Walking across the headland yesterday we came on something I’ve always longed to photograph — bog-cotton (er, Eriophorum angustifolium to you). It’s amazingly tough stuff, but I wouldn’t want to make a living picking it. Its presence, says Wikipedia, “is a useful indicator to hikers of potentially dangerous deep peat bogs to be avoided”. It is indeed: you should see the state of my jeans.
Rock formations atop the cliffs at Muckross.
St John’s Point, Donegal. Yesterday evening.
The view from Muckross beach this evening.
Hmmm… I’d like to try one of these…
A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.
Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.
Examples here. They’re claiming a price under $500 for the production model. It’ll sell.
… in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.
Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link to the background on how this image was ‘prepared’ for publication.
It was taken with that famous Hasselblad that they left behind (to save weight). According to this source it was a special version of the 500 EL strapped to the astronaut’s chest (and without a viewfinder). The film was a variant of Ektachrome 160.
From Technology Review…
Last week, Kodak launched the first ever 50-megapixel camera sensor. While such high resolution goes beyond the needs of most consumers, for professional photographers the new sensor will enable photographs to be taken at an unprecedented level of detail.
For example, in a picture taken of a field one-and-a-half miles across, the sensor would make it possible for a viewer to detect an object measuring just one foot across.
This sort of resolution is only really essential for and targeted at high-end professional photography, in which high-quality images often need to be blown up large. But it could also be useful for some other applications, such as aerial photography as used for services like Google Earth. “The ability to have more pixels lets the plane fly higher, so you don’t need as many pictures,” says Mike DeLuca, marketing manager for Kodak’s Image Sensor Solutions, based in Rochester, NY.
The sensor, which produces an array of 8,176-by-6,132 pixels, further closes the gap between traditional film and digital photography. “We’re really close to how film was operated,” DeLuca says. “It’s very close.” Now, he says, it’s just a matter of the photographer’s personal preference.
I want one! But just think of the RAM, storage and processing power we’ll need downstream of such a sensor.
UPDATE: Richard Earney emailed to say that Phase One have released a 60 megapixel 645 back for medium-format cameras.
Wonder who’ll be first to 100 MP?
Spotted by Tom on an Art trip to London.
The stairway to the Hall in Hertford College, Oxford.
Spotted in Oxford today.