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More photo rambling...W
Jul. 8th, 2006 02:07 amWell, the plan to sort out photographic gear is starting to come together. I have just posted off the cheque for the Better Light scan back (now that my money has *finally* cleared), so the first step of sorting out my large format rig is now in place. I need to look for a view camera on eBay, but that's relatively easily sorted out.
This evening, I met up with Richard Chang, the marketing/tech support guy from Megavision, who happened to be in the Bay Area visiting relatives. I had a fascinating evening, generally chatting about stuff and having an in-depth going over of the Megavision E-series monochrome back. I saw the 11 megapixel version, but I'm almost certainly going for the 16 megapixel square format (37mm x 37mm) image sensor. It's really impressive. Basically, you can get the back either in colour or monochrome form, but the monochrome version effectively has about twice the perceived resolution (though the same megapixel count) due to not having a Bayer pattern or antialiasing filter in place. Richard had it attached to a Bronica ETRS, on which it worked extremely well. The ETRS is a 6x4.5 camera, so the crop factor of the sensor is less significant than using it with a 6x6 body, and all the lenses are a bit shorter in focal length which also helps with this. The lenses are generally extremely good -- Richard rated them as better than the V-series Hasselblad lenses.
Image quality is very smooth. It is possible to get noise, but you really have to push it quite hard to make it visible. The sensor has a 'binning' mode which uses 2x2 groups of pixels as a single larger pixel, so you can run it at 4 megapixel (or 1 megapixel with 4x4 binning) and achieve utterly insane ISO ratings (> 10000 ASA is possible -- shooting by moonlight with daylight-style shutter speeds is quite feasible). Infra red is no problem, you just basically take the back off the camera, undo 4 screws, swap a metal plate that carries the IR high pass filter for an equivalent plate with no glass in it, and you're done. Using an IR low pass filter (or deep red filter) then gives the classic IR look. Apparently, a software update coming up around the end of the year will allow the back to run in video mode, giving a 2 frame per second update rate to the software, so you'll be able to easily use a laptop for focussing with an optically opaque IR filter.
The back runs tethered to a PC via firewire. They recommend (and, having seen one, I agree) the OQO palmtop, which runs the full Windows XP professional -- it's a little larger than my Palm lifedrive, a bit thicker and a fair bit heavier, but it has built in firewire and therefore can run attached to the Megavision back, allowing the whole rig to be used hand-held. It really works -- it does make the more typical approach of dumping images to flash devices look rather lame in comparison. Hit the shutter, and the image is immediately written to disc as a DNG. The software has a very simple interface, and fully supports the zone system (this, apparently, was at Richard's insistence -- he was a pro photographer for 20 years before joining the company in the mid 90s). You basically don't need a light meter at all. Set up a shutter speed and aperture as a reasonable guess, hit the shutter, and the result immediately appears on the OQO. Blown highlights and underexposed shadows are marked clearly on the image itself, so you just basically fiddle with the exposure and hit the shutter to see the difference. The response is instant. The back has a fan in it to help keep the sensor cool, which probably helps a lot to keep down noise, and the images I saw indicated that these sensors aren't amazingly trivial things.
Richard is a pretty damn good photographer in his own right, actually -- he showed me a stack of prints that were all shot with Megavision's much older 6 megapixel back (effectively a 35mm full frame sensor). They were pretty big prints, around A3ish and bigger, covering a variety of genres. He's good, I'm impressed.
He also re-sold me on Bronica kit. I used to have an SQ, the older 6x6cm, 120 roll film camera. It was gorgeous -- no automation, not even a light meter, but the results were stunning. The ETRS is basically almost identical, slightly smaller, with a 6cm x 4.5cm film plane and a pentaprism finder so you can use it like a 35mm SLR. I fell in love again -- these days, Bronicas cost nearly nothing on eBay due to the manufacturer's recent demise, but they are actually rather nicer than the classic Hasselblads. Not as pretty maybe, but a far nicer camera. The shutters are digitally timed, so you don't get the problems that are inherent in mechanical leaf shutters. I had a poke about on eBay when I got in, and easily found an ETRS with a 75mm standard lens for next to nothing, and a 150mm short tele from the same place. Both were buy-it nows, but really cheap, so I went for it. I'm also bidding on a 40mm wide, so fingers crossed. The whole lot shouldn't come to much more than the price of a low-end DSLR with a crappy standard zoom. The back will be a whole other kettle of enchiladas, however... $13,000. And another $2500 for an OQO, but I'll probably just use my Sony Vaio laptop for a while first, because apparently there is a newer OQO due out late this year. Yeah well. It's all a laugh, really, anyway..
One neat thing I like about Megavision is that they are accessible in a way that Canon or Nikon would never be. I asked what would happen if I needed to switch to a different camera system -- Richard said basically that it's no problem at all, then demonstrated removing the back adapter plate from the back (took about 30 seconds) and replacing it, and said that they could supply me with an alternative back without any difficulty.
