Originally posted by sarcastic
In my grandmother's family album there are pictures going back to the 1840's. They didn't have color back then everything was brown.
That is great, you probably have photos made with several different methods, like daguerreotypes, colloidal emulsions (my sister got a 95% score on
her last year of photography at the university because she re-created the colloidal process on painted paper) and other less know methods, there were
many at the beginning.
Some of the photos were brown (sepia) because it was a method that transformed the silver of the photo into silver sulfide, and this is much more
resistant to the passing of time.
Those photographs look better in quality than the stuff NASA has put out from the Phoenix Project already because everything looks black or
pebbly.
Those photos were probably taken with very long exposures, something like 3 to 5 minutes was common with the first photos, and even
after photography became more widespread, a 30 seconds exposure was normal.
Also, the negatives (or sometimes positives, depending on the method) were very large when compared to present day photos and to digital processes.
The photos taken by machines lack the knowledge of the photographer, and automatic settings can not rival a good photographer, and family photos may
have been adjusted at the developing process and/or after the print was made, these things are not possible with the robotic photographers on Mars (or
anywhere else).
I don't think they know how to take pictures or they're not trying very hard.
They obviously know how to take photos, but it depends
on what is the mission's goal.
If their primary objective was to take photos then they could have equipped the lander with a better camera that would take large, high quality
photos.
But then they would have the problem of sending all that data back to Earth, so they should have a different method of sending the data and a large
on-board storage.
Also, something that most people forget (or don't know) is that the Sun light on Mars is much weaker than what we get on Earth (something like 60% of
the what we have on Earth), and that is one more reason why the photos on Mars sometimes are too dark, Mars is really slightly darker than Earth.