One major application of this image enhancement tool is for portraits. The best way to see the effect is, of course, by applying it to your own work. However, below is a basic primer that demonstrates what positive and negative clarity does for a portrait, along with how you might adjust an image after a large clarity change. You can view the small summary below or Download this as a layered Photoshop Document for a closer examination.

Apple released Aperture 3 today. Under the Raw File Support List is the Canon 1Ds IV.

Granted this doesn’t really say anything about release dates, specifications, or usability. But it’s interesting to see a company obsessed with secrecy about unreleased products slip up on a partner’s unreleased product.

Also supported is most of the Leaf line of digital backs. With Leaf raw files now supported in Capture One, Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop (ACR), Raw Developer, Silky Pix, as well as Leaf Capture the openness of Leaf’s platform under Phase One’s ownership is a clear benefit to it’s users.

On the eve of GetDPI’s upcoming workshop in Salton Sea I thought I’d revisit the images that I took on GetDPI’s last workshop in Oregon.

One of the nicest parts of working with high resolution systems like the backs/bodies/lenses in the Phase One ecosystem is that it is so versatile if your intended output is panoramic. The shots below were taken with a range of bodies and techniques to accomplish a 2:1 or 3:1 aspect ratio with enough resolution to print many feet wide.

Panoramic images, by their nature, need a larger width when printed in order to maintain the visual impact of the image. While a 20″ x 24″ image may feel immersive a 8″x24″ does not (my opinion only of course). To get a 4 foot wide print of a panoramic evens the game again, providing an immersive and engaging viewing experience, but this requires a lot of resolution.

For a dSLR a single 22 megapixel frame may end up being 10-12 megapixels by the time you make a substantial crop. With the large starting resolution of a P45+, P40+, or P65+ however large crops still leave loads of pixels to print. Moreover on a technical camera you can stitch a higher resolution panoramic out of one continuous image circle (a much nicer process than panning-and-stitching as used with a dSLR).

I hope you enjoy these images. They are nothing too special, and the others on the GetDPI trip captured far finer imagery. But I hope they do give you a bit of inspiration to go out and capture the world in a panoramic format if it’s been a while since you’ve done so. There is something magic about the 3:1 aspect ratio.

A huge thank you to Dave Gallagher the owner of this highly specialized motley company to whom everything I do on the job is owed. These images were captured with equipment he bought, maintains, and pays for me learn. It’s a great job and I am lucky to have it.

Click images below for technical details and a larger view.

Bonus picture. The below Leaf image was shot by our owner Dave Gallagher. This was right when Phase One bought leaf. Coincidence? Probably.

Captured with a Canon 5D Mark II as still raw images. Shot tethered into Capture One Pro 5.0.1 using a custom Apple Script. Processed in Capture One, assembled in Quicktime.

Showing the view the balcony of our new location in Miami.

Music by ThomasDaneWagener.com

Well, I wrote an article, mostly for fun, over at getdpi.com (read the article) about why you would need two.

Big thanks to Charles Brown, one of our very talented customers, and a forum member of getdpi.com for the photo of the setup below.

As such we’ve been doing our homework. In the course of which Chris Lawery came across this great video.

Advanced Sound for DSLR’s from Zacuto USA, Steve Weiss on Vimeo.

Once we are home we will be posting all sorts of wonderful images and stories. Until then here is a sneak preview.

We stopped on the way from San Francisco to Bandon Oregon to shoot in the Redwood Forests. These were with a P65+ with a Phase One AF body and Phase One 75-150 D and Phase One 28mm. Processing was done in Capture One 5 beta.

Are you a Hard-Core Photo Nerd?

This article is a followup to the Extreme Macro Results post I made. It is only meant for those readers who are very technically oriented.

About this Post

This post is a bit unorganized. I’m posting below tidbits of knowledge gleamed from the hundreds of hours I spent planning, capturing, and post-processing during my Extreme Macro experiment.

Equipment

Click the images below to enlarge and to read the description of each.

Lenses

The following lenses were selected because they are optically optimized for high magnification. The microscope lens is designed for high-magnification for obvious reasons, but the enlarging lens may not be immediately intuitive choice. These lenses are designed to mount to an enlarger and project a small piece of film onto a large piece (relative to the film) of photo paper. Therefore, when mounted backwards on a camera they take a very small real world object and project it onto a large (relative to the subject) sensor.

• Leica Photar 25mm f/2.5 Microscope/Micro-Photography Lens
• Schneider 28mm Componon-S f/4 Enlarging Lens
• Schneider 50mm Componon-S f/2.8 Enlarging Lens
• Schnieder 120mm Macro-Digitar

A Note About Lens Length (and the 120mm)

I also evaluated Schneider’s recently-designed 120mm Macro-Digitar lens. There is very little doubt this is one of the best macro lens ever produced for use with a digital back (which requires very high resolving power). However, the Schneider 120mm proved to be not the right tool for my job for two reasons. First, at 120mm long, 4X magnification would have been been more than the 16″ of bellows extension I had available. Second, the optimal magnification for this lens is between 1:4 and 4:1, and I was interested more in the 2:1 – 8:1 range. Schneider should also be commended here for their personable and open communication; after explaining my experiment I was put in touch with the Director of Product Management for Photography at Schneider Kreuznach, Ulrich Eilsberger, back in the mother-land who was able to answer several very specific technical questions for me.

