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At 12:58 AM +0200 10/25/01, Stefan Bengtson wrote: >But all this is about lenses and microscopes, not about the way the >images are captured. There is no question that you can take great >pictures on film - or on CCD chips. I've been using the same Micro >Nikkor macro lens on a 35-mm camera and on a digital camera >(MicroLumina): the digital images are generally better, as they have >not been filtered through the grain of the film and the subsequent >scanner. Not to quibble, but it's about attaching lenses to cameras. If it is genuinely possible to adapt a digital camera body with sufficient pixel resolution to my Aristophot, I'll mothball my film scanner in an instant. The system uses a Leica 35 mm camera body. >>Granted, people will often swear by the lens they have been using >>for decades, and then tragedy ensues when it doesn't fit any of the >>new digital cameras. Yes, but there's a reason for that and it's not necessarily because they're dogmatically attached to old equipment that they know. Doing the best photography with small specimens in paleontology is something that a lot of effort has been poured into over the decades. There's a reason the Aristophot system is still in such widespread use, despite being a virtual antique, and there's a reason Nikon found it profitable to make an imitation of it (for a while). Not to disagree with anyone whose results I after all haven't seen, but these systems are vastly superior to any results I've seen with microscopes (again, depth of field with convex fossils is the key problem). It's a niche/fringe concern in general photographic circles, but light photography of mm-scale fossils remains a sticking point. If someone built a digital system that emulated the optics and lens quality of an Aristophot, I'd buy it. And if it's possible to couple a digital camera with sufficient pixel resolution to an Aristophot, I want to do it. My point is that while this size range is perhaps of niche interest, quite a lot of fossils fall into it, and only a few specialized lenses have ever been produced that give really high quality results. > >> 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. > >But again, do you need that resolution? Accepting the 300 dpi >resolution as standard for good print, you could blow up your hi-res >35 mm negative to more than 18" width... As I said in an earlier post, 450 dpi is the standard at least for Journal of Paleontology, which is printed with a 300 lpi screen (I certainly agree that once the world moves decisively away from printed journals [soon], 300 dpi is an adequate norm). Granted, 12" is still a big trilobite (though you'd need to completely fill the frame to get it). The biggest enlargement I make with my workaday photos is x5.58 (since the frame is far from filled, the trilobite is a very modest 1.5-2"), which is less than the maximum possible with 4000 dpi scanning (x8.89). So I could get by with a 2700 dpi scanner. But for digital cameras, even the Fuji S1 Pro you mention isn't there in terms of resolution (3042x2016 on a 2" LCD, allowing an equivalent maximum of x3.38). Now actually, that would be okay for quite a lot of what I do, but only just, in a range of cameras that retail from US$3000 to US$5500. Assuming 300 dpi it would be fine (and many print journals do request only 300 dpi). Yes, I don't think we disagree much. You think we're perhaps just past getting there, from the perspective of micro/macro photography I think we're perhaps nearly there. 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 ________________________________________________________
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