Macro lenses are for pansies

[Simplicius]

Why do it the easy way when you can load a gawdawful heavy contraption on to your flimsy tripod?



I got bored tonight, so I dug out my Auto Bellows and a little fossil, set up some direct lighting, and snapped away. What I took away from this adventure:

1. Razor-thin DoF is hard as hell to work with, and if your subject has any thickness at all you are screwed. Also, if your tripod can't hold a steady angle, you are screwed.

2. Lightweight tripods aren't worth the cost savings, not when they don't lock on the Y axis, have spirit levels for only two axes of movement, and start to quaver under anything heavier than an SLR body and a modest long-focus lens.

EDIT: and I did it wrong, too: "Auto" bellows means I could have stopped down the lens using my double cable release, and made life a little easier. Damn it.

...That's three rolls in the works and five waiting for development, for anyone keeping score.

[Phantasee]

how quaint

how many megapixels?

[Drooling Iguana]

I was expecting this thread to contain pictures of flowers taken through a macro lens.

[Instant Sunrise]

The real question on everybody's mind: How many bokehs does it have?

[Bounty]

There's a photo-a-day thread in AMP, wasting away from lack of attention, and you dump this in Testing? Bah I say. Bah indeed.

EDIT: and I did it wrong, too: "Auto" bellows means I could have stopped down the lens using my double cable release, and made life a little easier. Damn it.

You can set aperture with a cable release? How does that work?

[Simplicius]

how many megapixels?

Don't you know that analog photography has infinite megapixels?

The real question on everybody's mind: How many bokehs does it have?

Five in the body, but my Super-Takumars give me an extra bokeh in the proper lighting.

There's a photo-a-day thread in AMP, wasting away from lack of attention, and you dump this in Testing? Bah I say. Bah indeed.

Sir, I am paying close attention to the photo-a-day thread, and I assure you that I will contribute again to it at the moment - the very moment - I possess new photographs which meet my standards of Top Quality. This mere flaunting of hardware doesn't begin to approach the lowest bar I have set for material that, at day's end, will hopefully delight and edify the viewing public.

You can set aperture with a cable release? How does that work?

It's so simple and clever that I dare use the word fiendish. The lens attachment has a connection for a cable down below; when depressed, the cable pushes a little paddle in the housing of the lens attachment. This actuates the pin on the lens which auto-stops the lens at the same time as the shutter is half-depressed and the meter activated - in short, exactly how the camera would stop down for metering, but by proxy. The setup looks like this:



I could set the lens on Manual and select my aperture without needing the extra connection, but that wasn't working well the other night, and it's also easier to set up the photo wide-open and then stop down to preview the shot.

[YT300000]

how many megapixels?

Don't you know that analog photography has infinite megapixels?

Well 35 mm film stock is the equivalent of 15/16 megapixels, but who's counting anyways?

[Ford Prefect]

uh ooooooh

someone just got told

[Zablorg]

how are we supposed to know how many megapixels there are other than the designers word?

is someone seriously going to count them all

[The Grim Squeaker]

how are we supposed to know how many megapixels there are other than the designers word?

is someone seriously going to count them all

Yes.

This is SDN. Quantify it. Or thread lock.

[Bounty]

It's so simple and clever that I dare use the word fiendish. The lens attachment has a connection for a cable down below; when depressed, the cable pushes a little paddle in the housing of the lens attachment. This actuates the pin on the lens which auto-stops the lens at the same time as the shutter is half-depressed and the meter activated - in short, exactly how the camera would stop down for metering, but by proxy. The setup looks like this:

Ah, it's that peculiar SLR habit of stopping down the lens after compositing? The setup is pretty clever indeed. So you still set the aperture on the lens, you can just switch between that aperture and wide open with the cable release?

[Phantasee]

what is a bokeh?

[Simplicius]

Bumping this to AMP.

Well 35 mm film stock is the equivalent of 15/16 megapixels, but who's counting anyways?

That's only an optimal figure, though, using a fine-grained film, good lenses, etc. You could probably exceed it by a small factor with something like Kodachrome 25, assuming you could get it. Conversely, a good exposure with good lenses on ASA 400 film is probably about half that figure, based on my own haphazard test. (Direct comparison: a scan of a 35mm color negative at 4800 PPI displays roughly the same sharpness at 50 percent as a photo taken with a 7.1 MP pocket digital at 100 percent; pixel-in-image figures are 7.58 million [scaled] and 7.08 million pixels, respectively - but the 3:2 ratio of 35mm encompasses an area about 13 percent larger than the 4:3 ratio used by the pocket digital when scaled to the small side.)

