Tag Archives: cameras

gardening, my garden, photography

high-res camera in the october garden

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Is a camera with more megapixels better? In our bigger is better culture your might be inclined to think so, but for everyday use more could be serious overkill. Here’s a quick look at some of what a super-high resolution camera can do with subject matter in the early autumn garden.

One of the main reasons for a pile of megapixels is for making large prints. My background in large-format film cameras got me used to being able to produce 20 x 24 inch prints that you could look at with a magnifying glass to see even more detail. That’s not a requirement for most photographers.

Here’s a shot of Corethrogyne (a.k.a. Lessingia) filaginifolia next to some stepping stones in the garden. Flowers this time of year are pretty thin, and this is one of the great plants that comes to the rescue by blooming in late summer and fall.

This is a full-pixel crop of the above. (Click to enlarge to 600 x 900 on your screen.) The dried flowers are pretty sharp, still. The open flower is a little blurry, but that’s more from being a little out of focus. It’s not great art, but if you were to print the first image full frame, the extra resolution would let you make prints with nice detail.

Related to the issue of making larger prints, images with higher megapixels allow you to make nicer looking cropped versions. You might want to crop an image for prints, or you might just want to be able to show closeups from a larger image for use on the web.

Sarracenia leucophylla “Super Swamp Ghost,” putting out some new pitchers for the fall. This is the original full-frame image. The picture has stuff on the margins that I thought was pretty distracting.

This is a slight crop of the previous, making a cleaner illustration with fewer distractions. You’d be able to do this with most images from most cameras.

But what if you decided to crop to isolate just the mouth of one of the pitchers? I saw the one large fly when I took the photo, but I didn’t see the smaller one to the right until I looked closer.

Or how about getting really close, to take a really good look at the bigger fly? Or how about wanting to take a look at the hairs on the interior of the pitcher that direct insects downward, into the tube, into the digestive juices, never to escape. This is where the higher resolution original image gives you more options.

Why yes, you’d be able to accomplish some of this with a good zoom lens on your camera. But if you wanted to extend the reach of your zoom, it helps to have a photo with more information in it. Also zoom lenses don’t generally give you same image quality as lenses of fixed focal length, so that a $150 fixed lens can give results that would dust a premium zoom more than ten times the price.

The rest of these images are just quick looks at other things in the garden, not necessarily anything you’d want to print at a large size. I’ve down-sized the images from 7360 x 4912 pixels to 900 x 600, and this blog page further reduces them to 300 x 200. (Click to see the intermediate size.) If you only need photos this size, there’s probably no real need for a high megapixel camera.

Another of the pitcher plants, Sarracenia Sky Watcher.

Sarracenia leucophylla, “Hot Pink” clone from Botanique.

Sarracenia Green Monster x xcourtii, a cross by Rob Co of The Pitcher Plant Project.

Sarracenia alata x minor with a garden frog, contemplating the universe, deciding if it needs a high megapixel camera.

Dried flower heads, late season, on black sage. Salvia mellifera.

A sure sign that autumn is here, the dried flower heads and supporting stems from San Miguel Island buckwheat, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens. If you water the plant more than I do it’d stay a little greener. This plant is anything but dead, with there still being lots of green closer to the crown of the plant. Some people would cut all this back, but I really like how it looks draped over this patinated wall.

Cropped and focused a little differently and photographed with a little more care than my quick snapshot this might make a nice wall print.

FYI, the camera used here was the Nikon D800E, which is categorized at 36.3 megapixels. That’s pretty extreme for a small DSLR. But if you want to talk about extremem miniaturization, there’s even a 41 megapixel cellphone camera, the Nokia PureView 808. Word on the street is that it’s not a particularly great picture-take much higher than when you set it at at 5 megapixels, within the range many cellphone cameras operate in. Making a 41 megapixel cellphone camera seems to be a mostly a stunt, technically an extremely high-res camera, but almsot useless when operated that way. The Nikon by contrast is actually a good camera.

photography, places

cellphone camera test

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After having lived without a cellphone for the last two centuries I finally took the leap. Not only did I get a cellphone, I got a smart phone. The iPhones have been all the rage for a while, but I ended up selecting an HTC MyTouch serviced by T-Mobile.

As someone who’s a bit of a Luddite and who’s loudly protested cellphones and cellphone culture, I’m almost ashamed to admit owning the device. Still, something about the combination of a device that is part-phone, part-camera, part-wireless router, part-web browser, part-music player, part-camcorder, part-GPS unit, part-nanny, part-godknowswhatelse seemed compelling.

