a hard coated Anaston lens, a triplet. Taken in the evening, I used the maximum aperture of f4.5, and the camera was hand held at a shutter speed of 1/25th sec, and I guessed the distance to the front of the car, and set the front element accordingly.

I've mentioned elsewhere that the Tourist is a wonderful 6x9 folder, so I won't repeat myself here, except to reprise that they are very rigid when open, and have one of the most gentle (and sensible) shutter releases ever made, and being quite heavy, are easy to use at ridiculously slow speeds hand held. But it is not a pro camera, like a Mamiya RB/RZ, or a 'Blad, or a Bronnie, or whatever, and the lens design pre-dates computer designed lenses by several decades, so a long way off what could be done with a good, modern, film camera.

The film was Fomapan 100, a nice, forgiving film, but not exceptionally sharp compared to, say, TMY 100, Arcros, or some of the Rollei branded ex - Agfa aero films. I used Thorton's Two Bath to develop the film, and again although very forgiving of errant exposure, it is a derivative of Divided D23, and contains 85g of Sodium sulphite per litre, so it is solvent devloper, giving soft, low grain negatives, with a good tonal range, but at the expense of low acutance. What I'm saying here, is that this is just an ordinary negative, from an ordinary (67 year old) film camera !!

For anyone without specialist knowledge it is almost impossible to know exactly what algorithms are applied by the software in digital cameras, and even if you knew, it would be hard to replicate them on a home computer in a useable manner, so what follows is wholly qualitative, or if you like, subjective, just my impression of how things look.

So, what to do? Well, I've got the Canon Ixus 960 running on CHDK software, which allows writing and saving both RAW and jpeg files of the same subject, so I took a fairly detailed photo at 12mpx, at an ISO equivalent of 25, and then compared them side by side at the highest screen magnification I could get - I used Picasa for this, but I'm sure there are other ways of doing it. I have a program called Neat Image, which I used to clean up downloaded photos for an exhibition about the Great War, which I staged last year, and using this, I slowly altered the RAW image until it closely resembled the jpeg, although I had to do this in two stages. I then saved the filter settings as presets and simply applied it to the film scan, which was scanned at 2400 dpi on a flat bed scanner, - See, no science, just smoke and mirrors !

Before that, I used Gimp to correct some converging verticals, tidy up the curves a bit, and crop the photo to about 2/3rds of the original, to exclude a parked van, and afterwards, Picasa to remove the many tiny spots that inevitably are magnified when using Neat Image or similar software. Again, I'm sure there are others, but Picasa has a particularly fast and effective application to remove spots and blemishes, and Heaven knows, I need that a lot, so I've become quite adept at using it !

There you are, what a digital image would have looked like in 1948 !! In fact, it was not a coincidence that I chose to use an American camera built in that year, because it was in June 1948 that the Bell Labs division of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) revealed the invention of the transistor, by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain, that was to transform all subsequent electronic developments, and continues to do so right up to the present time, and which made possible all the myriad number of devices we now take for granted, including digital cameras!! Quite a bit of personal warfare went on at Bell Labs during the development, here's a brief outline:

www.pbs.org/transistor/album1