Megapixel resolution as a means of comparing film and digital is basically a penis-measuring contest between fanboys, though, since absolute resolution only determines the degree of enlargement possible, and the size of the final print is a presentation decision alongside matting and framing; not every photo is best displayed at maximum enlargement. If you are cropping so severely that you have to blow up small portions of the frame to get an appropriately-sized print, then you are doing it wrong. In the digital realm, sensor size is more important than absolute MP count, as older model DSLRs still beat the pants off of new pocket digicams or bridge cameras with higher MP counts on smaller sensors and smaller lenses. Color rendition and acutance are also important factors at any resolution.

But LOL@you for taking seriously a sentence containing the phrase "analog photography."

what is a bokeh?

It's the term for the effect of an unfocused lens at wide apertures, for instance the background of Death's tomato photo in the photo-a-day thread. I think it's wanked a bit as an artistic quality, and it's not good as a subject in and of itself, but it remains true that some lenses look better when wide open than others do.

[YT300000]

But LOL@you for taking seriously a sentence containing the phrase "analog photography."

I wasn't taking it seriously! Honest...

The issue is pretty much irrelevant unless you need a basically wall-sized print, anyways. I once took a group photo (~ 10 people) on my 8 megapixel DSLR, and I could effortlessly crop out a portrait for each of them of the same image quality as if they had been the subject (ignoring possible fuzziness due to DOF-based focusing, obviously).

[Phantasee]

So if I was looking for a movie poster-sized print, what camera should I be looking for?

[YT300000]

So if I was looking for a movie poster-sized print, what camera should I be looking for?

Any cheap DSLR should be sufficient for that, and the 7-8 mp that is standard nowadays is virtually overkill for that task. Just be sure to properly set the ISO and aperture, clean your lens, and all the usual things.

[Simplicius]

So if I was looking for a movie poster-sized print, what camera should I be looking for?

It depends. According to the Gigapixl project site, human vision needs at least eight square inches to see a megapixel's worth of information. Assuming by "movie poster" you mean the 22" x 28" half-sheet, that's a job for a 77-megapixel digital camera if you want to do it in one shot, or a lot of careful shooting and stitching with a digital camera that actually exists. A 16-MP DSLR could give you a 16"x8" image, for instance, so you could assemble a large print with a relatively small number of images - maybe between 10 and 20 to make the stitching as good as possible, but that's a wild guess on my part.

As far as film cameras go, you could hypothetically assemble that same image from a slightly larger number of 35mm frames, if you use a fine-grained film, have good clean lenses, and drum scan to get ~12 MP of information from each frame. But assuming that the resolution of 135 film scales linearly as format increases, you could get ≤49 MP with 6x6 medium format or ≤73 MP for 6x9 medium; and ≤190 MP, ≤333 MP, and ≤761 MP for 4x5, 5x7, and 8x10 large format respectively.

From that, we conclude that it should be almost possible to get a 22" x 28" print from a single 6x9 medium-format negative, which is what my Zeiss Ikon Nettar uses. The difference would be somewhere in the order of only 32 square inches. Meanwhile, a 4x5 large format camera should be able to generate a print almost 250% larger than the half-sheet poster, assuming of course a sufficiently high quality film, lens, shot, and scanner.

It's worth noting that the folks at Gigapixl, who use a 9x18 format camera built around an aerial reconnaissance camera, are working to maximize resolution and have pushed well past the 1,000 megapixel mark, and they apparently remain limited by scanning and printing technology rather than the absolute resolution of their film.

