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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
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.
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. --
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 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..