Challenge! March Symposium: The Small Sensor Look.

I love to do shots in the fog.

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My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica. which recorded 640x480 images on a 1.44MB floppy. The first image shows Homer Hickam of "The Rocket Boys" fame and his band of cohorts signing memorabilia at the Coalwood Rocket Festival in Coalwood, WV on October 7, 2000. Coalwood is the hometown of the Rocket Boys, and for years there was an annual festival honoring the Rocket Boys. It was very cold the day I went, and I still had to wait in line several hours to meet the gang. The second image shows another of the gang, Roy Lee, autographing my scale version of the Auk XXXI "Miss Riley" rocket featured in the climactic scene from the movie "October Sky". My version, at around 2 feet long, can reach around 3,000 feet in altitude, although I never launched it again after they all autographed it. The real Auk XXXI, which was their final launch, stood five feet high and reached an altitude of 4 miles.

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A grey day and rather cool and breezy, so my turn to delve into my archives, 2013 to be exact which was a good year for using this camera, here a couple of shots with it at full stretch in the telephoto sense.

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Plymouth pilot boat "Maker"

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Spoonbill

Barrie
 
My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica. which recorded 640x480 images on a 1.44MB floppy. The first image shows Homer Hickam of "The Rocket Boys" fame and his band of cohorts signing memorabilia at the Coalwood Rocket Festival in Coalwood, WV on October 7, 2000. Coalwood is the hometown of the Rocket Boys, and for years there was an annual festival honoring the Rocket Boys. It was very cold the day I went, and I still had to wait in line several hours to meet the gang. The second image shows another of the gang, Roy Lee, autographing my scale version of the Auk XXXI "Miss Riley" rocket featured in the climactic scene from the movie "October Sky".
Rocket Boys is a terrific book, and you've just reminded me to re-read it.

Did you know that the title of the movie (October Sky) is an exact anagram of the title of the book (Rocket Boys) ?

-R
 
I have a Q to K mount adaptor with which I can attached the old M50 f4 macro to the Q. This makes it about a 275 mme. Here's a quarter for your thoughts.View attachment 250574
Ahhhhh, GAS. I still have the Pentax Red Dot Sight and loupe from my days playing with manual lenses on the Q. I thought I still had a K-Q adapter bouncing around in a drawer, but it seems to have gone AWOL.

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My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica. which recorded 640x480 images on a 1.44MB floppy. The first image shows Homer Hickam of "The Rocket Boys" fame and his band of cohorts signing memorabilia at the Coalwood Rocket Festival in Coalwood, WV on October 7, 2000. Coalwood is the hometown of the Rocket Boys, and for years there was an annual festival honoring the Rocket Boys. It was very cold the day I went, and I still had to wait in line several hours to meet the gang. The second image shows another of the gang, Roy Lee, autographing my scale version of the Auk XXXI "Miss Riley" rocket featured in the climactic scene from the movie "October Sky". My version, at around 2 feet long, can reach around 3,000 feet in altitude, although I never launched it again after they all autographed it. The real Auk XXXI, which was their final launch, stood five feet high and reached an altitude of 4 miles.

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I was a huge fan of model rockets as a boy. I built them is the extensive cellar of the three-decker house where I grew up. My Aunt and Uncle owned the house and lived o the first floor, with us on the second. My uncle had a huge collections of tools and a big work bench where I built rockets and planes. Of course, we couldn't launch them in a residential neighborhood so we have to plan days when we could go to vocational high school to fire them off. Obviously, this triggered a bunch of fond memories.
 
Some random thoughts,

1. For many of us, this project encourages us to again carry a camera which is essentially pocketable. (No, I don't mean your phone.)
2. As cameras for online photography, the small sensor warriors are clearly much more than adequate.
3. While looking for articles on the "small sensor look", I found this rather angry article about the one inch sensor.
4. I am reminded of the old saying that "academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so small".
So far, there does seem to be consensus that the small sensor look covers a combination of wide DoF, greater noise unless the light is very good, and smaller dynamic range.
5. I'm still looking for a consistent opinion about either lower MP small sensors or a 20 MP smaller sensor, the latter being comparable in simple resolution to many contemporary sensors. 6. I'm leaving cell phones out of this discussion at this point since computational photography is so essential to those cameras.

Thing to Ponder: What would the images from a Pentax Q or Fuji X-10, 20, or 30 look like if they used all the benefits of modern phone-cam computational enhancements?
 
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