Goldilocks camera

Goldilocks and the three cameras:

"This cell phone camera sure is convenient to carry!  But it's so small that certain things are difficult to do..."
"This full-frame DSLR sure is amazingly capable!  But it's so large and heavy that it's not very practical for going out on a jog with a dog on a leash..."

So this time I toted a sort of mid-sized compromise, hoping it would be just right.  At any rate, my six year old Canon G10 wasn't a burden on the trail, even when we (Ziva and I) ran a bit.  But did it add anything to what I could have done with my iPhone 5s?  Well, it was a little better at holding texture in a very bright tree lying across the river.

When we got to my favorite abandoned bridge, I tied Ziva to a post for just a minute so that I could climb through the thorns to a new vantage point.  The G10 raw file responded to massaging in the computer (Adobe Lightroom®) better than jpegs from my phone camera would have done.  I was able to bring out the dark colors and textures, and still preserve the  intense blue of the sky.

On the return trip, I focused on a white tree against the deep blue sky, and used the exposure compensation dial (-2/3) to bias for the highlights instead of the shadows.  This gave me the tones I wanted in the tree, and richened the sky.

After all this, I still grabbed "baby bear" (iPhone) for a quick sunset snap today.  The trees were going to be silhouetted, so the dynamic range of the sky was not too challenging for the tiny digital sensor.    I tapped the brightest part of the scene to be sure the yellow, orange and pink areas would not be overexposed.  It's not the Grand Canyon, there's no view of the horizon, but I'm glad for every colorful sky that I get to see.

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2014/12/goldilocks-camera.html

www.jilcp.com

Talpidalpinism

Talpidalpinism, or, which is more important: lens resolution or camera pixel density?
What is that word?! Don't bother looking it up, I coined it from the mole family (talpida) and mountaineering (alpinism). Definition (according to me): making mountains out of molehills.

Perhaps because digital photography only began to appear in affordable form generations after film photography had matured and set "standards" for technical quality, and perhaps also because viewers of photo prints could judge the "sharpness" and detail of a print in what was thought to be an objective manner, those characteristics were treated differently (by many, perhaps most of us) from others like color and tonality (which could be considered matters of artistic taste, even though they could be measured just as objectively as resolution of detail).

At any rate, when digital cameras began to proliferate around the turn of the millennium, advertisers latched onto the number of pixels as a selling point, and the general consuming public readily accepted "how many megapixels?" as the measure of a camera's goodness. It's true that an image formed of, let's say, only a few thousand pixels will make its digital origins obvious to the naked eye, and until you get to the level of a few million pixels, a print of wall hanging size cannot have the clarity and detail that we expect from a photograph. By the time you are in megapixel range, though, all of the other characteristics of an imaging device become just as important as pixel count, in my opinion.

Which is more important, the lens or the imaging sensor? Both are necessary to make a photograph, and the technical quality of the result will depend on their interaction. If they are leagues apart in their capability, the quality of one may be wasted by the shortcomings of the other, but in the case of most "serious" cameras and their interchangeable lenses, it would be foolish to decide that a given lens is too good for a certain camera, or that a certain camera has too much resolution for its lens. It's a partnership, and the skill and care of the photographer also has to be maximized to get the most from the equipment.

And when you come down to an actual image, what matters most is content, composition, lighting, and the emotional communication that can result. Film, digital, paint, all influence how we craft things and the decisions we make along the way, but it always starts with seeing.

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2013/08/talpidalpinism.html

www.jilcp.com