Photography site with gear reviews, tutorials, and technical explainers on lenses, sensors, autofocus, and file formats.
HN links it to explain sensor size, depth of field, equivalence, autofocus, and DNG versus RAW, and commenters use it as a technical reference.
Several reasons:
* Until fairly recently, cameras couldn't focus well using just the sensor. The simple sensor-based focusing is based on contrast, and the problem with the method is that the camera can't tell whether it's as focused as it can get, or in which direction should focus be changed. So the camera constantly "hunts". You can see that happening a lot on youtube with people trying to show stuff from close (eg, Bosnian Bill, AvE very often have this problem).
* Phase focusing fixes this issue, but initially couldn't be incorporated into the sensor. The mirror in DSLRs bounces light into the better focus detectors, which are located on the bottom of the camera. Here's an illustration of the system: https://photographylife.com/how-phase-detection-autofocus-works
* Sensors get hot when they're constantly lit. Cameras refuse to keep taking pictures when it overheats. A DSLR's sensor can cool off while the mirror is blocking it.
* Sometimes the viewfinder is the better way, eg, if the LCD can't overpower the sun. Making a good digital viewfinder is harder than just optics.
* An optical viewfinder has no lag and almost zero battery usage
But yes, mirrorless is definitely the future. The DSLR was a technical compromise, and in fact mirrorless has advantages of its own:
* As this article says, DSLRs require a large separation between the sensor and lens to make room for the mirror, and that makes some kinds of lenses hard to design. Mirrorless cameras can use whatever…
>with everyone having a smartphone with high quality cameras on them there really is zero excuse for there to not be highly detailed accurate videos of this
Absolutely not.
I understand the tendency to assume that modern tech would make it relatively easy thing to accomplish but there are considerable challenges with ground-based aerial photography/videography...at nighttime...completely unplanned and unscheduled...by an amateur. Better technology makes the field more accessible in a general way, but there is still a very large barrier of: skill, hardware, and out-right luck involved in good image capture as a medium.
Consider, if you ever look towards the beginning or end of some runways you may see a group of plane spotters setup taking photos and video of the airplanes. The typical hardware used to capture things well is a minimum of: DSLR, tripod, battery extenders (or spares), and good perch to rest during lulls (it's more physically demanding on your arms then you might imagine.) More crucially, this is for airplanes that are taking off and landing 1) in a predictable pattern 2) at routine intervals 3) captured primarily in daylight.
Add in height? Introduce increased shake. Add in darkness? Introduce exposure (hold the camera still, longer to get a brighter image). Add in inexperience? Introduce beginner mistakes. On top of those practical concerns, it's probably also pretty creepy to see these unknown objects/drones/whatever. Fear impacts our ability to react in…
I see you are impressively knowledgeable in this field. But my issue is not with your knowledge, it is with your comprehension and logic.
So, fro example, Nikon typically provides three options for Raw: Compressed, Lossless Compressed and Uncompressed, as seen below:
https://photographylife.com/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/GrQZt6ZFhE4jsKqjDEtqRA/photographylife.com/2017/08/Nikon-D810-RAW-Options.png/w=9999
"Lossless Compressed means that a Raw file is compressed like an ZIP archive file without any loss of data. Once a losslessly compressed image is processed by post-processing software, the data is first decompressed, and you work with the data as if there had never been any compression at all. Lossless compression is the ideal choice, because all the data is fully preserved and yet the image takes up much less space.
Uncompressed – an uncompressed Raw file contains all the data, but without any sort of compression algorithm applied to it. Unless you do not have the Lossless Compressed option, you should always avoid selecting the Uncompressed option, as it results in huge image sizes."
Why make the distinction if there is no difference?
Apple is COMPRESSING the image. Period. RAW photos can be compressed, but if they are then they are "RAW Compressed" Files, not "RAW" files.Apple is not saying you are shooting RAW Compressed, it says you are shooting ProRAW photos, which is slick marketing because everyone thinks they are shooting RAW photos but ProRAW is not RAW. The…
The big iPad Pro with keyboard case is very nice. My primary usage, since the iPad 1, which I still have, is to display music scores at the piano. Since I got it, I realized that just dropping the music stand lets me use a laptop, though having both the iPad and new laptop is not just expensive, but confusing. Further, ForScore runs on the new mini with very large display, which is just behind the Roland keyboard, which is down for the regular swapping of key levers (what a horrible design. They break so easily and repair parts are hell to find) Dead keys are at the top and bottom now.
All that said, no regrets, and the iPad pro has the distinct advantage of also being able to show off my best photos to friends, and not being instantly stolen, as sharing on the internet implies.
Someone agrees with this:
https://photographylife.com/enjoying-photography-in-a-high-tech-world
My word of warning: I got really tired (OK angry) with ios losing HTML textareas for any reason, because it's too easy to poke the wrong button with fat fingers and go to another page and sometimes lose all the text, or when the server balks and asks me to go back and "repost the form". Well, that doesn't work all the time. I resolved to make my mobile forum use (including this one) read-only and send URLs to the desktop, which is more stable and has no touchscreen (not even a trackpad at this time) AND I looked for external text editors for browsers and found one that works ... GhostText, and…
Oh, and "image stacking" is the technique of combining multiple images within a single frame, allowing for greater clarity (as in here), removing noise (frequently applied in astrophotography), or depth-of-field / focal-plane stacking.
This almost always implies digital image processing, and depending on the goal / intent, various filters or masks may be applied. De-noising typically relies on including only visual elements appearing in most (but not all) frames of the stack, eliminating glitches such as satellite flares, meteors, terrestrial-based light sources, aircraft, sensor noise, or even radiation spots.
"Take Better Night Sky Photos with Image Stacking"
<https://photographylife.com/night-sky-image-stacking>
"Focus Stacking" (Wikipedia)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking>
Again, from TFA the source was motion-film footage from fixed-position cameras which could be used to generate images with much greater resolution than any individual frame. Note that 16mm film grain is typically fairly large, but with stacking and post-processing, smaller details can be inferred.
>I do not care if you take out redundant bits, you are still taking them out.
Why does it matter? Why does that make Apple deceptive? Lossless compression is as good as no compression, the only difference is the decompression time.
You could store the uncompressed RAW file on a filesystem with built in (lossless) compression, or you could store the losslessly compressed RAW file on a filesystem with no compression. Once you have opened the image in your editor or photo viewer, the bits in that application's memory that you are editing or viewing are identical.
Moreover RAW does not mean 'uncompressed'. It doesn't even mean losslessly compressed. Often RAWs use lossy compression. Both Canon and Nikon RAWs can.
https://photographylife.com/compressed-vs-uncompressed-vs-lossless-compressed-raw#nikon-raw-file-options