Want – Need – Afford

[Mark D Segal]

The Betterlight backs take 35 to 110 seconds for full res, and the Seitz about a couple of seconds - fast enough to only slightly blur water spray... not fast enough to catch a vaulter in flight.

OK, don't know why, but I was thinking of the performance of my film scanner when I wrote that. This is a different technology and different league.

[elf]

Are you saying the above image was a composite of 750 total images, just to get the 1 final image above? That sure seems like a lot of work. Don't you have just 1 image that could have sufficed and been as clear as the above composite?

I am trying my hand at photographing flowers myself (wildflowers, naturally, not set-up studio shots), and I do agree with Dick that they can be very difficult, especially since it is always windy ... however I pretty much just throw away the bad shots and keep the good ones. I try to take pride in getting one stellar shot, as opposed to Photoshopping 20 bad ones together to get 1 good one. For example, I took the photo below of a Trumpet Vine with just one shutter actuation, one 'sharpen', and a '10% saturation' on Photoshop, and that's it.

So I am not sure what advantage taking ten dozen shots, and then stitching them all together, would confer upon me. Or is the advantage in stitching files together, basically, the fact that if I took this same photo in (say) 4 distinct quadrants, and then stitched-up each quadrant together to become a (now) 4x-bigger file, that I would then be able to make a 4x bigger final print? Pardon my ignorance, as I am still learning, but if this is so it is a great lesson learned today.

Yes to the last question and this is true for any stitched image. The single image will also lack the detail of the stitched image.  The difference between just printing large and printing large at high resolution is the viewing distance can be the same as for an 8x10.  Flowers are only marginally easier to shoot in a studio, they still move quite a bit over time.

The FOV of the flower shot at this magnification (2.5X) is larger than even the P65+ can manage in a single image. It would require fewer frames, but the focus stacking would require the same amount of images for the DOF. Each individual image has a DOF that is a fraction of millimeter.
A single image shot at a smaller aperture could not begin to have the same DOF and diffraction would eliminate a lot of the fine detail.

This was shot with an Olympus e330, using a reversed El-Nikkor 50mm f/2.8 at f/5.6 on a custom bellows setup: http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=34499. It took around four hours to take all of the images.

I can't quite get my mind around that. The flower is beautiful, but you took 750 shots of it?? Can you show us a 100% crop? Did you removed it from its natural setting and shoot it in the studio?

At full print size, is it clear that this is a macro image? As shown in your post, it's not clear. It could be a single shot of an unidentified flower at F16 with an APS-C camera.

The first shot of what appears to be a dead insect is not nearly as inspiring.

Yes, it was shot in the studio and macro panoramas are hard to show on the web because they look like a normal image.  The dead fly was shot more for seeing what the resolution of my setup was compared to others shooting with the same lens.  I don't think it will ever hang on the wall
Here's a 100% crop of the flower:


And here is a Deep Zoom (Requires Silverlight 2 to be installed).  The max zoom level is around 150%, so you can see all of the imperfections.  
http://www.efrench.members.winisp.net/fuchsiaDZ/fuchsia.htm

Both of the bug and flower images were focus stacked with Zerene Stacker and stitched with Microsoft ICE.  Both of these programs are very automatic, so most of the time involved to create the images was simply and repetitively clicking the shutter.

[Bill VN]

$15,000 for a slow scan back with less res than a H3D11-60 (or P+65)... are you kidding?

9,000 * 12,000 pixels would give a nice 24 * 35 " print @ 360 ppi, an be useful for some landscapes, and save stitching 2 shots.

By the way, the pixel count of the BetterLight back you mention is 9,000 x 12,000 x 3 = 324 megapixels, which is way beyond any MF digital back. And BetterLight provides a panoramic stitching accessory as well!

[Dick Roadnight]

By the way, the pixel count of the BetterLight back you mention is 9,000 x 12,000 x 3 = 324 megapixels, which is way beyond any MF digital back. And BetterLight provides a panoramic stitching accessory as well!

I think the native maximum resolution is the real figure, and the "megapixel rating" is the result of "funky" arithmetic... look at the print sizes they quote.

[Christopher]

By the way, the pixel count of the BetterLight back you mention is 9,000 x 12,000 x 3 = 324 megapixels, which is way beyond any MF digital back. And BetterLight provides a panoramic stitching accessory as well!

wellor not. I don't think it is such a difference.

[BlasR]

wow 750 shots, !!!

4 hours.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

did you have coffee next to you or wine ?

here is one, only one shot, ranning, cold, wind blowin, handheld, coffee in my other hand, plus 4 kids pulling my pants

and my wife screaming "let's go"

BlasR

[Tyler Mallory]

I know it's not a BetterLight, and it's focus range is pretty limited, but the price tag is pretty reasonable. My flatbed scanner is my poor man's scanning back. Big juicy files for about $120.

