I got a tour of the NASA Roman Space Telescope as it was undergoing integration in class 10000 clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center the other day. It’s using a mirror that is the same diameter as the one on Hubble but made of honeycombed beryllium (so 1/5th the weight of the original glass one). But the most amazing part is the camera sensor - it is meant to be a wide field version of Hubble (similar resolution) but in the near infrared. It uses qnty 18x 4K x 4K pixel NIR arrays from Teledyne. Thats a lot megapixels!
Here is the overall clean room high bay:
This is the main spacecraft bus - a hexagonal structure with 6 swing out “doors” that hold all the avionics. The masses of wire harnesses total 40 miles of wires!:
This is the main optical sensor / mirror base:
Now, that’s an amazing camera and perhaps one of the highest megapixel count ones I have seen - 288Mpixels.
Here is the overall clean room high bay:
This is the main spacecraft bus - a hexagonal structure with 6 swing out “doors” that hold all the avionics. The masses of wire harnesses total 40 miles of wires!:
This is the main optical sensor / mirror base:
Now, that’s an amazing camera and perhaps one of the highest megapixel count ones I have seen - 288Mpixels.
I've never seen anything remotely like this. The increased solar activity gave us an incredible show in Seattle last night. I started with the 35 GM, went to 20/1.8, then 15/2.0 and ended up using the TTArtisan 11/2.8 fisheye to try to get the scope of the aurora. All shot from my roof in Leschi/Mt. Baker neighborhood.
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For portraits so you can focus on the eyes and varied light, while being a rangefinder, that is the appropriate answer. There is no specific reason you have to use a rangefinder or 35mm etc. Only you can answer how large a device you want etc. I've done portraits with the III to some degree but the rangefinder is truly leaving something to be desired. The viewfinder on a III is fine, so doing just candid etc is fairly easy, as it was intended. I tried to recommend the cheapest glass I could that is also very good. IMO a rangefinder is not ideal for portraits, it is better candid. In fact the focus when you are use to it is fast, as intentioned. Know that the M body built the Leica reputation as well. When you say Leica NO ONE is thinking about a I/II/III. Again you are talking about one that has a beautiful integrated rangefinder and viewfinder for framing vs one that has a mouse sized peep hole that is dark as **** for focusing and an entirely separate view finder for framing. No famous street photographer had the time to use a III
If you are going harder to focus what about a Yashica Mat 124? It has very good image quality, being medium format you will be able to blow up the pictures a lot (it is about 50mm for 35mm film equivalent). For the price you are getting a lot. (A Rolleiflex 3.5 Xenar would be awesome because the quality is stunning good, but more $). It is a little weird because you look down to focus. The Rollei offer a prism finder for looking forward but it is an expense.
Here is an alternative idea. Pentax K-mount work on all SLR Pentax cameras. Get a K-1000 or MX body (LX if you want the creme). Use any of your manual focus lenses on them and then pick up the cheap but superb K135/2.5. (scroll for sample photos). Then any lens you buy with manual focus option can be used on all of your cameras. Plus I love Pentax in B&W.
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Wow! Amazing. I was hoping to see it here but we had cloudy rainy weather. Beautiful and a rare sight to see in the USA.
I happened to wake up at about 2 am this morning and remembered that the northern lights may be visible. I peeked out the window and was rewarded with the Aurora Borealis. (For the record, my latitude is just north of 50 degrees).
I grabbed my camera and tripod and took a bunch of pictures. I used an aperture of f4 with 1/3 second exposure and then adjusted the brightness and contrast to bring out the northern lights. In person, the lights were not as distinct.
Here are three shots. With the last image, I cranked up the brightness and contrast quite a bit.
It's interesting that images that I've seen taken by friends with iPhone cameras display much more vivid colours (including pinks) with higher dynamic range. I think there is a lot of image processing going on in the Apple devices. I took these photos with a Nikon digital camera in JPEG format.
I grabbed my camera and tripod and took a bunch of pictures. I used an aperture of f4 with 1/3 second exposure and then adjusted the brightness and contrast to bring out the northern lights. In person, the lights were not as distinct.
Here are three shots. With the last image, I cranked up the brightness and contrast quite a bit.
It's interesting that images that I've seen taken by friends with iPhone cameras display much more vivid colours (including pinks) with higher dynamic range. I think there is a lot of image processing going on in the Apple devices. I took these photos with a Nikon digital camera in JPEG format.
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My 25mm f/2.0 TTartisaans M43 lens just arrived. It’s nice to have a true 50mm ful frame FOV finally in my GX1.
Feel in the hand and on camera is solid and well built. I finally have an outside aperture ring similar to Leica M lenses.
Here is with 43mm lens shade.
Looking forward to taking some images - mostly environmental portraits and candids I think.
Test shots. ISO800, 1/640sec F/2.0
I like the color rendition and what is supposed to be in focus is sharp. Nice background blur.
