Photo question for Ed Huntress

Sony's a7 Series actually are mirrorless cameras, Joe. They look like a DSLR but they have a high-res video screen in the finder, rather than a mirror and prism.

But they are full-frame. Both Sony's APS-C sensors, like I have in my NEX-7, and their full-frame sensors, as in their a7 cameras, are 24 MP. What you get with the full-frame sensor is a bit more dynamic range, rather than more resolution.

The few I've talked to are using 24 MP cameras to replace medium-format cameras. A 35mm Kodachrome, says Kodak, is somewhere between 14 MP and 20 MP. It's hard to fix the number because you're comparing grain and circles of confusion (in the film, not in the lens) with pixels, and they aren't exactly comparable. So they tell me. BTW, I asked this question of Ted Gustavson, the film curator at the museum in Rochester, just a few weeks ago. That's where I got it. Back in the '90s, Kodak said that a Kodachrome slide was 18 MP.

I have some photos of a hot-stamping press that I got from ThyssenKrupp Steel in Germany. They were shot with a 6x7 Mamiya with a Leaf Aptus II back. A Leaf Aptus II back costs between $8,000 and $12,000, depending on the version.

Here are the newer models:

They're nice photos, but not that nice.

There are several solutions for 4x5. One is a Sinar back that costs about as much as I paid for my house (if it's still available; it's been around for years now), and another is a step-and-repeat back from one of the aftermarket people that uses a regular camera, overlapping steps, and blending in Photoshop. I've never seen or tried one but I've heard they sell for less than $200. 'Don't know for sure.

IMO, a 24 MP camera with top-notch lenses is more than I'd need for anything.

Take a look on the B&H site, I see a number of 80MP camera bodies available at prices comparable to a nice car.

SLR medium format has, for decades, been primarily a realm for advertising and weddings. Product photography, fashion, display advertising, and commercial photography for collateral (brochures and other printed pieces) are the primary places where they've been used. For a while, well-off amateurs picked up some of them, but lens prices were a killer.

Now, as you saw from those prices, digital medium-format has reverted to those high-buck commercial applications where the fees will pay for it. I don't know what wedding photographers are using now. But I talked to a few industrial photographers when I was deciding what to buy, last year, and they had either moved to, or were moving to, the high end of the small-format cameras.

Even there, the high-end Zeiss lenses that amateurs pine for are on the order of $1,000 each. You really have to shop carefully and be realistic about what you need.

I have a mirror-less camera too, an Olympus OM-D e-M1. Only ~16 Mpix, but I'm happy. I was more interested in the size and weight of the camera, and I'm taking snapshots.

So, the full-frame digitals fall between 35mm and 2-1/4.

I have read about these. Film is (or was) a whole lot cheaper.

Agree. It's still hard to beat an 8x10 Ektachrome.

I remember Sinar. Good camera. Never used one, though.

I'd be suspicious of any solution that involved so much stitching of little images. The eye is very good at detecting deviations from reality.

I've been trying to correct a photo I took of a vertical mill with a wide angle lens and tool little space, using Dxo Optics with ViewPoint. It almost works - I can straighten things out, but it still looks odd. I guess that the amount of correction needed is too extreme.

For industrial photos, probably true. I was wondering about for instance the mainline advertising industry. Think Photo District News.

Joe Gwinn

Yeah, probably. Somewhere aroud here I have some 2-14 x 2-3/4 Ektachromes I shot two decades ago, and Kodak Pro PhotoCD scans I had made of them. Pro PhotoCD had, IIRC, 4,000 x 6,000 pixel resolution. I should pixel-peep them and see how they stack up -- pixels versus grain.

Even with a view camera's swings and tilts, extreme corrections with a short lens look weird..

It's industrial work that I'm thinking about. Studio advertising photography is probably what they sell those Leafs for. Maybe. I'm not in touch with ad photography anymore.

On Sunday, November 30, 2014 11:11:38 PM UTC-5, Joe Gwinn wrote: .

Not for professionals, but I understand slightly insane amateurs are kludgi ng up large format cameras. They are using scanners in place of the film. So they have a large ( maybe 8.5 inch by 14 inch ) " film ". And can use tilts and such to get exactly what they want as a photo.

The disadvantage is of course time. No stop action photos using a scanner as film.

And then there are the astronomers who use software to stack up images to i ncrease light sensitivity without losing resolution.

Dan

How much worse could it be than a bloody fisheye lens?

Yeah, AFAIK, there is no real "un-FishEye" software for correction, and normal wide-angle lenses don't really distort. Reshoot with real lens and merge the 2 photos. Panorama software is quick, simple, and distortion-free.

_That_ old stuff?

Not for professionals, but I understand slightly insane amateurs are kludging up large format cameras. They are using scanners in place of the film. So they have a large ( maybe 8.5 inch by 14 inch ) " film ". And can use tilts and such to get exactly what they want as a photo.

The disadvantage is of course time. No stop action photos using a scanner as film.

And then there are the astronomers who use software to stack up images to increase light sensitivity without losing resolution.

Dan ============ I built an astronomical camera into an instrument that detected very faint infrared from abnormal conditions using minutes-long exposures. The software that came with it subtracted out a reference exposure with the shutter closed to cancel out hot pixels. That application didn't require gamma correction.

Sorry, Joe. I missed that the first time around.

Have you ever shot with an 8x10 camera? I've done it once, when I had my agency and my art director brought in his Calumet 8x10 to shoot a job for Casio. They wanted some Duratrans transparencies for a trade show exhibit, printed 24 feet wide.

Anyway, my AD was called out of town and I had to shoot the 'chromes. The lens was a very wide 360 mm. Even with that, the depth of field was nightmarishly shallow. To get an acceptable aperture without running into color shifts from reciprocity effect (the result of long exposures), I had to use 6, 5 kW incandescent movie scoops. In July, IIRC.

I hate those cameras. I donb't know how Ansel Adams put up with them, except that he was shooting b&w, and the reciprocity at least doesn't screw up your color. If I had to do it again I'd rent the biggest mofo flash units they make.

Some time back I read about some software in Nasa Tech Briefs that was used to fix distorted images. It worked very well. So I bet if you serached the magazine you could find it. I don't remember if it was developed by NASA or if it was available to the general public for free. You should check. Eric

You would need a reference model to measure the distortion from, like an image of a grid.

I attended a lecture by the engineer in charge of correcting the second order spherical aberration in the Hubble's mirror. They knew exactly what the problem was and could partly correct images based on the fact that stars are point sources. The final fixes however were compensating optics on replacement instruments rather than software.

-jsw

a search for "slit scan" and photography will come up with some of these. Some folks move a slit across film, some just us a scanner mounted on the back of a camera.

That guy is confused.

commerical photography is done digitally these day. Yeah, some people may use film every now and then, but that's not how the majority of product type photos are taken.

Computer operated cameras and platforms that spin the product (product photography) around and take photos automatically are not science fiction anymore.

Real estate photos? somebody with a digital camera.

He's a guy with a website. He even admits he hasn't a had a real job in years, and even then it nothing to do with photography in the first place.

website hits and google searches have nothing to do with reality.

Commercial photography is done digitally these days. Read the words carefully if you have to.