I've recently restarted studying the history of conflict photography. I'm working my way through the earliest conflicts where photography started to be used (1840s onwards). This morning I was looking at some images from the American Civil War. This isn't going to be news to anyone here, but the level of detail in those early images really is mind-blowing.
This shot is labelled, "USS New Ironsides and five monitor-class warships engaging Forts Wagner and Gregg in Charleston harbor, S.C., in what is one of the world's first combat action photographs, taken in September 7 1863", by Haas & Peale from the Library of Congress.
This is amazing enough.
But if you zoom in, and this may not be so evident in the forum, you may need to look at the original; the detail in the distance is fantastic.
The original:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/cwpb.04748/The advent of 35mm photographic film changed conflict photography significantly. But the grain and the far smaller format had disadvantages in terms of quality. I've not shot large format, would you get the same level of detail from a fine-grained negative of the same size? Annoyingly, the Library gives a huge amount of detail, but not the size of the original.