It’s kind of cool to have manual focus and manual aperture ring in same FOV as my old Nikon FE and 50mm lens. But in a much more compact digital package. Focusing on the external LCD is no fun though. I wish I had an EVF. They have one that plugs into the hotshoe, but it costs more than the camera body!
Feel in the hand and on camera is solid and well built. I finally have an outside aperture ring similar to Leica M lenses.
Here is with 43mm lens shade.
Looking forward to taking some images - mostly environmental portraits and candids I think.
Test shots. ISO800, 1/640sec F/2.0
I like the color rendition and what is supposed to be in focus is sharp. Nice background blur.
It’s kind of cool to have manual focus and manual aperture ring in same FOV as my old Nikon FE and 50mm lens. But in a much more compact digital package. Focusing on the external LCD is no fun though. I wish I had an EVF. They have one that plugs into the hotshoe, but it costs more than the camera body!
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The lens on my camera, the Nikon 24-120mm 1:4G, was at maximum aperture. I had not seriously planned shooting in the early morning hours but just happened to wake up to go to the bathroom and luckily remembered the possibility of northern lights. I just grabbed my camera without any special setup.
Focus was pretty good as the stars are quite sharp and Cassiopeia is identifiable in one of the images. A longer exposure may have been better, but my ISO was cranked up from previous shots and I was not wide awake enough to make adjustments. Still, I think these images capture the reality of the northern lights.
I find that the iPhone images of the northern lights that I have seen do not accurately represent what the human eyeball/brain sees. There are wavelengths present (such as pinks) which I do not see with my eyes. The iPhone images are very vivid, but to me, not accurate colourwise.
I think the colors are probably all there and probably accurate (except for settings that enhance to vivid etc) but just too faint to be seen by naked eye and the iPhone is simply collecting more light almost like color night vision goggles.
That’s cool that you were able to capture on your F/4 zoom lens, perfectly understandable as a groggy grab shot.
That’s cool that you were able to capture on your F/4 zoom lens, perfectly understandable as a groggy grab shot.
I'm curious about the Japanese me-too "Leicas". Canon is the most prominent, but a surprising number of companies were making them after the Second World War. They're quite affordable, and I've occasionally thought about buying one of the Canon II models, for the looks as much as anything else. In actual use, I don't feel I'd greatly enjoy some aspects of these cameras, inherited/filched from Leica itself. I've never handled one, but it sounds as if the viewfinder window is uncomfortably small, and loading film looks like a struggle. Unscrewing the base and cutting the film leader to shape? Wow. But still, a beautiful design from an aesthetic point of view.
I don’t know if iPhone has “raw” data images? Is HEIC a raw format?
@Bohuweno - I like the aesthetics of the Leica but find it odd to have to remove the bottom plate of the camera to load film vs a swing out back that allows the 135 cartridge to simply drop in and let you pull the film across to the take up spool like 99% of all other cameras in the world.
Glad it's not just me. I don't know about how other cameras of the era (originally 1930s, I suppose?) were loaded, but cutting the end of a film before you can even load it seems very laborious.
Not RAW at all, it's essentially a container format, and in some cases used in conjunction with specific compression formats.
RAW is:
"A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner."
Shooting in RAW usually creates rather huge file sizes, beware.
Using an old 16mp phone creates over 32MB large files per shot.
HEIC is, (from Wikipedia's HEIF article):
"The .heic and .heics file name extensions are conventionally used for HEVC-coded HEIF files.[17] Apple products, for instance,[18] will only produce files with these extensions, which indicate clearly that the data went through HEVC encoding.[2]"
RAW is:
"A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner."
Shooting in RAW usually creates rather huge file sizes, beware.
Using an old 16mp phone creates over 32MB large files per shot.
HEIC is, (from Wikipedia's HEIF article):
"The .heic and .heics file name extensions are conventionally used for HEVC-coded HEIF files.[17] Apple products, for instance,[18] will only produce files with these extensions, which indicate clearly that the data went through HEVC encoding.[2]"
That's a crop frame camera! Latest full-frame the astro people have is this one:
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news...n-largest-digital-camera-ever-built-astronomy 3200 MPx.
The earlier Leica (and Japanese copies) is the more appealing design to me, on a purely aesthetic level. Looks-wise, it's really something special. The Japanese rangefinders quickly moved to hinge-back models, though I don't know if they did that independently or were copying new Leica models.
The history, the very little I know of it, from that period is interesting. I didn't realize that one reason for the slew of Leica copies was that Germany lost its patents after the war. Apparently Japan also did, but it presumably wasn't as far along industrially and commercially at the outbreak of war as Germany was.
So the postwar years had some interesting outcomes, with one defeated power successfully copying designs from another defeated power, the German camera and optics industry finding itself in either East or West Germany (with some actually innovative and advanced designs coming out of East Germany in the early years), and the outright removal of large amounts of inventory and equipment to the Soviet Union (along with technical staff - I don't think the word for that is emigration), which is probably the sole reason the USSR was able to produce halfway interesting cameras for the next 40 years.