[Simplicius]

Although that's actually a bit of a best-case or near-best case scenario. Let's be more conservative and say that we're more likely to get 7 MP out of a 135 frame, as happened in my rough comparison. Then it scales like this:

135 = 7 MP = 56 sq. in. = 9% of a half-sheet
6x6 = 29 MP = 232 sq. in. = 38% of a half-sheet
6x9 = 44 MP = 352 sq. in. = 57% of a half-sheet
4x5 = 111 MP = 888 sq. in. = 144% of a half-sheet
5x7 = 194 MP = 1552 sq. in. = 251% of a half-sheet
8x10 = 444 MP = 3552 sq. in. = 577% of a half-sheet

A 16-MP DSLR could give you a 16"x8" image

Ignore this. I was so concerned with factoring 128 sq. in. that I forgot that a DSLR will give you either 1.5:1 or 4:3 aspect ratios, not 2:1. The salient point is that 16 MP gives 128 sq. in., though, which is almost 21% of a half-sheet poster.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Bumping this to AMP.

Well 35 mm film stock is the equivalent of 15/16 megapixels, but who's counting anyways?

That's only an optimal figure, though, using a fine-grained film, good lenses, etc. You could probably exceed it by a small factor with something like Kodachrome 25, assuming you could get it.

Or Velvia 50/100, which you can get, easily. Provia 100 is not too far behind either. You also can exceed it quite handsomely by using slow B&W film. Kodak Tech Pan would be the "difficult to get" example, Rollei ATP 1.1 or Adox CMS the easier to get examples, from Germany of course. Adox CMS is made by Agfa, by the way. Not the dead German AgfaPhoto but the very much alive Belgian Agfa-Gevaert. They just don't sell films for consumers and instead sell it to Fotoimpex in Germany, the owner of the Adox brand. It was developed for aerial photography and it's still used for that.

It is perhaps telling that with those films the diffraction limit is somewhere about F/4. It means that only the best of lenses are good enough to be used with them, if you want maximum resolution, considering that most lenses don't reach their best resolving power until F/5.6 or F/8. The only catch with those slow B&W films is that they really are quite slow by modern standards, typically exposed at EI 32 or less.

Conversely, a good exposure with good lenses on ASA 400 film is probably about half that figure, based on my own haphazard test.

Would again depend on the film. Provia 400X will give you significantly more resolution than a consumer ISO 400 color negative. Professional ISO 400 color negatives would be somewhere in between. But in general the resolution would be much less than on ISO 100 films, of course.

Megapixel resolution as a means of comparing film and digital is basically a penis-measuring contest between fanboys, though, since absolute resolution only determines the degree of enlargement possible, and the size of the final print is a presentation decision alongside matting and framing; not every photo is best displayed at maximum enlargement.

Yes, it's basically all just measurberation. You are forgetting one thing about maximum enlargement size though: granularity ("grain"). Digital images from DLSRs typically have very little noise compared to the granularity of film, which makes bigger enlargements from digital possible without the noise being intrusive. That's the main reason why the majority of people think that digital is better. Subjective image quality has very little to do with resolution and a lot to do with noise/grain.

But LOL@you for taking seriously a sentence containing the phrase "analog photography."

I prefer "film photography" or "chemical photography" over "analog photography", unless you really mean strictly analog workflow by the that. Most people use a hybrid workflow (i.e. scanning the film) , even when they talk about "analog photography". Not the people at APUG though; when they say analog, they really mean it.

what is a bokeh?

It's the term for the effect of an unfocused lens at wide apertures, for instance the background of Death's tomato photo in the photo-a-day thread. I think it's wanked a bit as an artistic quality, and it's not good as a subject in and of itself, but it remains true that some lenses look better when wide open than others do.

Bokeh can be important in some cases, but without the Japanese we would not have a word for it and probably only a particularly bad bokeh would invite attention. It pretty much used to be that way until the 1990s. Bokeh was rarely tested in non-Japanese lens tests before that, although the testers might make a note of very bad looking out-of-focus areas.

[Simplicius]

Or Velvia 50/100, which you can get, easily. Provia 100 is not too far behind either. You also can exceed it quite handsomely by using slow B&W film. Kodak Tech Pan would be the "difficult to get" example, Rollei ATP 1.1 or Adox CMS the easier to get examples, from Germany of course. Adox CMS is made by Agfa, by the way. Not the dead German AgfaPhoto but the very much alive Belgian Agfa-Gevaert. They just don't sell films for consumers and instead sell it to Fotoimpex in Germany, the owner of the Adox brand. It was developed for aerial photography and it's still used for that.

It is perhaps telling that with those films the diffraction limit is somewhere about F/4. It means that only the best of lenses are good enough to be used with them, if you want maximum resolution, considering that most lenses don't reach their best resolving power until F/5.6 or F/8. The only catch with those slow B&W films is that they really are quite slow by modern standards, typically exposed at EI 32 or less.

