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When 8 Megapixels Just Isn't Enough
squidfrog writes "AP has an interesting article on a half photochemical, half digital process to produce 2.6-gigabyte photographs at 'more than a thousand times the size and resolution of those generated by a typical digital camera for consumers.' 'A vacuum pump ensures that the film is flat to within one-thousandth of an inch, and a dual-mirror device keeps the film parallel to the lens. Sand bags strapped to the camera and tripod prevent the machine from shifting, and a reinforced aluminum cradle maintains the parts of the camera in perfect alignment.' The images are apparently higher resolution than can be reproduced on available printing technology (5' by 10'), but the designer hopes to use an 18' by 36' digital display wall to reproduce the images at their best possible resolution in the future. The camera has apparently only been utilized for landscape photography thus far."
I think it would be kind of limiting to force your focal plane to always be parallel to your film plane. Sure, it works fine for most 35mm SLRs, but when you're working with a view camera like the one the inventor is pictured with, you often find it useful to tilt your plane of focus while keeping your film plane vertical or at some other angle.
Depth of Field is the area of acceptable sharpness, generally considered to be 1/3 in front of the plane of focus, and 2/3s behind it. It's limited based on a number of factors including lens length (and thus, aperture) and distance to subject. If you were shooting a landscape, and wanted to ensure your foreground was in focus, as well as the mountains off in the distance, you'd tilt the top of the focal plane forward a bit, for instance.
Not to belittle this guy's ideas, but going that far out of your way to keep your lens parallel to your film plane, with that type of camera, seems a bit silly.
This sig intentionally left justified.
There is noting digital about the camera. It says in the article that the film is scanned after beeing proccessed.
When i Moderate something -1 Flamebait, why do i not get another modpoint?
5--1 = 6
So, the point of paiting is making something that is as close as possible to a photography?
Maybe it's because I saw a Miro exposition just last Sunday, but the quote gave me a good laugh!
The topic is a little misleading I was expecting that the camera somehow used film to store a digital image (makes no sense I know that's why I was interested). But what is really going on is Ross created a really stable, perfectly focused camera and then scanned the negitive in to make color corrections. The camera is not digital at all.
If he had used photographic plates (i.e. glass covered with emulsion) then he could have saved putting a vacum pump on the thing to keep the film flat. I mean its not as if you're going to get that sized film in a roll, is it? :)
This guy(from the link at the bottom of the article) came up with his own large camera format. But looks like he's found other uses for those big pictures...
Half analogue, half digital? He's just scanning a large negative, hardly earth shattering.
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What is with this freaking diminutive attitude? Is your life so shallow and meaningless that you can't see any beauty in the effort it took to set this up, from a geek angle?
Honestly, this is one hell of a cool project. So its not portable, so what? Its still some interesting science, well applied, to a real-life situation with good result.
The neg size is quite puny really. At Antwerpen Photograpic Museum I saw a camera which was HUGE - as tall as me. Took something like 4 foot negative plates.
Yeah, well while you're all "cool" and "elite" and everything for having visited Antwerp, on the web I saw this... and since it could drive to Antwerp and take a picture of your so-called 'cool place', it shits all over your 4 foot negative plates
Really. What a negative person you are.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Just hire it for a week, its going to be far more cost effective unless you are a pro and need it all the time. mind you they are not portable, they have to be lashed to a laptop with firewire.
Because the images produced are so high in quality that scanning it in is the only way you can realistically actually *DO* anything productive with these negatives once you've created them.
The article seems incomplete. What he's describing isn't that unusual except for the size of negative and that's not record setting. Stat cameras have operated with vaccuum assist like he describes form decades. I used to use one in the mid 70s and it was an old machine. I'm sure he had difficulty working with files of that size at first but technology has caught up with him and a workstation board running 8 gigs of ram would handle an image that size quite easily and other than a beefy video card not require any special or custom equipment. It's not a digital image so I'm not sure what he's doing that is so landmark. As the article points out others have worked with much larger negatives. I recall one who even turned a van into a camera for shooting large format landscapes. Most did B&W but it was primarily for artistic reasons. The images sound stunning but there's nothing new as far a technology. He basically updated an old aerial camera then scanned the neg like everyone else.
You're right. Nothing here is absolutly earth shattering. However, you're overlooking the extent to which the process has been taken. The film flatness is a HUGE issue at the enlargement rations at which he is working. Vacuum systems, while comercially available for medium format, are pretty much unheard of for large format cameras. The mirror alignment check is also a critical detail. Commonly used in telescopes, and within the last few years, enlargers, this is the first camera I have heard of that employs such a thing. Keeping the film plane absolutely perpendicular to the optical axis is, again, critical at these enlargement ratios because even an arcsecond of misalignment will produce visible defocus. The use of aerial film contributes greatly to the finished product. Aerial film has a MUCH higher resolution than standard films. The problem, as stated in the AP article, is using aerial film to reproduce a scene and produce a final print containing reasonable contrast and color values. This is where digital imaging comes in. The negative on the film cannot be used to make a "photo-realistic" print with conventional wet-process materials.
Oh, and it is highly unlikely that he "just stopped down the lens" At smaller aperatures, diffraction starts to become an issue and the resolving power is lowered dramatically. As for the sand bags, their purpose is likely twofold. Well, one purpose, two reasons. Obviously, they're there to reduce movement during the exposure. Part of this need is brought on from the length of the exposure time, but part of it also comes from the maximum allowable movement during the exposure. Take, for instance, the blades of grass. They're x millimeters wide d meters from the camera. From this, you can determine the degrees of arc that a blade of grass subtends. Moving to the back of the lens (inside the camera) you can work from the subtended angle and the distance to the film plane to determine the size of the blade of grass on the film. To avoid triganometry, consider that the entire vista before the camera is shrunk down to the size of the film, a small detail like a blade of grass is really, REALLY small on the film. If the film or lens moves by the size of the blade of grass on film, the blade of grass will be completly obliterated. If it moves even a small fraction of that size, it will be visibly unsharp. There's a reason holography is done on giant, sand filled isolation tables (no, I'm not implying that these photographs are resolved to somthing on the same order as the wavelengths of the light being recorded, I'm just saying thery're out there in the same freaky territory).
