The Electrical Engineer

  Background Since I first started taking photos, I was interested in taking panoramas. I was both inexperienced and the tools accessible to normal photographers at that time where very limited. My early attempts were made using tripods, attempting to mount the camera close to the center of the nodal point of the lens, and then very carefully manually stitching photos together.  Lacking the correct and expensive tools, the process was tedious, and error prone One of my first attempts at a Panorama Eventually I stopped attempting panoramic images as the results where never very successful. (I did try other ideas circa 2007)  Revisited That eventually changed when a technique  Ryan Brenizer  became popular somewhere around 2012-2014. ( I can't recall when I first encountered it) This method was taking a long fast lens and taking photos to cover the entire area of what a larger format would cover.  The result is both an impossibly thin depth of field combined ...

  As I've been revisiting using a Digital Camera as a film scanner, I thought it might be interesting to see if using a Foveon Style sensor would have any advantages. While it only has 25 effective megapixels, for 35mm scans and smaller, the extra color information and sharpness of the foveon sensor should be more than enough under ideal conditions. One note is that the shutter slap on the sdqh isn't great and made getting sharp scans more difficult than a mirrorless with an Eletronic shutter. But what I am interested most in is if the color response would appear to offer any advantage.  For this setup it's more or less the same as my latest venture into film scanning: DSLR SCANNING sdqh with 105mm macro lens While there are three kinds of film I could test, I think slides make for the easiest comparison as they result in an image without any additional processing to compensate for the color base or being inverted. Because of the greater shadow noise of the sdqh at the same...

The comparison between the Lumia and a similar spec'd DSLR drew a bit more attention then I would ever expected. It is nice to see so much interest in such a great pock-able camera. While I stand by the original test I thought I might revisit it once more for a moment. Addendum   There is so much more to making great images then cameras, and there is so much more to great cameras then megapixels. It's a fairly established morsel of common photographic knowledge that quality is often preferred to quantity when speaking about the pixel. So then why even compare such machines, since they are so wholly different. It's because it's hard not to be curious what 38mp on a phone looks like compared to a SLR with a similarly impressive marketing number. After shooting with 36mp I've come to learn that pixel perfect sharpness provides more elusive and such a camera is prone to bringing out weaknesses in both lens and photographer patience. In reality most ph...

I will be the first to admit that the choice of title is a bit absurd. The D800 sits near the top of DSLRs with astounding dynamic range, interchangeable lens, and a sensor that's nearly 15 times the size of the 1020. So why even consider comparing such different machines? One word: Resolution The Lumia 1020 sports a 41 mega pixel "Pureview" sensor and optical image stabilization (OIS). In 4:3 this gives a working resolution of 38 mpix, and at 16:9 a working resolution of 34 mpix. This puts it 2 mpix on either side of the D800’s very impressive 36 mpix sensor. These two cameras which are worlds apart share nearly identical pixel counts.  While not all megapixels are created equal, we can’t help but wonder in a practical sense, how does a 36mpix image on a phone stack up when compared to the likes of a dedicated SLR of similar resolution? But exactly what would be fair wasn't easy. The Nikon is a very versatile machine producing images no smart phone cou...