Velvia 50 is the film used in most of the digital vs. film comparisons that I read for this thread, so I assumed it was the film used to get the 15-16 MP figure and tried to think of something that might top it.

I have yet to use much by way of slow film, since I've only been doing this for a couple of years, though I think it's preferable for the kind of things I photograph. I've got a roll of Ilford Pan-F 50, which is the slowest I've ever seen in any of the stores in my area, but I do see that the Rollei 25s can be had by mail order from B&H.

Yes, it's basically all just measurberation. You are forgetting one thing about maximum enlargement size though: granularity ("grain"). Digital images from DLSRs typically have very little noise compared to the granularity of film, which makes bigger enlargements from digital possible without the noise being intrusive. That's the main reason why the majority of people think that digital is better. Subjective image quality has very little to do with resolution and a lot to do with noise/grain.

I figured it was sort of implied, since film grain is the main limiting factor of film resolution, and thus of enlargement - isn't it? The maximum resolution of a given film stock should relate directly to the degree of enlargement possible before sharpness starts to drop off, since after that point the amount of information displayed in the photo is constant and enlargement only stretches it out - like up-scaling a digital image.

I prefer "film photography" or "chemical photography" over "analog photography", unless you really mean strictly analog workflow by the that. Most people use a hybrid workflow (i.e. scanning the film) , even when they talk about "analog photography". Not the people at APUG though; when they say analog, they really mean it.

The only reason I care to make fun of the phrase "analog photography" is because it's been seized upon by trendsters who want to seem cool by defining themselves as "not-digital" because that's what "everyone else" uses. They might as well suck it up and say "film photography," because they don't use anything more unusual.

Bokeh can be important in some cases, but without the Japanese we would not have a word for it and probably only a particularly bad bokeh would invite attention. It pretty much used to be that way until the 1990s. Bokeh was rarely tested in non-Japanese lens tests before that, although the testers might make a note of very bad looking out-of-focus areas.

I have the impression that there is a definite preference for softness scattered around the Japanese photographic world, though it's not a body of work I'm terribly familiar with, while the legacy of the Pictorialists is minimal at best over here.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Velvia 50 is the film used in most of the digital vs. film comparisons that I read for this thread, so I assumed it was the film used to get the 15-16 MP figure and tried to think of something that might top it.

Everything I have read, including tests made by Zeiss (who still uses film for lens testing, since digital sensors can't compete with B&W film) indicate that Velvia 50 and 100 have at least as good resolution as Kodachrome 25. There is no difference in resolution between Velvia 50 and 100, only the color rendition is slightly different with the latter being a tiny bit less crazy (but still way too saturated for my taste). The 15-16 MP figure appears in some older tests made with consumer level scanners (which include even the Nikons and Minoltas), but tests made with Imacon/Hasselblad Flextights or drum scanners capable of more than 5000 spi true optical resolution give higher numbers, up to 20 MP.

I have yet to use much by way of slow film, since I've only been doing this for a couple of years, though I think it's preferable for the kind of things I photograph. I've got a roll of Ilford Pan-F 50, which is the slowest I've ever seen in any of the stores in my area, but I do see that the Rollei 25s can be had by mail order from B&H.

Photoimpex in Berlin ships worldwide as well:

http://www.fotoimpex.de/anglicus/index.html

I figured it was sort of implied, since film grain is the main limiting factor of film resolution, and thus of enlargement - isn't it? The maximum resolution of a given film stock should relate directly to the degree of enlargement possible before sharpness starts to drop off, since after that point the amount of information displayed in the photo is constant and enlargement only stretches it out - like up-scaling a digital image.

The relationship between granularity and resolution is not direct. For example Fuji Astia has a smaller RMS granularity than Velvia, but lower resolution. The visible grain is actually a kind of noise pattern and not really part of the actual image.

The only reason I care to make fun of the phrase "analog photography" is because it's been seized upon by trendsters who want to seem cool by defining themselves as "not-digital" because that's what "everyone else" uses. They might as well suck it up and say "film photography," because they don't use anything more unusual.

Yes, glass plates are pretty rare these days. They are mostly used by people who cook their own experimental or historic B&W emulsions. There are some of them in APUG as well...