Thursday, February 4, 2010

Interesting article in OP

There is an interesting article in OP. It describes famous photographer Jack Dykinga's method of using a DSLR with a PC control lens to generate high resolution digital landscape images. It's a very nice article well worth a read. This is basically the method I and many others have been using for years now and it is great to see it used by an icon of landscape photography. I wrote about the method here, here, here, here, and in many other places. Even OP has linked to my writings!. I use a slightly different method as Dykinga because I simply do not have the money to buy a PC lens (they're around $1500 and a >20 MP DSLR (8k$ in the Nikon system that I prefer). So I rotate the camera using a wooden jig I fabricated based on some instructions I found on the web. I can actually do Scheimpflug movements this way shifting the "plane" of focus and the horizon, about which I will write more in the future. That said, doing these high resolution images with a DSLR is nothing new, and even OP has written about it before in several articles. I make fantastically large prints (wall-sized) using this method that are impeccably sharp and you would be hard pressed to distinguish these from larger format film. It is harder to visualize the final image in the field though, but that is something that I have found actually to work in my benefit as it makes me far more deliberate in my shooting. In the end, the only thing that matters is the final image. How you technically got there is quite irrelevant.

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