RE: paleonet Digital photography again

From
Date
Reply-To
Hey folks, before we rush to become totally digital, think about this.  We
can still take beautiful specimen photographs with a 50 yr. old camera (or
and even older one), but we usually cannot read media (tapes, diskettes,
whatever) that are more than 4 or 5 years old.  I have been using computers
since 1981, and have many types and styles of electronic recorded data that
I cannot read without a great deal of cost or effort (if at all).  Upgrades
and changes in data format, hardware, and software, make electronic media
storage obsolete rapidly.  Have you upgraded your computer hardware lately?
My current computer will not read a large floppy or a small low density or
double density floppy.  Some of the computers in our offices have no floppy
drives at all. The efficiency and editing capabilities of digital cameras
are impressive, but what do you do when the format/hardware/software changes
make your equipment unusable and your data unavailable?  

My vote is to continue to use the "old-fashioned" optical camera for archive
photographs.  Then, at least, a researcher will be able to look at the
photographs 15 years from now.

Sandy Leo
  

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Adrain [mailto:jonathan-adrain@uiowa.edu]
Sent: October 24, 2001 4:48 PM
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Subject: Re: paleonet Digital photography again


At 9:49 PM +0200 10/24/01, Stefan Bengtson wrote:
>Tom Whiteley makes a number of valid points. Still I'd say the 
>balance has for a while weighed over in favour of digital cameras 
>(and even Tom admits he's mostly digital these days):

For many purposes, including probably most purposes of people on this 
list, this is likely true.  For specimen photography, it depends. 
For relatively large specimens, stuff you'd shoot with a standard 
macro lens with or without regular bellows, digital cameras are 
probably now the way to go.  Perhaps I'm biased by my own needs, but 
for photography of small specimens - a few mm to perhaps 2 cm in 
dimension, really on the boundary between micro/macro (e.g., most 
trilobite sclerites), it's not so simple.  You ideally need quite 
specialized lenses (many of the people currently publishing 
high-quality photographs of trilobites, e.g., Harry Whittington, 
Derek Siveter, still use a Leitz Aristophot system made in the 1950s 
and 1960s [fixed camera with bellows/extension tubes to 20-35 cm, 
focussing manually using universal stage], and Milar and Summar 
lenses [which close down to f48 or f96] or else the Multiphot copy 
made by Nikon in the 1970s and 1980s).  As far as I know there is no 
way to use these with a digital camera (I would love to be educated 
if it's possible!).  Photography down the barrel of standard 
microscopes generally yields lower quality images, with sharpness of 
optics and depth of field the main problems (I do have a Pixera 
digital camera hooked up to a Leica MZ75 trinoc, but only use it for 
morphometrics; years ago I shot quite a lot with a Wild 
Photomicroscope setup, but always got better results with Zeiss 
Luminar micro/macro lenses, another alternative to Summars/Milars). 
And, for people in this boat, resolution continues to be an issue. 
With 4000 dpi negative scanning, you get 5512x3675 pixel resolution 
of a 35 mm frame.  Don't get me wrong - the sooner everything is 
totally digital the better, for the many reasons you list.  But for 
some of us, I'm not sure we're quite there yet.

J
________________________________________________________
Jonathan Adrain                 Managing Editor
Assistant Professor             Journal of Paleontology
Department of Geoscience
121 Trowbridge Hall             phone (319) 335-1539
University of Iowa              fax   (319) 335-1821
Iowa City, IA 52242
USA

http://www.geology.uiowa.edu/faculty/adrain/adrain.html
________________________________________________________