Noe wrote:
I am planning to take only one lens …
Bring the one you love using the most. It’s dark enough at Kang right now to see the northern lights so if you’re staying overnight consider the 35. The landscape is an optical illusion without signs of civilisation and photographs rarely match one’s memory of scales. There are few places whose atmosphere arranges itself so richly as Greenland’s and yet it is often her least photographed characteristic. Peter’s suggestion of taking your 24–105 will cover most situations. I can speak only of my own preference but then I use a 1969 Voigtländer with a concave front element because it’s what I’ve fallen in love with. Of your set I’d be tempted to take the 35 but only you know which of your photographs bring the most satisfaction.
We spoke a while ago about Amerloq Fjord which Jakob Hall and William Baffin visited. The former of course met a sticky ending when confronted by angry locals demanding answers about their kin, kidnapped by Hall during an earlier expedition. Here is a photograph of it, at the top right, taken earlier today with a iPhone 6. Qeqertarmiut, the foreground skerry, lies about 1 nm from the town. Nasaasaaq, or Kællingehætten, is on the right behind the town and next to the fjord. At 784 m it has an elevation almost twice that of the rock of Gibraltar. The iPhone 6 field of view is roughly similar to how 28 mm looks on full frame.
And here is a view of the aerodrome at Sisimiut (BGSS) immediately south of Palasip Qaqqaa, or Præstefjeldet, whose elevation is only 544 m.
Neither of these snapshots would have been improved or made more interesting by a telephoto which is why I would personally keep life simple and take a wide prime. If the weather’s a bit grim when you go then it’ll avoid needing a tripod for the higher focal lengths.
Looking forward to seeing photos from your trip Noe. And don’t forget to grab some very tasty rensdyrspegepølse med hvidløg in Kang!
You are very privileged to be living where you are, Qalupalik 
HMD bringing the Nokia monster camera concept back to market. Well, kind of…
Very interesting. It’s a bit like that slab-shaped product posted earlier which had loads of lenses. I suppose this is logical. One cannot sell a phone like the 808 today, due to its thickness
regardless of how good the camera is. There is nothing problematic about a phone being thick like that; it’s much easier to hold anyway. But most people won’t buy it. Most people don’t care about the picture quality so long as the sky is bright blue etc. So you will never get volume. So, as with PC CPUs which maxed out at ~3GHz, the only way to go forward is to go sideways. With CPUs they went to multiple cores. With phone cameras they are going to multiple small-lens cameras and correlating the images in software. I presume all the cameras take the same photo; there would be too many cases where multiple parts cannot be stitched together because there is nothing unique and contrasting at the boundaries.
Sorry Qualipalik, I thought I had emailed you earlier: sadly the trip got cancelled as I had another mishap (after the near complete loss of power on one engine in February, at night over the North Sea on the way to Norway):
This time the right engine conceded even before the trip started, the starter engine fried within about 2s of being cranked for the first leg.
We were short on time already (we were doing this in 4 days) and the 2 day delay (we didn’t carry a starter engine like Timothy wisely did on his North Pole trip) has us delay the trip to at least next summer.
One thing I find fascinating about this thread is that all the posts seem to be from IT experts. As an IT dinosaur who has spent his professional life in photography and the moving image I hopes you will forgive me for butting in here.
Firstly the title of the thread “will a phone be anywhere as good as a dslr”. The answer to that is “of course it can and already is”.But of course it depends what you mean by as good as.
IMO 90% plus of a good image is the person behind the camera. In some countries one has to pay to take cameras into tourist sites, or where cameras are not allowed, the phone is better than the dslr, or inside a small space. A phone will usually be with you to get the shot whereas you might decide to leave the dslr at home, because you can’t be bothered to carry the weight around.
David Bailey had an exhibition some years ago, of photographs of London streetlife.If I remember correctly the client was Nokia and all the images were taken on one of their phones, although some airbrushing was used afterwards but that is not unusual, whatever medium is used to capture the image. I believe the images were published in a book and they are well worth seeing if you can.
At the opposite end of the scale another photographer built himself a pin hole camera from a shoe box and used polaroid paper instead of film. The results in terms of image sharpness are impressive. They may still be seen on the internet. What I am trying to get at is that phones, dslrs, zoom lenses, are tools. You first need to decide what images you are trying to capture, then look at what the problems are and the tools that best suit the job.
For that you might find it useful to look at some of the old ways of solving problems.
Peter talks about Vietnam war photos. Despite the fact that slr’s were available in the 1960’s, many war photographers used non slr Leicas. Why? Well the lenses were superb ( usually fixed focus) , they were incredibly rugged, they didn’t suffer the same condensation problems, and generally most photojournalists were comfortable with them.
For film, even Leica zoom lenses suffered a slight soft focus on the long end of the Zoom when wide open. In the 70’s and 80’s Cook Zoom lenses were possibly the sharpest but were some 10 times the cost. All lenses have faults, and those faults can be different on different cameras even of the same type.It is why film cameras are colummated to a set of lenses and why before any movie starts shooting the camera crew will spend an day or more running camera and lens tests which will also make sure that they know how a particular batch of film will perform.
I see here that people are concerned about infinity stops, one thing to remember is that a wide angle lens is rarely made to be sharp at infinity. They are designed to get amongst the action not focus on something in the distance. Sharpness across a range of distances can of course also be changed by the aperture.
