Site Moved To BailwardPhotography.com

This site has been sadly ignored for far too long, and in hopes to consolidate a few of the various blogs I have I'm moving it over to http://bailwardphotography.com where it will be loved and let run in the yard whenever it wants :)

Seriously though, please hit the link and check out the site, and understand that things will be in flux for the next while as pages and images are moved around, themes are tweaked, etc.

http://bailwardphotography.com (rss)

Pentax Global Shoot Day

The 7th annual Pentax World Global Shoot Day is coming up next weekend, where Pentaxians are encouraged to all shoot locally. Any Pentaxians from the Vancouver or Fraser Valley area feel like getting together?

K-7 Review @ DPReview

DPReview gives the K-7 a thorough, 33 page review and ends with.... well, I'll let you see the conclusions yourself. :)

Fantastic Landscape Image

Sometimes you run across an image you have to give kudos to, and this is one of them. Lets see what's right about this lovely shot:

• Made with a Pentax (of course this has nothing to do with it....)
• Rule of thirds obeyed, boat is on the left third, horizon on the top third
• Foreground elements (boat + vegetation in the water)
• Triangles, lots of 'em, starting with the angled boat, extending to the mountains in the background, followed by vegetation on the bottom right and clouds in the background
• Center of focus on the sun, with everything pointing towards it
• Well lit and the perfect time of day, the golden hour rules!

Kudos to Aleš Nanut for his fantastic image.

New Pentax K DSLR - The K-x

I'm realizing now that naming this blog after a particular camera body wasn't the smartest thing, especially now that the K-x has been released. OK1000 has some great details on it. Looks like it is basically a low end K-7 (with a $700-900 price point with lenses) and comes in funky colors. It has the picture mode stuff that the pros scoff at, has 12mp, ISO 100-12800, 720p video, HDR bracketing and a few other things from the K-7. This is to the K-7 what the *ist-DS was to the *ist-D, the lower end, affordable consumer model (not that there's anything wrong with that).

What Resolution Is Needed?

I was having an IM conversation with a friend of mine today talking about the resolution of digital cameras and what's needed for printing images out, in his case for large wall hung landscape prints.

My attempts to figure it out with him were basically along these lines.... The megapixels you need are not what you think they are. The current range of about 10-14mp is pretty damn good, and here's why.

First of all, heck out the print sizes for different digital camera resolutions. It has a nice explanation of sizes, printing needs, and most importantly, DPI. The accepted sizes that magazines print at is 300dpi, for close up viewing (about a foot or so I figure). For billboards, you only need about 40dpi according to the page.

I also found this megapixel calculator. It's pretty good, and given a pixel height and width it'll tell you things like filesizes and printed size given 300/150/72 dpi printing.

For example, put in the settings for the 6 megapixel Pentax *ist-D, with a maximum resolution of 3008x2008. You can see that you can get a high resolution (300dpi) print of 10x6" and a "photo" resolution print of 20x13" (which is pretty huge). If you're using screen resolution of 72dpi (still higher than the billboard setting) you can get up to 41x28". That's a 3 foot print from a "mere" 6 megapixels.

Bump it up to the 14 megapixel K20D and you can check out the 4672x3104 image size stats. This bumps you up to a 15x10" magazine resolution print (ie: larger than your standard magazine size), 30x20" photo print size and 64x43" for screen resolution.

Even if you take into account the photo resolution of 100dpi (which is probably more than is needed for viewing from a foot or more away in a home setting), you can get a 20 inch print out of a 6 megapixel camera, or 28 inches from 12 megapixel camera. And an image printed out at 20 inches by 13" is huge :)

Update: OK, so looking at this post from BoingBoing about the big $$ and big megapixel Phase One digital back, maybe I take back a bit about what I said regarding extreme cropping. The calculator shows that 60.0 megapixels (I chose the square cropping hxw) gives you a 25" square image at 300dpi. Kinda big :)

BBC Series - The Genius of Photography - Is Genius

While I'm only about halfway through the 6 hour miniseries from the BBC The Genius of Photography, I have to say it's absolutely fantastic. Talking about photography and it's evolution from the very first images, though the renaissance of the new artists using it, to war and back again, it's done very, very well. Most of what hit me was how sometimes the simplest images have huge impact. Sure there are the "created" images, but some of the most powerful images that everyone has seen and knows (such as the iconic images from various wars) were just grabbed running and gunning with an all manual Leica, or shot as the photographer was thrown to the ground. No bitching about lens sharpness, or lack of bracketing, or having to go into the menus to get feature XYZ.... makes you think.