Yearly Archives: 2019

Fish and Chips

Photographs

Computational photography at its best.

Nikon just reintroduced its Noct Nikkor which boasts an aperture of f/0.95 and is about the size of a Mack truck. At $8,000 the price is comparably huge. Leica has long had its f/0.95 Noctilux at a scant $11,000+. Neither could have done a good job, fully open, of this snap, taken last night in near darkness at The Olde English Pub in Albany:



Winston contemplates the annual cod harvest.


You see, the depth of field of those gargantuan optics is less than the distance from my son’s eyes to the tip of his nose, at f/0.95. And if you do not use these lenses fully open, why use them at all? Further, everything but the eyes would be blurred, and I really wanted that Union Jack to be clearly discernible. Third, both are manual focus and while the Nikon’s finder comes with a focus confirmation light, the Leica’s rangefinder can barely do its job at f/1.4. F/0.95? Be prepared to work that focus collar and take multiple snaps. Finally, dynamic range would be shot, the highlights hopelessly burned out.

Then again, the iPhone used to take this snap has 8.5 billion transistors in its CPU to do all the magic, which includes taking 9 images in Night Mode, picking the best bits and doing all sorts of things I will never understand to deliver broad dynamic range. The Leica and Nikon? 8.5 billion fewer transistors.

The recorded exposure? 1/4 second at f/1.8, ISO 800. The result? Stunningly sharp, with a quick pass through Focos to add a touch of background blur. The blur lens of choice? Why, none other than the 50mm f/2.8 Elmar which came with my Leica M3 in 1971.

The result? A picture of a young man on top of his game, with straight As at mid-semester in his Senior year at prep scool, and looking forward to four years at college.

My beer? Served 10F too cold. What else would you expect of a former colony?

Skidmore College

Colleges

A bucolic setting.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Home to some 2,600 students on 850 acres, and a ten minute walk from the lovely town of Saratoga Springs a few miles north of Albany, NY, Skidmore College started life as an all girls’ school. The school went co-ed in the 1970s and we were lucky to visit it on a crisp New York autumn day. The lovely campus, replete with trees and perfect buildings, is one we have long wanted to visit for its mix of setting and academic quality.



Capital for the gardens is abundant.


We visited on a Saturday, so it was busy. This is the Admissions Building.


The tour begins.


The Dana Science center.


At work in the chemistry lab in the Dana.


Autumn is here.


Our irrepressible tour guide, Charlotte, had vocal projection which needed no megaphone.


The science center has rotating displays of chemical molecules.
This is Prozac ….


Bikes are useful for visiting nearby Saratoga Springs.


The Dining Hall is simply the finest we have seen. Lots of cuisines, freshly prepared and a vital part of student life.


One of the many chefs in the magnificent food center.


Jonathan Seliger’s ‘Politeness Counts’, 2004 at the Tang Museum.


George Rickey’s mobile ‘Double L Excentric (sic) Gyratory VII’, 1994.


The volleyball courts in the Williamson Sports Center.


With the sole exception of a dorm building, all are limited to a couple of storeys.


The Zankel Performing Arts Center hosts many performances throughout the year.


Everything here is in perfect condition, the dorms are spacious and modern, the food center is beyond compare and the academics are first class. The nearby town of Saratoga Springs, famous as the oldest site for professional horse racing in the US, is within walking distance, and while home to only 25,000 residents is sophisticated, beautiful and safe. Dining (and coffee!) choices are abundant.

Alumni include director Jason Reitman and Grace Mirabella of Vogue.

Snapped on the iPhone 11 Pro.

iPhone Pro – Part IX

iPhone

The digital zoom function.

Click here for an index of all iPhone articles.

Here’s an index of the iPhone 11 Pro pieces:

Part I – The revolution realized
Part II – Upgrading
Part III – The ultrawide lens
Part IV – The Normal lens
Part V – The Telephoto lens
Part VI – The Focos app
Part VII – Quirks and anomalies
Part VIII – HDR and the Night Mode
Part IX – The digital zoom function
Part X – A lens correction profile for the ultrawide optic

Here’s the image before enlargement or zooming:



The original scene.

Here it is enlarged and zoomed:



LR enlargement at left. iPhone digital zoom at right. .

In addition to its choice of three lenses for non-selfie photography, the iPhone offers a digital zoom. In the Camera app you hold your finger on any one of the lens selection icons – 0.5X, 1X or 2X – and a rotatable protractor appears at the right allowing enlargement options up to 10X. While this protractor will appear for any of the three lenses, the iPhone only uses the best lens for digital zooming, the 1X optic. The digital zoom function is accessible in Photo mode, not in Portrait (blurred background) mode.

At 10x LR reports an effective FFE focal length of 270mm. That’s seriously long, but are the results any good?

To take a closer look I took one image using the 1X lens at the regular 1X un-zoomed setting and the other at the 10X digital zoom setting. Importing both into LR I enlarged the central section of the 1X un-zoomed image to the same size at that in the 10X digitally zoomed image. Stated differently, the first image was using enlargement in LR and the second was using the iPhone’s digital zoom function to enlarge the center when the original was snapped.

The results – see above – discloses that the iPhone digital zoom image (on the right) shows fewer artifacts than the LR enlarged one. It also shows meaningfully less grain/digital noise. So zooming ‘in camera’ beats selective enlargement in post-processing.

Is it usable?

At a pinch, yes. An 8″ x 10″ print from the digital zoom file is just about presentable if you avoid sticking your nose in the print, but the image is clearly breaking up. So on those occasions where you need to really zoom in, by all means use the digital zoom in preference to later enlargement in software, just be aware that there are limits as to what can be extracted from that tiny iPhone sensor.

To liven things up a bit and to increase apparent definition and blur the background, simply pass the iPhone’s digitally zoomed image through Focos and you get this:



Focos does not get blurring of the love knot-enclosed background right.

Not half bad, huh?