Film tends to run through the camera at 24 frames per second (its the frame rate that became standard throughout the world) although UK tv films used 25 fps.That equates to 1440 frames per minute so if your prop has 1 blade and turns at 1440 rpm you could stop the propellor out of frame if you start the camera at the right time. That’s a theory but this sort of strobing has always been a problem (look at the stagecoach wheels in early westerns) and compromises have always had to be made. Of course the moving image only works because of the way the human eye works and how it interacts with the brain.It’s main basis is persistence of vision, ie the retina effectively freeze frames an image and the brain only processes the changes to that image as movement for instance occurs.So you can see its not just computers that can do this.
TV used a similar effect on the brain but where film is basically a series of still frames running one after the other tv tended to change from one frame to the next like a shutter blind.It is why now we have two systems eg 1080p (as in persistence) and 1080i (the I for interlaced like changing like a shutter).
4k will provide a different set of opportunities.
With autofocus, autoexposure, autostability auto image capture or autowhatever you will never make a great photographer from someone with no eye for composition. Even AI will struggle with that.
I suppose what I am trying to say is that IMHO the IT expertise on this thread is capable of solving the technical problems highlighted in the thread using codes, algorithms, bots or whatever. That is the future. But in order to do so it will be useful to look at the past and how and why things developed he way they did.
Gallois, you’ve got a very true point. Photography at amateur level is no different from any other sport in that the boys usually will start talking about their toys.
Regarding 4k, could you explain what causes the weird feeling one sometimes gets watching 4k video footage? Especially 4k at 60 fps delivers a funny feeling. It’s hard to describe.
We had some posts on this “60fps making people sick” here some years ago.
Is this happening with broadcast material? Is there any 50mbps broadcast source?
The demo setups used to sell 4K TVs in the shops use a special purpose player to deliver a very high bitrate to the display. This will never be seen in a broadcast and probably not in any movie DVD playback.
But those shop videos use specially generated footage, which has large areas of relatively uniform colour, which yields best results with mpeg playback – because most of the scene is not changing, you get better detail in the bits which are. Also a lot of them are CGI which does do exactly this – large areas of same colour.
If I can answer that question backwards. 60fps is a wonderful speed for very clear stable images.Many years ago a guy whose name I forget at the moment, (its a problem of age the guy is quite renowned in the film world) developed a film system called “Showscan” it ran 35mm film at 60 frames a second. The results are fabulous. There were problems eg. you were using up twice as much film so doubling both the cost of the of film stock and the processing and printing.
Your shutter speeds were now 1/120th instead of 1/50th so you needed more lights and more electricians and generators to generate the electricity. The high costs meant that films made in Showscan became specialist films only shown in specialist cinemas. I believe one can still see an example at Futuroscope near Poitiers in France. Another thing that stopped the rise of Showscan was the invention of IMAX at around the same time . Basically IMaX replaced 35mm format with a 120mm format, something like you would use in Hasselblad or a Rollieflex but not square. This is amazing in itself in terms of picture quality, and seeing the view as seen as asittingic skier going over the edge of a mountain is both weird and quite terrifying for a non skier.IMax had further developments, one of which is 3D IMax which is viewed through a set of lcd goggles, maybe like the virtual reality goggles, although I don’t really know much about virtual reality goggles. The first film I ever saw in IMAx 3d was a demonstration of a stupid caterpillar puppet. The problem was that I was watching this in a theatre full of people all sitting there with these goggles on, and each of us feeling that this damned puppet was getting more and more real and picking on me as butt of its jokes like sitting in the front row at a comedy show when the comedian singles you out for a bit of mickey taking. I for one couldn’t help but take the goggles off to see if the puppet caterpillar really was in my face. Of course it wasn’t, there was just a screen full of squiggly lines.It was very weird. Later there was a movie made about the early days of the air postal service across the Andes, starring Val Kilmer. Part of this film was made for 3d IMax. This too is weird in that all the actresses appear like living dolls. I mean I know many actors and actresses are not so tall but this really made them look like perfect moving, talking dolls.
So to finally answer your question, if you are lucky enough to be able to run 4k(which is about the resolution of a 35mm frame) at 60fps at home, every image
will be much sharper than your eyes have been used to more perfect, you will notice things you have not noticed before, such as how much make up actors have to slap on to cover skin blemishes, yours eyes and will be resolving many more times the information they are used to processing from a screen. All this will make things seem very weird at first but eventually they will become the norm.Then you will look at your normal HD screen and think, “Was the tv I used to watch really that blurry and soft focus?”
Of course I am assuming that the weird you posted about is not the type of weird you get when there is a problem with the system and some of the pieces don’t compliment each other.
Archie wrote:
Going on from a post from a year ago, the remaining pro’s of a DSLR are:
- usable depth of field
…
Wow, DSLR’s have just received another blow: finely adjustable depth of field from f 1.4 to f 16 after having taken the photo:
(start at 3h49:31)
gallois wrote:
I suppose what I am trying to say is that IMHO the IT expertise on this thread is capable of solving the technical problems highlighted in the thread using codes, algorithms, bots or whatever. That is the future.
The camera segment starts at 3h42m33s
p.s. why can’t I post a link to a youtube video with a start time such as
+youtube+KYVHLWjRbp4?t=3!h42m33s
Youtube says Apple has requested the video be blocked! Don’t they want the PR!?
Oops: found other video:
finely adjustable depth of field from f 1.4 to f 16 after having taken the photo:
(start at 1h13m18)
Whole camera segment starting from 1h6m00