Next project: find and win a view camera and equivalent wide/standard/tele primes.
This evening, I met up with Richard Chang, the marketing/tech support guy from Megavision, who happened to be in the Bay Area visiting relatives. I had a fascinating evening, generally chatting about stuff and having an in-depth going over of the Megavision E-series monochrome back. I saw the 11 megapixel version, but I'm almost certainly going for the 16 megapixel square format (37mm x 37mm) image sensor. It's really impressive. Basically, you can get the back either in colour or monochrome form, but the monochrome version effectively has about twice the perceived resolution (though the same megapixel count) due to not having a Bayer pattern or antialiasing filter in place. Richard had it attached to a Bronica ETRS, on which it worked extremely well. The ETRS is a 6x4.5 camera, so the crop factor of the sensor is less significant than using it with a 6x6 body, and all the lenses are a bit shorter in focal length which also helps with this. The lenses are generally extremely good -- Richard rated them as better than the V-series Hasselblad lenses.
Image quality is very smooth. It is possible to get noise, but you really have to push it quite hard to make it visible. The sensor has a 'binning' mode which uses 2x2 groups of pixels as a single larger pixel, so you can run it at 4 megapixel (or 1 megapixel with 4x4 binning) and achieve utterly insane ISO ratings (> 10000 ASA is possible -- shooting by moonlight with daylight-style shutter speeds is quite feasible). Infra red is no problem, you just basically take the back off the camera, undo 4 screws, swap a metal plate that carries the IR high pass filter for an equivalent plate with no glass in it, and you're done. Using an IR low pass filter (or deep red filter) then gives the classic IR look. Apparently, a software update coming up around the end of the year will allow the back to run in video mode, giving a 2 frame per second update rate to the software, so you'll be able to easily use a laptop for focussing with an optically opaque IR filter.
The back runs tethered to a PC via firewire. They recommend (and, having seen one, I agree) the OQO palmtop, which runs the full Windows XP professional -- it's a little larger than my Palm lifedrive, a bit thicker and a fair bit heavier, but it has built in firewire and therefore can run attached to the Megavision back, allowing the whole rig to be used hand-held. It really works -- it does make the more typical approach of dumping images to flash devices look rather lame in comparison. Hit the shutter, and the image is immediately written to disc as a DNG. The software has a very simple interface, and fully supports the zone system (this, apparently, was at Richard's insistence -- he was a pro photographer for 20 years before joining the company in the mid 90s). You basically don't need a light meter at all. Set up a shutter speed and aperture as a reasonable guess, hit the shutter, and the result immediately appears on the OQO. Blown highlights and underexposed shadows are marked clearly on the image itself, so you just basically fiddle with the exposure and hit the shutter to see the difference. The response is instant. The back has a fan in it to help keep the sensor cool, which probably helps a lot to keep down noise, and the images I saw indicated that these sensors aren't amazingly trivial things.
Richard is a pretty damn good photographer in his own right, actually -- he showed me a stack of prints that were all shot with Megavision's much older 6 megapixel back (effectively a 35mm full frame sensor). They were pretty big prints, around A3ish and bigger, covering a variety of genres. He's good, I'm impressed.
He also re-sold me on Bronica kit. I used to have an SQ, the older 6x6cm, 120 roll film camera. It was gorgeous -- no automation, not even a light meter, but the results were stunning. The ETRS is basically almost identical, slightly smaller, with a 6cm x 4.5cm film plane and a pentaprism finder so you can use it like a 35mm SLR. I fell in love again -- these days, Bronicas cost nearly nothing on eBay due to the manufacturer's recent demise, but they are actually rather nicer than the classic Hasselblads. Not as pretty maybe, but a far nicer camera. The shutters are digitally timed, so you don't get the problems that are inherent in mechanical leaf shutters. I had a poke about on eBay when I got in, and easily found an ETRS with a 75mm standard lens for next to nothing, and a 150mm short tele from the same place. Both were buy-it nows, but really cheap, so I went for it. I'm also bidding on a 40mm wide, so fingers crossed. The whole lot shouldn't come to much more than the price of a low-end DSLR with a crappy standard zoom. The back will be a whole other kettle of enchiladas, however... $13,000. And another $2500 for an OQO, but I'll probably just use my Sony Vaio laptop for a while first, because apparently there is a newer OQO due out late this year. Yeah well. It's all a laugh, really, anyway..
One neat thing I like about Megavision is that they are accessible in a way that Canon or Nikon would never be. I asked what would happen if I needed to switch to a different camera system -- Richard said basically that it's no problem at all, then demonstrated removing the back adapter plate from the back (took about 30 seconds) and replacing it, and said that they could supply me with an alternative back without any difficulty.
Next project: find and win a view camera and equivalent wide/standard/tele primes.