If I may add my 2 cents worth?

Discuss cameras, settings, composition, or anything related to photography - cactus or other subjects.
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mikethecactusguy
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If I may add my 2 cents worth?

Post by mikethecactusguy »

Hi All.
I was raised with film photography. My first camera was a Kodak Box, then an Argus 3c and a Twin Lens Reflex through High School. A good 35mm SLR with a half dozen lenses for 20 years after that. Come the 90's digital came out and I bought my first 5meg camera , it was ok. Around 2004 my daughter got into photography and film was still the medium taught. So I went back into film. Had myself a Mamiya 645 with 6 lenses and all the bells and whistles. Film was fun, but expensive. When she went off to art school, she migrated to a 15 meg Nikon because that was where professional photography was headed and I went back to 8 meg small camera.
As phones improve, picture quality does get better. I now shoot mostly with my phone at very high resolution. I'm still going to buy a decent DSLR soon.
However. If you were to compare exactly the same 15meg image from a Full size DSLR, a small Digital camera and a phone camera you will see a noticeable difference. It the amount of image thats captured that will make the difference in enlargements. A 2" lens will capture more then a 1" lens and seriously both will outperform a 1/8" phone lens. For web work, a high quality phone lens will be fine. I laugh at all the Apple Billboards that show these massive images shot on the Iphone with some much resolution. We know that they have been manipulated to get that big and clear.
Photoshop is a miracle tool.
Mike The Cactus Guy
Enjoying the Spines
DaveW
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Re: If I may add my 2 cents worth?

Post by DaveW »

I did have a box camera as a child, but only really later started with an Exacta Varex IIA for plant photography and then moved on onto a Nikon F2 Photomic that I used for 35 years until I changed to digital and bought a 10 megapixel Nikon D200 which I still use since it is more than good enough for web use and digital projection.

It's all down to light collection of the pixel sites and the final magnification of the original image. With a small format you have to enlarge the original image much more than with a larger format camera to fill the screen, meaning you both enlarge the circle of confusion more, plus any faults on the image, including grain on film and noise, it's equivalent on digital. You can have too many pixels on a sensor if the pixel sites become too small, that is why the DSLR camera firms are now moving up from the APS-C sized sensor to the full frame one because they can put more megapixels on but keep the pixel sites larger. They started to find with small sensors that adding more smaller pixels was making the image worse not better. A camera phone sensor is very small when compared with a full frame DSLR one.

Three good articles here:-

http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/doe ... ze.matter/

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/53659 ... s-on-noise

https://lenspire.zeiss.com/photo/en/art ... -vs-aps-c/

Of course the thing most overlook with digital cameras is the means of reproduction. If you want to print out house door sized prints all those megapixels are used. However if you want them for the Internet as Mike says a phone is OK, for the simple reason that a computer screen only has the resolution of an about 5 megapixel camera. Therefore no matter how many megapixels your camera has that is all you will get on screen. As they say "a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link" and at the moment that is our computer screens resolution. It is even worse for digital projection since most projectors used in photo clubs have less than a two megapixel resolution. So therefore we all have cameras good enough for the Web.

A good lens probably makes more difference to the image on screen than a high megapixeled camera. But even so the resolution of most lenses is still better than the screen, that is unless you drastically crop the image.

When photography started with full plate cameras the image was just contact printed, therefore no enlargement was needed and lower resolution lenses would produce a decent image. It was only when smaller formats came in and needed more enlargement for the final image they needed lenses with greater resolution. I wonder how many I-Phone billboard images were actually shot with large format Technical Cameras rather than I-Phones?
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mikethecactusguy
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Re: If I may add my 2 cents worth?

Post by mikethecactusguy »

Hi DaveW
Now that would be false advertising since the bill boards always say shot on an iphone. As I said before, I would suspect a considerable amount of digital enhancement and manipulation has gone into those billboards. Or, they do a print with no pixalation and then use a much higher resolution device to retake the picture.
As for computer screens, my current resolution is 3840 x 2160. I used to build some very detailed and realistic HO scale structures. I would shot at ar8 meg on a small Canon capable of macro photography. Never liked digital zooms. The resolution helped me find the flaws as small as a 32nd of an inch on my models. It's really all about the video card and the monitors capabilities. I've found that the better the card the sharper the picture.
When I was in high school I did have the opportunity to shoot a Speed Graphix. Now that was fun. Architectural photography was great.
Mike The Cactus Guy
Enjoying the Spines
DaveW
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Re: If I may add my 2 cents worth?

Post by DaveW »

Digital zoom as we both know is just another name for cropping part of the image on the sensor. We can all "digital zoom" with any digital image by simply cropping the centre part of the image and enlarging it in post processing. Problem with all cropping is you enlarge all the pixels and faults on the image when you enlarge it to the same size an optical zoom would produce on the same sensor. Optical zooms are always preferable to digital zoom, although that can be handy on occasion since digital zoom is usually the only form of zoom adopted by smartphones..

For those who are confused by the difference see:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g6NiMrRp5M
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