The view looking north, up past Scripps Pier

Last week a good friend came to visit for a few days. A tourist trip up to the top of Mount Soledad, the high point of coastal San Diego, seemed like a good idea. Thursday was a break between winter storms, which meant that the visibility could be pretty stunning.

Yes indeed. The views were terrific. Also, a lot of native plants surrounding the little pad of green grass and parking at the top of the mountain were breaking out into bloom.

Did someone say “photo-op?”

Scarlet monkey flower, Mimulus aurantiacus, but judging from the focus the camera was more rapt with the view of La Jolla below.
Deerweed, Lotus scoparius, also frustratingly out of focus, no matter how hard I tried to get the camera to focus on the flower instead of the background foliage.

Since I didn’t have my real camera this seemed like a good test for the camera feature on the new handheld device. (Really, can you call it a phone anymore?)

Here’s a short stack of snapshots I took up there. And yes, I consider them snapshots, only snapshots.

I’m used to cameras with lots of controls. For controls, this model has a moderate zoom option and the ability to turn the flash on or off or on automatic. That’s it for options. So, it does make for a simple-to-use camera, but it’s simple to the point of being simplistic.

Coast sunflower, Encelia californica, showing both focus and exposure issues.

The flowers of lemonadeberry, Rhus integrifolia. Unlike my other attempts at closeups, this shot came out clear and crisp--but still blown out in the highlights.

Achieving good focus or getting an exposure that doesn’t overexpose something in the frame can be a challenge. These are limitations for lots of point and shoot cameras, so I don’t know that it’s any worse than some of them. Lens flare when you shoot into the sun can be a problem, but that happens with even the best of cameras.

The phone designers probably realized that the camera would be liable to shake as you took a snapshot. To compensate they applied a fairly extreme level of in-camera sharpening. For some images it’s barely noticeable, in others it’s so obvious it hurts.

So as not to seem like I’m a total Mr. Negative, there were a few things I did like. The wide 9:16 aspect ratio of the image–similar to the current generation of televisions–is kinduv cool and cinematic. The 2:3 aspect ratio of old-school 35mm cameras is harder to work with and often feels unnatural.

A view with encelia and lemonadeberry in the foreground, as well as the ever-present coyotoebrush, baccharis.
That view again, this time with some chamise, Adenostoma fasciculatum, in the foreground. I still have trouble deciding whether I'm in coastal sage scrub habitat or maritime chaparral. The presence of chamise tells you that you're in chaparral.
A view to the south. You could easily see a couple dozen miles into Mexico that day.

Colors looked pretty true to life.

And in the end there’s the much better chance that you’ll have the cellphone camera handy when you’ve left the dedicated camera at home. You may never miss another photo op again.

So…has life changed with a cellphone? I can’t say that it has that much. It was handy to have when I was trying to navigate Philadelphia a couple weeks ago. It’s handy to keep in touch with people when you’re away from the landline. And I guess I feel just a little bit more hip. Like, now, when people talk about angry birds, I realize chances are that they’re most likely talking about the app and not what happens when you disturb a nest.



photography, rambles

last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

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Walking around town when I get breaks between meetings I’ve dragged along one of two cameras. One is a trusty roll film camera that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embarrassment of a digital camera, the first digital camera I bought John when digital cameras were just coming out. I haven’t gone shopping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capacity as a My Little Pony digital camera today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impressive than 1.3 megapixels. And on top of the low resolution it eats batteries like crazy. Seriously I thought it had died and gone to digital camera purgatory until I dropped into the gift shop downstairs and fed the camera five bucks in batteries. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real digital camera.

Since most of the pictures I took were with the film camera I’ll have to forgo the immediate gratification and wait to see the pictures until I get them developed. But here’s one of the random digital shots of a structure located just above the downtown tourist district. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubtful that it was ever attached to any operation like a mill. In fact, it’s apparently a bit of a mystery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mystery who built it. Apparently carbon dating of the mortar dates it to various dates, some as late as the late seventeenth century, some to the early 1400s.

Old Mill Tower

Call me a skeptic, but just like people who claim their hotel is haunted, what mystery there might be well could be overblown and might have nothing to do with reality, though it’d certianly be good for business. There are a lots of web pages where it’s discussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The Newport Tower: a Medieval Ruin in America; the Redwood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on UnexplainedEarth. If any of those pages have any authority, Wikipedia points to the Redwood Library’s pages, and I might go with that evaluation: The library is located just across the street.