Another try on unnatural light which is neither day nor night. This one is a double exposure. I searched astronomical data, looking for two dates/times when the position of the moon at one of them is the same with the position of the sun at the other on the next day. I mounted the camera on the tripod stabilized with additional weights. The first exposure was deep in the night, at about 3:00h, having the moon at the position you can see the sun on the photo. This exposure contributed the lights at the distance, dark blueish sky components, and that redish hues on the bottom parts of the walls. The latter come from the lights in the streets. Then I left the camera on the tripod on the balcony, the whole thing covered with a very light isolating foil and hoped that it wouldn't somehow change its position. On the next day, at about 11:00, the sun was at the same position as the moon the night before. With a correction of -1 EV I took the second exposure. This "overburned" the dark blueish tones of the sky but did leave enough night components of the tones on the sky, so that the mixture of the two resulted in that unusual color. The rest of the photo, especially the town is in such a mixed light too.
Thinking now of how to do the same with multiple exposures at different timesof the year.
BTW, does the above belong to "alternative process?"
Many thanks for the URL, Andre! Really remarkable work! And it makes perhaps more understandable what I try to say: Those photos of Janet are excellent, be it her own children or not! They are photography in its best, as quite opposed to many other "photos" of this kind.
Hi Nick, An interesting conversation. As you say, it is very difficult to do outstanding work of children. The trick is to take something that does catch the interest of people who otherwise might not particularly care to see more family snapshots. If someone can accomplish that, good for them! Please visit the portfolio of "Janet B" for an example of what I'm talking about. http://www.usefilm.com/photographer/93395.html I think that she is one of the best here at creating interesting, outstanding images of her own children. I really like her work. Her images always make me smile, and that isn't all that easy to do sometimes. Check out the shots with the little bug. Also the shots where the little boy and girl are dressed up in costumes. Andre
Thank you very much again for the additional information about the software. Let me first have my experiences (and bad bad failures ;-)) in order to get on the way of better knowing what I am doing when I am doing photography ;-)
My aim is to be able to correct exposure at photo shooting time for achieving exactly what I want to achieve. Thus, it is not only a matter of perfect stiching but much more a matter of perfect lighting when I shoot some single photo of some given scene. I have to exercise that.
To put it again in just a few words, I *must* know and I *will* know (with all apologies to Hilbert).
Zeno was a sophist and the sophism movement was eager to shock people by finding contradictions to common sense. On the one hand, the "common sense" is indeed many times simply wrong. On the other hand, Zeno's argumentation was based on the fact that at that time it was "common sense" to believe that the series sum(1/2^n,n,0,oo) does not converge, since its upper limit of summation is infinity. Notice that this was *believed* but not proved. Much later it was proved that the series does converge to 2. Zeno's argumentation was much like the a priori belief in per se digital superiority of resolution.
As Russel once said, most of the things we believed to be true, proved to be false! I won't accept any "common sense" without a proof. Notice again that without this theoretical frame we wouldn't have even an abacus, and much less we would have scanners and other technology that we use everyday. So, it is really very strange to speak about two quantities, the maximal theoretical resolution of film and of a CCD, and to say which of the two is bigger, without first knowing the magnitude of *both*. A comparison of magnitudes makes necessary the knowledge of two magnitudes before comparing, or else we compare a number to... yes, to what?
The grain that you talked about has a very different reason which *does not* have to do with the calculation of the theoretical resolution of the film. This grain is the result of collective phenomena like for example aggregation and light absorption of the aggregates as "single molecules", that are then much much bigger than the real molecules of the light absorbing substances on the film. I think that more investigations should be made in order to inhibit this aggregation. This should be possible since chemistry does have methods to control reactions at molecular level.
Of course, as you said, when I shoot photos it is the practical considerations that play a role. But the theoretical considerations play a very central role for the development of technology, which could give us tremendous power for everyday usage. Much like today's PCs that have more power than the super computers of yesterday. Nobody would even thibnk of that back in the 80s. Certainly, more power does not automatically imply better photos, I know. But it guarantees the fundamental things necessary to make them. It is necessary but not sufficient, as one might express it mathematically ;-)
To your magnificent scientific essay I can only give an episode from old Hellenic life. One ancient Greek philosopher once postulated the absence of movement. (Zenon maybe). The other said nothing, just got up and started walking to and fro in front of him. The moral – it doesn’t matter what you say theoretically, in our life practice matters more. To be more specific – I have 6 x 9 negative made with a fixed lens camera (I photographed Athens from Lycabethus ten years ago – 100 ISO T-MAX). I scanned it with 2.400 p/i resolution. So it’s about 50 MP. But at this resolution I have more enlarged grain than detail. With 110 mm Nikon lens I could make a number of frames, stitch them together and get much more detail in the long run.