[JohnKoerner]

Yes to the last question and this is true for any stitched image. The single image will also lack the detail of the stitched image.  The difference between just printing large and printing large at high resolution is the viewing distance can be the same as for an 8x10.  Flowers are only marginally easier to shoot in a studio, they still move quite a bit over time.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer in so detailed a manner; it has helped me appreciate the value of stitching. I realize many try to take so many photos, and stitch, to try to get a uniform level of clarity across the whole image (or to work on different exposure levels on different parts of the image), I never really thought about the advantage from a sheer "size/quality" standpoint, until reading some of Ray's remarks.

That being said, and with all due respect, there is no way a studio-placed flower moves with anywhere near the frequency, or the drama, as a wildflower. I would say not even remotely close, otherwise what would be the point of studio conditions? Sure, over time (taking 700 photos), a studio flower would doubtless have some subtle movement ... but please ... it would still be not approach anywhere near the movement of a wildflower, outside in the wind, being subjected to those same 4 hours and 700 photos.

The FOV of the flower shot at this magnification (2.5X) is larger than even the P65+ can manage in a single image. It would require fewer frames, but the focus stacking would require the same amount of images for the DOF. Each individual image has a DOF that is a fraction of millimeter.

I absolutely can see the value in stacking and stitching to create a larger file, so that one can print a much larger final overall image, but for average-sized prints I don't see any real qualitiative advantage in your posted 100%-crop image over this 100%-crop of mine:





I am sure that at 44" yours would have an advantage, but I would say mine would remain excellent up to 24" x 36", so I suppose stitching would have value to me only if I forsaw an image being good enough to warrant a 44"+ blowup.

A single image shot at a smaller aperture could not begin to have the same DOF and diffraction would eliminate a lot of the fine detail.

Well, again, my image was taken with a single shot and I feel (even at a 100% crop) that the detail stands up quite well to yours. Perhaps it is not perfecto, or at the level of a P-65, but it is still very clear, and I can't imagine doing much better than that, even after 4 hours and 700+ shots. I have attached a 1/4-size reduction of the full image below, but believe me it is just as clear at 100% as relayed above. That being said, I do wish I had taken the same photo in 4 quadrants, and stitched them together, if for nothing else that I could make an even larger print than I can now.

This was shot with an Olympus e330, using a reversed El-Nikkor 50mm f/2.8 at f/5.6 on a custom bellows setup: http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=34499. It took around four hours to take all of the images.

My shot was taken with a Canon 50D using a Canon 100mm USM Macro lens, f/18, ISO 100, with a MT-24 MacroRinglight Flash, and it took me less than 5 minutes to get the composition and actuate the shutter. If I feel I have a really nice photographic opportunity, I will probably make a habit of incorporating many different shots of the same subject in preparation for a much larger composite file, specifically for printing purposes, but again it would have to be a really stellar shot that I planned to make a very large print of, in order to make all of that effort worthwhile IMO.

I really do appreciate your time and detail of explanation, so thank you.

Jack

.

[elf]

Elf, those shots are really impressive. I'd be very interested to understand why so many shots are needed to make the composite. Is the subject-to-camera distance so close and the aperture so wide that you lose focus with a few millimeters?

The DOF at 2.5X and f/5.6 is 0.0518mm (edit: COC set at 1.5x pixel size).  This single image shows the relative size of each frame and the amount of DOF:

[Dick Roadnight]

That being said, and with all due respect, there is no way a studio-placed flower moves with anywhere near the frequency, or the drama, as a wildflower. I would say not even remotely close, otherwise what would be the point of studio conditions? Sure, over time (taking 700 photos), a studio flower would doubtless have some subtle movement ... but please ... it would still be not approach anywhere near the movement of a wildflower, outside in the wind, being subjected to those same 4 hours and 700 photos.

This depends on the wildflower you are talking about: my friend (and my first wife's mentor) the late Leslie Greenwood was a flower painter, who illustrated Francis Perry's "Flowers of the World", and he said that some wild flowers (which had not been bred or selected to be cut and put in a vase) collapsed very quickly after being cut, so scaffold had to be erected so that he could paint the flower uncut... (usually in a green house, like Kew Gardens, UK.) I photographed his paintings for his lectures.

[Bill VN]

I think the native maximum resolution is the real figure, and the "megapixel rating" is the result of "funky" arithmetic... look at the print sizes they quote.

I don't know where 9,000 x 12,000 pixels came from, but BetterLight's online FAQs cite:

6,000 x 3 “effective pixels” on the sensor
8,000 sampling positions
144,000,000 “total number of effective pixels”
144 megapixels

[JeffKohn]

I don't know where 9,000 x 12,000 pixels came from, but BetterLight's online FAQs cite:

6,000 x 3 “effective pixels” on the sensor
8,000 sampling positions
144,000,000 “total number of effective pixels”
144 megapixels

So it produces 48mp files, but they're playing the same numbers game as Sigma with its Foveon sensors, and tripling the megapixel count since they're RGB pixels and not Bayer. I don't doubt it would produce more resolution than a 48mp Bayer sensor, but not 3 times as much. That's just marketing BS.