Zoomy zoomy zoom zoom.

[compilerbitch]

Out of This World

Over 70 composited exposures, Bronica/Megavision. (count the doseybats)

Nose Rock in glorious TechnoHyperMegaColour

Better Light Super-6K/Cambo Legend. Never seen before in captivity.

Snow in the Painted Desert

Bronica/Megavision.

(courtesy http://zoomify.com/ -- idea stolen from the Better Light web site)

ETA: As for why I'm messing around with this, I'm about to put a load of stuff up on eBay, and I thought it might be cool to put up zoomable images of some or all of the items. It would be cool for the mixing desk, particularly.

Comments

[technolope.livejournal.com]

Oooh. I like this zoomify thing, and I love the painted desert image! But I can't do it on Linux, and I'd want to host the images myself anyways. Is there some open source or Linux software that'll do that?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I don't know -- if you find any, let me know! I have thought about doing one in Java, possibly with GWT, so it works the same way (i.e. client-side Javascript only) as Google Maps. But, alas, I am horribly lazy.

Actually with Zoomify, you can get a free version (which is what I used), and you can actually host the images yourself (which I did). It has very little in the way of a user interface -- maybe it'll run under Wine?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Did you find the petrified tree? There are a couple of them in the bottom right of the image.

Actually, this image isn't quite right when you zoom right in -- both the back's battery pack and the shutter battery in the camera body were nearly flat, and the temperature was just around freezing. There are some weird artifacts in the image that look like the CCD isn't quite doing what it's supposed to -- a few minutes latter the back refused to keep working and kept coming up with 'shutter error'. It still prints OK though, thanks to the huge resolution.

Actually, all three aren't great at the pixel level, though they all print fine. I blame 'learning curve' -- the top one was one of the first things I did with the digital back, so I didn't really quite have my technique completely down. I probably stopped down a bit too much so lost a bit to diffraction -- you'd never have noticed with film, but that sensor is utterly unforgiving. The second one is suffering from lack of depth of field, I think -- there are a couple of areas that are really sharp, but the rest is a bit soft -- I probably could have fixed it if I'd known at the time, but I was using an older version of the Better Light software that made it difficult to check images at the pixel level. It looked pin sharp on the ground glass, even through a x10 loupe. And again, this was only second or third time out with the large format, so learning curve again.

[technolope.livejournal.com]

Oooh, Wine tends to break things. I have avoided using it for the last 2 years, and those have been pretty happy years.

Making a F/OS version shouldn't be too hard with the knowledge that I have around me. I can write C code to make the multiple levels of images, capital_l knows web interfaces and backend programming, and my brother did some programming for apache back in the day (if we'd even need that).

[technolope.livejournal.com]

Is the petrified tree in the area that looks like the ruins of a greek temple?
I still have a 4x5 Crown Graphic, and have shot about 30 sheets, so I know what it means to have to learn stuff every time you go out.

One of my better shots

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Very nice photo. :-)

The thing you think looks like the ruins of a temple *is* the tree, I think. Bottom right corner -- I think there are two of them, but I've not really looked closely enough to say for definite that there aren't more. I kind of wish I'd shot that scene with the large format now.

[technolope.livejournal.com]

Wow, so that resolution was from a MF camera? Do you shoot 6x9 or something?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

It was shot with a 16 megapixel (4000x4000) monochrome-only digital back (a Megavision E4). I used a shift lens -- I took one frame shifted all the way left, another shifted all the way right, then stitched them in Photoshop to give something like a 6500x4000 image, as I dimly remember. It's not quite the 8000x6000 of the Better Light, but it's not bad, and I think the Bronica lenses are actually somewhat contrastier than some (but not all) of my large format lenses, so that tends to make the images look disproportionately sharp. Certainly prints up to the biggest that I can make with my R2400 are really quite surprisingly sharp, way beyond anything I've seen from 120 roll film.

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

cor blimey missus that's well bonkers

[davefish.livejournal.com]

You've inspired me to try that as well. I've got a webpage working, but it doesn't want to embed into an LJ post....

[3smallishmagi.livejournal.com]

The Internet gnomes say http://brainmaps.org/index.php?p=brain-maps-api