Now to pano soft. I am very happy with Autopano pro. They progress in super great pace. I upgrade now every 1.5 weeks. They upload beta versions that often. That program even has HDR integrated! (HDR – high dynamic range – a way to overcome a well known photo inability to encompass all the difference between light and dark areas). You just bracket, load the frames to that soft and there you have it!
Of course we will not talk only about photography but rather about anything here. I do that myself and indeed it is a great fun factor.
*But* the focus should be photography in the sense that we show at least some kind of interest for techniques/critiques and the like. For me it is very sad to see that the main stream goes more and more in the direction of "just shoot something, post it, and talk about anything but photography".
To make it clear, I re-use the example of the "sweet nephew". I don't have anything against posting good shots of persons. Actually I consider such portraits as one of the most advanced kinds of photography. But the question is: Why do we post such a photo? Is that because we are convinced that it is a good photo, or do we make the mistake to think that the world should feel what we feel when we see some miserable photo of our sweet nephew? You see, the photographer might have some special feelings about persons, landscapes etc, that are of main importance in his/her heart/mind. But the spectator most of the time just can't share those feelings simply because he/she is *not* the photographer. To make it clear, I can't love some kid the way his parents do, and thus I can't "oversee" the photo itself and "see" that kid in my fantasy the way its parents do. So then only thing that remains is to look at the *photo* itself, without any consideration whatsoever about "sweet relatives". In other words, why should I mainly care about the sweet nephew as a *relative* of some photographer and not as a subject of photography?
It has to be understood at last, that when somebody looks at some photo, he/she just can't have the feelings of the photographer him/herself. The only thing that I can see is the photo itself, since for me the depicted persons are de facto strangers. The same applies to any other subject of photography. So for example, I can't be in the mind and heart of some photographer that shoots a wonderful sunset if the photo does not convey that feeling because it is not well done. How am I supposed then to take part in his/her emotional and intellectual process if the carrier of the message, the photo itself, does not transmit a message in the sense of photography? Much more than that, how could we expect to improve our skills this way, if we only "caress" that sweet nephew verbally instead of talking about the photo itself?
Regarding stiching, I guess I am in the phase that you already passed and so I have to gather the experience that you have now. Oh well, the results are of course way not perfect but indeed I learn much more than using software right from the start. However, I *will* use software for that purpose soon. For now, it is much like looking at the results of some experiment (the frames for the stiching) and making my conclusions about what I should have done when I was shooting them in order to achieve unhiform lighting.
Thank you for the message and the in depth information again. And have a nice day!
You lucky guy with your 6x6! I am not a fan of film bgut rather a fan of science. It is simple mathematics/physics that lets you calculate the maximal theoretical resolution of film. But let's take things one after the other. We have two different things to consider here. The first is: How much information is stored even on a frame of film of 24x36mm. Knowing the average size of the "pixel" on film we can do that easily. And the "pixel" of a film has molecular dimensions - i.e- it is tiny compared to the pixel of a CCD. The other thing that we have to consider is how we can extract this information from the frame of film through processing. It is *this* that is a very tedious and error prone task to do! This process takes but a tiny part of the available 200MP. Unfortunately very little interest exists in making this process better. Regarding resolution digital photography has not the advantage of greater resolution per se, but because of the much easier extraction and usage of the captured information.
Of course for a photographer it is the practical usage that counts, since he/she can only work with the real available technology and not with theory. But still as a mathematician I have to clarify the reasons that the 100MP wins: It is not that the film doesn't *have* an extremely high resolution but rather that the process *can't extract* this resolution out of it, since we still don't know of any processing that could accomplish that. I wish they would investigate further in this direction and give us at last all the available pixels on film, just as I wish the 200MP digital camera to be soon affordable for everybody. OK, I am a bit impatient perhaps, but I think that it is also the "pressure" from the side of the photographers that makes companies investigate for further development.
As about the lens: The optical resolution of the lens is *much* higher than that of the carrier of the information be it film or CCD, so it is really not the bottleneck. The lens of a modern telescope can resolve as little as some tiny parts of an angle of one degree out of the 360° of the sky.
In addition, the physics and technology for resolving objects down to the dimensions of single atoms (!) is already available, like for example the electron microscope which lets you see single atoms on the surface of objects. What would that mean if applied to photography? Wow!
-- Continuing in the next message due to space limitations.
Hi Nick, I can chat back and forth with the best, (or worst) of the "social" commentators too :) But when it comes down to it, I prefer to keep the conversations toward photography. So, I do understand your frustration. But we have to remember, it is an open forum with many types of people present. Andre
OK, Nick, now I see – you are a film camera’s fan. I will not dwell into film vs digital discussion here. I can only say, that I have a large 6 x 6 negatives collection. So I can compare a 6 x 6 neg. and a 100 MP image. The latter easily wins. And I doubt that 35 mm camera ever have 200 MP capability. The lens will not comply with that.
