Sebastião Salgado, is a social documentary photographer and photojournalist. His work highlights the lives of people in the poorest parts of the world and the damage to the environment. Being Brazilian, a lot of his work is in Latin America, but also in central Africa.
He was interviewed by Canon a couple of years ago about the part the company played in his transition from film to digital.
He says he was resistant to moving from film to digital but he realised that the world was becoming trickier to negotiate with film with the number of x-ray scanners that film had to go through.
It’s established fact that the structure and grain of film disappears with repeated exposures. And he used fast film, which suffers the most from exposure to x-rays.
Additionally, the film manufacturers were reducing the amount of silver in the film emulsion and he saw that they were not really interested in improving their products and were not putting investment into it.
So, with some resistance, he tried a couple of digital cameras that Canon lent him, and shot them side by side with his film cameras and compared the results.
And he saw immediately that 35mm digital was superior to images from even large format (18 x 24 inch) film cameras.
The problem was that he liked grain, and digital was, as he described it, flat. The film he worked with (Tri-X) was very grainy and he liked the look.
To solve the problem he worked with his team and a studio in France and they solved the problem.
I don’t know how they solved it, but there’s a slider in the ‘Effects’ tab in Photoshop with which one can add grain, and I have never used it until now.
The photo I used for the experiment is one I shot with a Canon EOS R7 outside the camera shop in Cambridge that kindly lent me the camera to test it.
It’s a crop of about one eighth of the full frame.
For this experiment I slid ‘grain’ to the max in Photoshop, and here are the results, one with and one without grain.
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