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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."
imagine penthouse printed out in this size format....
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
...110lbs of camera, vacumpump, sandbags and a specially reinforced cradle? Me think we won't see this kind of sofistication (and stunning pictures) from a consumerlevel camera anytime soon. Or at all, as he rightly points out in the article.
Maybe as well - a 5'x10', sharply focused photo of my own fingertip wouldn't be all that interesting ;)
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Remember them, just another thing japanese business men will have on their keychain in a few years.
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.
Genuine Panorama photo equipment was similar in quality.
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A long strip of negative was gradually pulled slowly across the focal plane as the camera was slowly rotated
The photographs from 80 years ago are staggering in detail.
BTW his , method was replicated using CRT and mirrors with a negative moving along in a long strip to create ultra hi rez newspaper printing plates in the early 1980s. This stuff is old hat.
The reason? The negatives themselves are very tall but astonishingly long.
A modern camera can never be desinged to do that. Its a lost artform.
luckily examples of the photos exist in libraries
if dig camera manufacturers did not LIE and count the colors seperately RGBG (two greens per blue and red) then the megapixels would not be 400% inflated.
a 16 megapixel camera is actually only 4 megapixel
a primitive 33mm negative is 8,000 "pels" wid in resolution.
digital cameras will take years to reach that.
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.
Thats a joke compared to a 40 dollar SLR camera.
let alone a 1930s panorama camera
Wake me up in 20 years when i can finally be impressed.
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.
2.6GB files would be perfect to use as a wallpaper in Longhorn.
--JC
Half analogue, half digital? He's just scanning a large negative, hardly earth shattering.
...
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. --
I mean its not as if you're going to get that sized film in a roll, is it?
Actually, I believe 9" film is still pretty standard for aerial photography. At least in the old days, they had to do so much overlap to compensate for the speed of the plane (vs headwinds) and other factors, they'd only end up with about a 5" square of new data in the middle of a frame, and they'd have to overlap quite a bit to stitch together an accurate map.
Interestingly, this is in part why RC paper was developed. Fiber photo paper stretched and shrank too much, and when you're doing things like plotting bomb trajectories, the accuracy of your maps is pretty important.
Or not.
This sig intentionally left justified.
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..
IMAX is such a brilliant form of cinema but it's really restricted due to film costs. The length of the film (Not in minutes but kilometers) is also a problem that drives up cost. (The Human Boday which just came out on IMAX recently is 12 km long)
If we could digitize the process it would allow for widespread IMAZ screen implimentation. However, due to the colossal massive-ness of the screen you need some hiiiiiiigh ass resolution. You would also need some 30 fps out of the camera, so maybe film will be essential to IMAX in the cmoing years, but we can get there!
I'm sure data storage isn't a problem, but resolution and projection are. I'm not calling for implimentation tomorrow, but the digitization of all formats benefits the art, so maybe a 10-year goal?
The major advantage is cutting out the cost for the film (which is high) and the cost of processing the film. (Also high)
Just think of IMAX pr0n!!! Minka can truly be the number one, asian, big-boob queen.
For example, there is Sinar's 22 Megapixels Sinarback 54
Anyway, the problem with digital photographs is not really the definition, but the very narrow luminance range the sensors are able to record. That's where the photo-chemical process makes a huge difference: it is able to keep much more detail in the very bright areas. That wouldn't matter for advertizing photography in a studio with controlled lighting, but in the real world, our eye sees a huge range, photographic film much less, and digital sensors far less.
Already got one. I have a method of storing in excess of a Gb of information on a 60mmx60mm piece of porous plastic less than 1mm thick by coating one surface of the sheet with gelatin into which is embedded silver halide crystals and certain other chemicals. Currently it's Write Once only (WORM) but given the small size and very low cost I do not see this as a problem, infact given the durability (if stored correctly) of this material I believed that it would be excellent for use as a medium to long term storage solution. No electric power or electronics are required in the storage or reading of the media, although methods using both exist and some users may prefer to use them.
I think I'll call it........film.
Stephen
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