Oh my giddy aunt.

[compilerbitch]

I was just doing some idle fiddling around with a frankly not very interesting photo I took from my balcony yesterday. It's an awful photo, don't give me a hard time about it, please, but just try zooming in on the detail.

Download here

Warning -- though this is only about a 2.5MB Jpeg, it is a full res 6000 x 8000 image that will require best part of 150MB of RAM to open, so if your PC crashes or your browser blows up in the process of trying to view it, don't come crying to me, OK? ;-)

Tip -- there is a telegraph pole with a transformer hanging off it, and a yellow label. Yes, it's there. Zoom in and you can see it. Oh, and try looking through the bars of the railing at the parking signs.

Tech info: BetterLight back on Cambo Legend, standards parallel, slight fall on the front standard only, about 600 ASA (I think), Caltar 210mm f5.6 stopped down to about f16. White balance set at the preset daylight setting, IR high pass filter in front of the lens mounted in a compendium shade. Small amount of unsharp mask and curves in Photoshop, but otherwise straight out of the box. No retouching or burning in. The camera was focussed on the bell tower using the focus meter facility on the BetterLight software -- basically, this moves the linear CCD to the relevant position and locks it in place, then displays the output as three line graphs with 'sharpness' meter readouts. You basically just tweak the focus to get the spikiest graphs and the highest numbers. It seems to work a treat and is far more accurate than eyeballing the ground glass. Focus seems to be incredibly critical with this sensor due to its extreme resolution -- you can't get away with a sloppy job, so it's good to have the tools available.

Wow, that Caltar is mindbogglingly sharp. Oh, by the way, the Caltar lenses (as with the Sinarons) are all rebadged Rodenstock lenses made on the same production line, so it's probably really an Apo Grandagon or some such. With very minor sharpening (far less than is used in a typical DSLR in-camera), it is pretty obvious that the lens is taking the sensor to its limit, which is quite staggering considering the 72 x 96mm image area. Wow.

PS: Any jpeg artefacts you may see are definitely not in the original image -- I deliberately used a relatively low quality setting to keep the file down to a sensible size.

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Hot damn. :)

And yeah, I can read the addresses on those parking signs. *wimpers*

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

I'm seeing occasional RGB separation issues, most noticeably on the far right, towards the bottom, dark leaves against the light-coloured building (looking CMY). It looks motion-related, as if the channels are taken at slightly different times.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, scanning backs don't really 'do' movement, for obvious reasons. This is the flip side to their extreme resolution. As you correctly notice, R, G and B are taken with three adjacent linear CCDs that sweep across the image together, so they are taken a fraction of a second apart.

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

Whoah.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Impressive.

[debslover.livejournal.com]

verrry nice. Reminds me of my equipment from my Navy days before the digital era.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the BetterLight uses a very similar sensor to the kind used in most imaging satellites. In the case of the scan back, a motor physically moves the CCD across the film plane, but in a satellite, the CCD is fixed and the satellite's orbit handles the movement -- it's known as a 'push broom' sensor.

[debslover.livejournal.com]

I had a nice fixed 400mm for regular use but access to a 10,000 to 1 telephoto with the old Starlight features. Nice to be able to tell the color of a pilots eyes when they are still a mile out.

[k-kojootti.livejournal.com]

OH, that's so cool!!

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

My. Beware of cyberstalkers with Photoshop. :-) Accurate focusing with film traditionally involved a loupe--have you tried that?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I don't currently have a loupe, but I should probably invest in one I think. The BetterLight's focus meter facility is actually better than a loupe in terms of accuracy, but a loupe would probably be better for setting up swings and tilts.

It's early days yet, though. Whilst I know the theory behind using a view camera, the reality is such that I'm going to need a fair bit more practice before I'm proficient with it. It's a learning curve, but it's worth it, I think!

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Actually, it occurs to me that with this thing, I could stalk entire buildings in one go...

[davefish.livejournal.com]

That image is very very impressive. Just so far from what I could ever hope to get from my Canon.

Is it a horizontal or vertical scroll?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Horizontal, i.e. the CCD was vertical and was swept horizontally -- the 4 x 5 back on the camera was in the horizontal position, and the scan back was inserted from the right hand side so it scanned right to left. If you look very closely, there are a few artefacts that result from this. There is a vertical dark streak in the sky to the right of the church tower, for example, and a multicoloured smear on the pavement that was probably from a pedestrian. I'm not sure what caused the streak in the sky, but my guess would probably be a bird or insect passing relatively close to the lens. I suspect that I'll have to make a habit of taking several frames for any important image, and be prepared to stitch them in photoshop later if necessary.

This way of taking photographs is about as far from your Canon in convenience than it is in image quality, however -- I can expect to have to haul a huge amount of equipment, and spend half an hour or more on each image. Still, Ansel Adams famously said when asked what equipment he used, "As much as I can carry!". I'm not sure I'll go so far as to use a pack animal as he did sometimes, though!

I had been thinking about adapting a golf trolley, actually -- the size and weight of the equipment is probably not dissimilar to a complete set of golf clubs, and golf trolleys do make it very much easier to haul that kind of load through about 5 miles of golf course, so it might well work for me too. I'll have to have a look around to see what is available.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Actually I'm talking crap. It's a vertical shot, not horizontal, so the scan back would have gone top to bottom. I'm not sure what the vertical streaks must have been -- I've not seen them on other images, and they aren't continuous so they can't be sensor dust. UFOs probably.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

The golf trolley idea isn't so bad. keris was very amused when I moved in and had a camera case. This was a big old suitcase, jammed to the brim with various camera gubbins.

Though not as much as you will have to carry, my bag still has both shoulder strap and waistband. Having the chouce is very handy, even though the latter does make it look like I have a bum bag on steroids. When I take studio lights around, then I definitely have a big pile of stuff, though I can just about manage it all by myself. Back to the "As much as I can carry" mentality.