Robert James Wallace – Plate VII from “The Silver ‘Grain’ in Photography” by Robert James Wallace, The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. XX, No. 2, Sept. 1904, pp. 113–122, Chicago.
Toronto. In film photography, grain is the ‘clumping’ of metallic silver created by the development of exposed silver halides. Large clumps were not a great issue when the sensitivity of glass plates was relatively slow and the plates and cameras so big. However, it became an issue when the minicams, 35mm films and 120 films took over the market in the 1930s.
Generally speaking, the greater the film sensitivity, the greater the grain, the lower the resolution and the softer the contrast. before and after WW2 great effort was spent in the darkroom to increase film speed a stop or two and reduce the grain. So called fine grain developers became popular for B&W film (I eventually settled on microdol-x and microphen).
Copy film was very slow but contrasty with high resolution and little visible grain. At the other end of the scale were HP4, and Tri-X, etc. films – relatively fast, soft in contrast (more pleasing) with lower resolution and more visible grain.
When colour film arrived the ‘grain’ was the smallest ‘dot’ of colour dye created by the developed silver halides. In today’s digital cameras, grain doesn’t exist at all (no film). A comparable effect is pixels – the more there are, the better the resolution, etc.
Note: The title of this post is a riff on a Carpenters song called, “Rainy Days and Mondays“, a song I have always enjoyed.