This camera isn't a new thing, it's an old thing taken to a place never before explored.
The 20x24 Polaroid is print only. (At least I don't think they ever made any B&W pos/neg film in that size...) I have seen direct color prints made on these cameras in a museum, and the sharpness and color are amazing.
This sig intentionally left justified.
to reconcile photographers about the paper vs digital feud. It sums up exactly what are the advantages of both technologies : film for accuracy and digital treatment afterwards combined to make near perfect prints.
On a smaller scale, I have both an EOS 500N and an EOD 300D, and I use both, but for different reasons. Digital gives me instant verification of my settings and allow me to do lots of tests without burning my money on prints, and my old 500N is used to take the final picture that I will be able to print in large.
To go back to the current topic, it illustrates what direction the digital cameras should take to make film based ones really obsolete: it's all about resolution, although many will say this is false. I agree with the fact that better lenses are far more important than a high resolution, but when you already have a good lens, the only way is to go up in details.
The reason the film is held flat under pressure and the front standard is held perfectly parallel to the film is that when you are doing aerial spy photography in WW2, you want to use a large apeture and high shutter speed. This means that your DOF is quite narrow and if the film and/or front standard is out of alignment, some of the photo will be out of focus. Using mirrors would also dampen/eliminate some of the vibration of the planes at the time. Of course, when using the photo for non-aerial/spy photography, you sometimes don't want everything parallel, because you want to change the plane of focus (one of the reasons for lugging such a large camera around in the first place!). So I would have thought this would be a disadvantage rather than an advantage.
Plus the fact you would have to cut your own film for it..
at that rate you'd need better storage than those 512mb flash cards
or a better format for storing the pictures
Is more important the size of the megapixels instead of the quality of the optical lens? I think the actual cameras needs to improve the lens, because the digital zoom is awful, do you get a good photo if you use 4 or more megapixels with no optical zoom?? I prefer less size of pixels and a greater zoom (4x or more)
This story is supposed to be NEWS, that's the point. Anyone interested in photographic technology will look at this story and think "so what?". I'm sure this guy enjoyed homself building his camera, but pretending that he's innovating is intellectual fraud, and it should be exposed as such.
What's next? A story about some guy who's built a folding PC with batteries and a screen that's about the same size as a large hardback book?
How about a story about the video projector I built out of a Reflecta 35mm slide projector and a Sega GameGear in the early '90s? Not much innovation there, but I was fairly pleased with it!
It's true that he wouldn't be able to fit the image on even a huge flash card. But since this isn't actually a digital camera, that's pretty irrelevant. The image negative has to be very carefully scanned. Once it has been scanned into digital form, it needs many colour corrections and adjustments. The guy says he can only do at most a few of these in a year - it's not like he's taking holiday snaps! :-)
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
How about a story about the video projector I built out of a Reflecta 35mm slide projector and a Sega GameGear in the early '90
Actually yeah, I would be quite interested in hearing about that, since I am of the ilk that whatever physical endeavours a man chooses to waste his time on, its still a lot more interesting than hearing someone shit all over someone else, just because "it doesn't excite them"...
So tell me how you made a video projector. If its cheap, I might yet still learn something from you, even though you aren't being 'innovative'.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Where film has it's advantage is resolution.
Also color fidelity and saturation, low-light photography, slow shutter-speed photography (i.e., those cool pictures of a city at night with all the streaky red lights from the vehicles), medium-and-large format photography (though to be fair, Mamiya has digital backs now for their medium-format cameras), infrared film photography, and lower power-consumption.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
That's a ridiculous statement. First of all, my 6.3 megapixel camera outputs images that are perfectly sharp and full of detail right down to the pixel level, at a resolution of 3072 x 2048. How many pixels is that? 6291456. Sounds pretty damn close to 6.3 MP to me.
Your fearmongering about the Bayer pattern (RGBG) interpolation is unjustified. It's not marketing bullshit to have alternating colors (and double green) the way the Bayer pattern does, it's very much intentional. The Bayer pattern is designed to mimic the way our eyes detect light, and for most people, very professional photographers included, it does a superb job. If you are doing serious astronomical work (one of the few places where the interpolation fails to give optimal results, because you don't want to see what the human eye sees, you want to see more) then the Sigma Foveon X3 sensors may be something you're interested in. But other than that, the cones in the eye are not laid out alltogether in little blocks of RGB. If you want to record what a human being would see if standing where you are, there are people who actually prefer Bayer pattern sensors.
even the best real 1920x1080 camera (the Thompson Viper) can take a phot at that res in one 60th of a second exposure at 12 bits of color depth.
That's ridiculous too. The Sigma SD9 and SD10 using Foveon X3 sensors have 3.4 MP, which is significantly more than 1920x1080. And what does exposure length have to do with anything in this discussion? 1/60 sec? Huh?
Wake me up in 20 years when i can finally be impressed.
Don't worry, we'll wake you up when CDs sound better than records, too. Some people just can't get over the fact that we know exactly where the limits of digital technologies are, whereas the limits of analog don't lend themselves to quantification, therefore people assume that they have no limits and are 'perfect'. Just another form of zealotry. I'd prefer to know exactly where my limits are, so I know when I've exceeded them. Helps me avoid situations where I'm asking too much of the camera and have to try something different (multiple exposures, filter, whatever)
Random and weird software I've written.