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Oh my giddy aunt.
Jul. 20th, 2006 11:33 pmI 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.
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.