http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040525/ap_on_hi_te/high_resolution_camera
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040525/ap_on_hi_te/high_resolution_camera
Interesting and also sad. Sad because it is not until near the end of the article that you see he is using film of a size (9x18) which is well inside the range of 'conventional' ULF! Wouldn't they love to see an image from a 12x24 or larger?
This looks more like a case of ultra-large self-promotion.
And no discussion of lens, focal length nor aperture utilized. The picture looks like a pretty long lens was used due to the extension. It sounds as though he needed a lot of DOF to cover the near-in blades of grass and the mountain 7 miles away. Because it sounds as though he used no tilts ("a dual-mirror device keeps the film parallel to the lens" - I think they meant perpendicular to the lens axis), he was probably diffraction limited in any case. The film flatness solution is cool although I suspect not your normal field work device, but it did help eliminate that source of error. And of course, there is the ever present quality of light that is necessary to truely get high resolution pictures. A grand undertaking nonetheless and it's good to see "big film" getting positive press.
The only trouble with doin' nothing is you can't tell when you get caught up
wow, I loved this bit :
"Some were too small. Others produced only black-and-white photos..."
How can a large-format camera produce only black and white photos ?? Maybe there is something I didn't understand in the process, but a camera produces an image on whatever photosensitive surface you put in it... Don't you love it when news people write what they think and don't know about what they are writing about... Always makes me wonder about all the other news that I don't know anything about and that I have to rely on the news source...
PJ
What a load of crap.....
From the JPEG on the internet, it looks like he has mounted some sort of optical lens in the front, with an accordian-looking light baffle behind it, and in the back is a metal device that appears to hold the film, and then the whole thing is mounted on a three-legged stand. The people at the patent office must still be shaking their heads at the sheer creativity of it.
I checked out his website, and while painfully slow loading, none of the images I saw were in color, and the prints were 17"x36". I think I could manage a pretty sharp 17x36 from a 4x10 neg shot in my poor old Deardorff "accordion" camera. Looks like a lot of hype for a one trick pony to me.
I am guessing he has to use 9-inch film so that he can get color and that he has taken pains to align and flatten the film. OK. I wonder if the resulting resolution is somehow superior to any ordinary arial camera?
Somehow I get the impression that there's a whole lot less here than meets the eye. But I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, so after perusing his website I'm willing to concede that his pictures might actually be better than they look.
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