I did some manual stitching – in PS I made layers for each frame. Then I converted the upper layer to screen mode (or multiply mode) so that I can see the underlying layer. Matched some points, did some transforming, then back to normal mode. Then “merged visible”. And so on with all the frames. It was an extremely hard and time consuming work. I acquired much experience and got very bad results.
The content of the letter you didn’t get is almost identical with what I wrote about stitching technique.
I didn't receive your email. Could you please resend me that please?
Thanks a lot for the information! It will be a great help for me. I have some comments/questions though, which I write here.
1) OK, but as long as I don't have the software I must do that manually.
2,3) Exactly what I do :-)
4) Yes! But I would like to be able to do that already with the camera at take time, since it is a great knowledge advantage that in general improves skills
5) Yes, I do that.
6) It is not necessary but it makes things much easier, especially when the axis of rotation is adjusted to lie in the plane of the film. Not to speak about long exposition times like for example panorama photography in the night.
7) It is really not necessary as long as we have shifts but not vertical rotations of the camera.
8) Very interesting! I'll download the trials and see how they work. As about scanning, I usually don't scan but use the photos that come after the process on CD, so it'll be OK.
9) Hehe, poor computer ;-)
10) Well, as long as digital cameras do not reach the theoretical 200MP od film I won't buy even a cheap one. And if they reach that resolution some day, I would only buy some that has the most important button, labeled: "All manual" ;-) But for the time bgeing I am behind a middle format Hasselblad that I flirt with each weekend at the bazaar market of Lucerne. 8-D
Thanks again for all the info and for taking the time. Sending you email soon!
No, Nick. I wrote to your email, the one that can be found in your bio. It seems there’s something the matter with it.
All right. What I wrote was about stitching technique –
1. Do not stitch manually. It is like trying to photograph with a pin-hole camera when we have high-tech Nikons. 2. Photograph vertically (start with that at least) 3. Overlap by 50 %. 4. Use manual mode. A must in most cases. Thus you will eliminate light problems. 5. Do one row or several of frames. 6. You may use tripod, but it is not necessarily. 7. You may maintain even horizon in your photos, but again it is not a must. 8. In stitching I use Autopano Pro (http://www.autopano.net/) and PTGui (http://www.ptgui.com/). They cost 130 and 100 USD respectively and they are worth that money. They can stitch hundreds!!! of frames and they do it flawlessly. You will have no light problems whatsoever! The only problem for you will be film scanning. When you move to digital you will see how easy it is to make panoramas or just large dimension photographs. For a try you can go to the above mentioned sites, download their trial versions and see for yourself. Some people here advise using Autostich. It is free of charge but it is too simple and lack some very handy tools. 9. While I write this letter my 3.5 year old computer is busily working on 20 panoramas. 10. With these programs we do not need super expensive cameras in order to make 12 MP photos. We can easily do 100 and more MP with relatively cheap digital cameras.
I hope you will find this information useful. If you want more you may write to my email – panophoto@yandex.ru
You hit another important nail on its head! I guess that the about box is very often used the same way as the comment box is used. Most of the time I can read there things like... introductions to family members in the sense of "that's my nephew, isn't he sweet?" which of course is a tremendous contribution to photography ;-) Oh, and not to forget the many "philosophical" messages that are written independently of any logic whatsoever, in the sense of "universal laws" as if the universe would care about their private fantasies ;-) I know, I am too cynical, sorry! :-D
Thanks heavens there are also many people, like you, that do write real explanations or do raise some interesting questions about photography or thoughts related to the photo in the sense of brainstorming. Let's hope that they will get more.
Hi Valery and thanks a lot for your nice comment and information about tzhe software for astronomical calculations.
I didn't calculated anything but only searched tables that contain dates/times of sun/moon identical positions. Normally I use the program "Starry night". I can find the position of any object on the sky at some date/time but I don't know how feed the program with the found coordinates and let it calculate the date/time at which some other object will have the same coordinates on the sky. I have to read the fff..full manuals, I guess ;-)
I did receive your Email about stiching software - if you mean the message that you wrote here in UF. And I did answer that. Did you receive the answer? If not then you can read it at http://www.usefilm.com/Image.asp?ID=1222333
Nice results from this experiment Nick. The light seems very special and "unnatural" indeed!
There are not many here that go to the trouble of a fully detailed explanation in the About section. Personally, I think it is the way to use this site. I also like to explain myself when there is something different or worth writing about in my images. Andre
Hi, Nick. It must have been quite a hard work – calculating the same Sun/Moon positions. For my astronomical calculations when I need them I use Red Shift 3.0 program. The excellent program I must say. What help do you use in your calculations? BTW, did you receive my email on the best stitching software? Valery
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