Several times, I talked about the limitation to photo image quality by light diffraction but I failed to go into the details. To the general request of one reader who asked, I will try to give some explanations to better understand why the digital photographer must absolutely take that into account to make better pictures and to choose its camera.
The first thing to know is that light diffraction is a very general phenomenon and quite natural. It’s been a long time already that scientists and engineers noticed that -on the one hand- light rays are slightly deflected while running through a very small orifice and -on the other hand- two light rays can interact with each other on the condition that they are have very paths nearly perfectly parallel. This is even one of the most significant and founding elements of quantum physics. When you combine both those phenomenons, you will notice that light going through a very small opening like camera lens diaphragm will produce not exactly the expected neat circle but a more irregular and circular shape that you can see in the illustrative figure that goes along this paragraph: Usually named an Airy disk or Airy disc.
Greg Scott is really an impressive wild life photographer. His images of hummingbirds are simply astounding: clear, detailed, nicely framed and showing the bird in the most surprising positions.
Italian firm HAL9000 has a neat technology to shoot very high definition images. They apply it to antique art masterworks like Leonardo’s major painting “The last supper” (of recent cinematographic fame): An incredible 16 gigapixel resolution to get down to the finest cracks in the paint.
Another previous work from HaltaDefinizione (with only 8.6 billion pixels).
Photographers are avid of more pixels per frame. Most of them are also fond of panoramic photos (they look so cool). Why not join forces and make a contraption able to shoot panoramas with billions of pixels (multi-giga-pixel panoramas)?
This is what Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University did when they developed the GigaPan robotic camera mount (Press release). Rather than stitching together hundreds of images painstakingly taken one-by-one, the tripod mount is able to pan through a landscape and capture the individual images needed by a computer program to build these wondrous images.
Not all the images are perfect, but some of them are gorgeous.
GigaPan motorised mount on a tripod. It hold nearly any kind of digital SLR camera and pans slowly to capture a full panoramic image.
The GigaPan is not currently available yet but could be no more than a few hundreds of dolalrs, and work with open source software (so, free software).
The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) is a project that is being prepared to hunt for dangerous asteroids that may hit Earth (and possibly wipe out Humans like one did for the Dinosaurs).
Technically, the sensor is impressive. It’s no less than 40cm-wide and hosts 1.4billion pixels (can you say “1.4 giga-pixel camera”?) but there will be four of them installed in Hawai.
Thanks to USGS and NASA, we will have one of the most detailed photo of the Antartica continent. Using images from the Landsat 7 satellite, the researchers created the most detailed, high-resolution map of Antarctica. This results in what is now known as the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA).
Using several images of the same location, they have been able to remove clouds from most of the map, but also, they gave a very clear view in near real-life colours (a difficult aim for most of satellite imagery): Natural colour at 30m resolution (or black and white at 15m resolution).
All in all, this is supposed to help scientists observe this region of the world that is critical for the understanding of global warming and its future effects on human life on Earth.
A photograph of no less than 10 by 30 meters. Made in a plane hangar used as dark chamber and with a swimming pool used to develop the record image.
This is a group of photographers collectively known as The Legacy Project that made the mad project possible. Nothing was utterly impossible. Everything was astoundingly difficult:
Build the image paper by preparing the immense cloth piece with dozens of liters of sensitive gelatine emulsion,
Build a dark chamber out of fighter plane hangar with enormous quantities of paint, tape and foam gap filler,
Find the right exposure parameters with test strips as large as a door (result: 35 minutes of exposure).
In the end, the biggest photo in the world is a black and white photo (colour did not crush B&W yet, so digital photography still has a long way to go…)
The Large Hadron Collider, the next monster from experimental physics in CERN at Geneva, is currently being built. Peter McCready shot a photo of it in a magnificent panorama (or is it the LHC that is really magnificent?).
1000 millions of pixels, that was good enoug. 1000 billions of pixels is better! But it’s really a technical challenge. Before we can see the first 1 Tera-pixel digital photo camera (don’t wait for it), Aperio defined an extension to the TIFF image format allowing to create such a large image.
Previous Entries
The first thing to know is that light diffraction is a very general phenomenon and quite natural. It’s been a long time already that scientists and engineers noticed that -on the one hand- light rays are slightly deflected while running through a very small orifice and -on the other hand- two light rays can interact with each other on the condition that they are have very paths nearly perfectly parallel. This is even one of the most significant and founding elements of quantum physics. When you combine both those phenomenons, you will notice that light going through a very small opening like camera lens diaphragm will produce not exactly the expected neat circle but a more irregular and circular shape that you can see in the illustrative figure that goes along this paragraph: Usually named an Airy disk or Airy disc.