Bodies

The bodies were selected to allow easy and extensive extension of the lens away from the body.

• Phase One 645 AF body with Mamiya Auto Bellows N
• Sinar X 4×5 View Camera

Precision Motion Table

The Velmex precision motion table is generally used in industrial applications where precision in the range of +/- 0.001″. It was selected for this project because I needed to divide a centimeter or so of motion into 400 frames. This allowed me to move a fly head a dozen or so microns at a time.

Technical Challenges

Diffraction

Diffraction is a loss of sharpness due to a too-small aperture. At high-magnifications diffraction is a major issue because it is based on the effective aperture, not the aperture as-marked on the lens. Below are two images showing f/11 with no extension of the bellows (the lens and sensor are very close to each other) and f/11 with 6 inches of bellows. As you can see the same physical opening is apparently and effectively smaller when bellows extension is added.

Diffraction Math

• Effective aperture = Marked aperture * Square-Root(1 + Magnification)
• Magnification = Subject Size on the sensor / Subject Size in real life
• Magnification = [Extension - Focal Length] / [Focal Length]

*Extension is the distance from the nodal point of the lens (usually the center of the lens with simple-design lenses) to the sensor

• Low Magnification Example: the Schneider 50mm Lens with 6 inches (approx. 150 mm) of extension would have a Magnification of 2:1 and the effective aperture will be 1.7 times higher than indicated. So if the lens was marked to f/8 the effective aperture would be about f/ 13.
• High Magnification Example: the Leica Photar 25mmLens with 17 inches (approx. 450mm) of extension would have a Magnification of 18:1 and the effective aperture will be about 4.4 times higher than indicated. If the lens was marked to f/2.8 the effective aperture would be about f/12.

Diffraction Ramifications

In high-resolution high-magnification macro photography diffraction may kick in on the very first aperture. However, lenses are not usually their absolute sharpest wide-open due to optical imperfections. So where will the balance of diffraction and lens sharpness fall? See below some real-world examples of when diffraction does and does not kick in. My experience with this project is that for every single lens/subject/magnification it’s simply most useful to do real-world diffraction bracketing using the math as basic guidelines only.

Stitching Errors with Helicon Focus

Helicon focus is a depth-of-field-stacking program with incredible abilities to compensate for slight changes in registration and exposure. Here are hints from my trial-by-fire:

• Order Matters – make sure to sort them and keep them in order. In the Source Images Pane ensure that the subject/focus is closest in the first frame.
• Radius Matters - too small a radius results in blob-like artifacts in the shadows
• Retouching – use the last layer to retouch OOF areas to be consistent

Stitching in Groups

I found that Helicon did not handle large groupings would create artifacts. Therefore I did two passes – grouping images 8-10 at a time into 8-20 composites and then running those composites into one final product.

Registration/consistency

Registration and consistency is critical cecause several hundred images will be stitched together for the final product. Here are precautions I took:

• triggering the exposure remotely
• moving the subject rather than the camera
• using the Velmex ultra-precise motion table to ensure micro-meter accuracy
• Profoto Lights (1/100th of a stop accuracy)
• Exposing without a moving shutter or aperture

How did I expose without a moving shutter or aperture? I used a Phase One digital back which can be set to begin and end an exposure using a small exposure box sold by Capture Integration. I used this box with the following workflow: 1) connect the lights & digital-back with a standard sync cable, 2) connect the exposure-box to the digital-back 3) manually stop down the lens 4) manually set the focus 5) using the exposure-box to trigger the exposure and flash. Doing this in a very dark environment, combined by the high effective aperture of the lens, means there is no (meaningful) ambient light in the final exposure.

Manual Stop Down of Automatic Lenses off-camera

In order to use the Phase One 80mm lens I had to find a way to stop down the aperture of the lens. The problem is that aperture control is completely electronic with this and most other modern lenses; so you can only stop down the lens when mounted on a body such as the Phase One 645 AFD body – either by taking a picture or by using the Depth-of-Field-Preview button. These cameras are sophisticated and if you turn the camera off while the Depth-of-Field-Preview button is pushed it will release the aperture to wide-open before turning off. The trick I discovered is to turn the body on, hold the Depth-of-Field-Preview button and then remove the batteries of the body. The body will not have the chance to release the aperture and you can use the lens off-camera stopped down.

This post is the culmination of six months worth of research, experimentation, and refinement into high-magnification macro photography. Taking pictures of extremely small objects with extremely high resolution systems is an incredibly technical endeavor with great challenges and even greater rewards.

I’ll be posting an article for my readers interested in the nitty-gritty of the techniques and equipment used for this work.

On the day of random drawings I check http://finance.yahoo.com/gainers?e=us. I take the ticker symbol with the fifth largest % gain at the closing bell for the NYSE. The winners of the random drawing are the email addresses which falls directly after that ticker symbol in alphabetical order*

Not 100% true-and-random. Mr. Spahn, my high school AP Stats teacher, would be a bit disappointed. But it is fully transparent and easy to do. Plus it gives me an excuse to check my stocks at work.

*If an email address starts with something other than a letter then I start with the first letter in the email address.