Flutterby™! : Sierra Trip 2000-11-28 18:31:54+00

Sierra Trip

2000-11-28 18:31:54+00 by Dan Lyke 12 comments

A few notes and images from my recent Sierra trip are up.

Remember - the right one only comes along once in a long time - many have regretted not grasping the moment. You wrote: "but that reaction still shocks me when it comes up" you intended that as metaphor but am I the only reader to think its more than metaphor? You would be a great dad.

I think I'm getting enough of parent-hood as the "rich uncle", I have a lot of fun spoiling 'em and getting 'em to do stuff their mother won't let 'em do, but at some point I need to send 'em home. I'll freely admit the face isn't a metaphor. That reaction is real (and she might even be reading this), but as I've matured from my youthful exuberance I know that the initial rush isn't sustainable, that there's more to maintaining a long term friendship than the rush of hormones. Similarly, as beautiful as I find that country, and as much as I enjoy trudging through the snow amidst the pines at 8,000 feet, shoveling the driveway and finding a way to make a living in the midst of that rich desolation is would quickly wear on me. So just like parenting I visit occasionally, but don't really want to live there. (And damn that sounds convoluted as heck. Is that thought parseable by anyone who hasn't known me in person for a while?)

Awesome photos Dan, I won't start with the parenting thang again. You can spoil the parts of my kids that I leave unwarped...

Actually, my Digital Elph has a "show 1/3 of the previous picture in the viewfinder" option, and then some post-processing software to stitch such pictures together. I haven't installed their software on a Windows box yet, so I just used Gimp to stitch the images together. If I was shooting with my SLRs I could just crop from the 17-35/2.8 35mm slide kinda the way the APS cameras do it.

Oooh.... Now I really want an Elph. I have an APS camera, which is fun (I've always fallen prey to Kodak's ploys of making photography easy - I used to love my Disc camera). But it's fixed-focus and the resolution of the images isn't that great. Not to mention, the developing costs are high. I like to take lots of pictures and lots of different shots of the same scene. The digital cameras are perfect because you can sit down afterward and throw out the bad shots.

I really thought digital photography was going to take a lot longer to become viable than it has. A good 2+ megapixel digital camera and a decent color printer are already comparable or superior to APS, and given some of the technology announcements I've read, notably CMOS image sensors, I can imagine that within two years we'll be seeing image quality that blows away 35mm film, especially if you consider film grain to be more intrusive than actual resolution (I do). I was thinking about buying a medium or large format camera, but with the way digital technology is going in a year and a half I think the only thing I'd want one for is movements. Hopefully by that time Canon will have introduced the successor to the D30 and I can just buy an EOS mount Tilt/Shift lens.

Everything I've read about the CMOS imaging is that it will certainly drive the price down but the quality will never aproach that of the CCD. Speaking of which fujitsu has an 8 megapixel CCD (should be as good as 35mm film)out now. Hmmm all I need is that super CCD in an ELF size body with one of those sony memory sticks :)

8 megapixels on an EOS mount body and I'd never use film again. Well, modulo presentation technologies, a $350 slide projector's cheaper than a 6 megapixel (about what I figure I get using Velvia, a tripod, and a good prime lens) video projector... I'd also have to have a writeable DVD and a decent image compression system. The only remaining issue is is that CMOS area big enough to cover a 35mm frame or am I gonna be out another $1.4k for a really really short lens? The one thing I really miss with the ELPH versus my SLRs is that wide angle bit...

Well, writeable DVD is here. You can get 2Mp DLP systems. And don't count out the CMOS image sensors just yet. There is some interesting work going on that should give CIS arrays better image quality than CCDs.

I'm sure there will be digital backs with resolution rivalling 35mm film within a couple of years, but I think it'll be another decade (at least!) before I find myself using one. The cost differential compared to a film back is likely to be even greater than it is today, and if I decide to spend thousands of dollars on camera gear I'm going to put it where it really matters and not waste it on a fancy body. I think cheap digital cameras are going to squeeze out APS on the low end, and the expensive ones will probably show up in quite a few studios on the high end, but I have a hard time accepting the idea that digital cameras will kill off the 35mm SLR anytime soon. 8 megapixel CCD, image area as big as a 35mm film frame, $500 - how long is THAT going to take? -Mars

Well, I buy film 40 rolls at a time. $5-6/roll (mail order from B&H plus $8-9 for developing (at Marin Filmworks), so somewhere between $13 and $15 per roll. So before I get anything scanned it takes somewhere between 1.5 and 2 film orders to pay for a $1000 camera body. Right now 3 megapixels in an SLR body that fits my lenses is $2.5k.. I don't remember exactly, but I think that's about what my two 35mm SLR bodies cost combined, and when weighed against the cost of the glass in my camera bag.... Moore's Law predicts it'll be a year and a half for 6 megapixels (about what I figure 35mm is good for, discounting grain), though with some of the things being claimed for CMOS sensors it might be 18 by that time. And digital doesn't have the grain issue, so suddenly 35mm glass can compete with medium format quality wise, even if the lenses can't hold the full 3500 by 5000 lines (On a guess, from experience with 2k by 3k scans, most of the Canon EOS primes and several of the high end zooms in portions of their range can probably hold that, although the quality of your tripod becomes a big issue). Most of the applications I'm interested in photography for end up going through a digital phase anyway. I can tell the difference between a LightJet and a conventional print with the naked eye, but for most people it's just a cool party trick. Of those whose work I admire, everyone but Christopher Burkett seems to be printing digitally, and he uses the full 8" by 10" of his source material. I've had enough trouble communicating printing instructions to labs that I'd rather do it myself, and it really seems futile at this point to set up my own conventional darkroom, especially since I've already spent thousands on machines which run Gimp and ImageMagick. Yes, I'm being optimistic about delivery times, but after playing with the total convenience of digital (it's getting harder and harder to put together a slide show or an album when I can just slap stuff into a web page...) I could see myself ditching film within in two years.