Phototastic

Free Melbourne photo download and a thought about the future

If you’d like the full 150 megapixel resolution image, for non commercial use, download Melbourne in High Resolution right now. If you use it, please let me know. Either on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or link to this regularsteven.com. It’s 33 megabyte file, so best not do this on your mobile. You can print this as big as you like if you like. Please, just don’t sell it or use it for commercial purposes.

As for the quality, here’s the picture at 100%. You can crop in almost anywhere and figure out how to frame a shot. Over and over, a new picture can be found – the quality is crazy!

And, not only, but this picture is cropped down from 330 megapixels. Check out the full view of what I captured while standing in the rain.

The potential detail you can get with consumer cameras is remarkable. This is a photo that has been generated from 50 individual shots, each taken at the same settings, each shot with some overlap from the previous photo, and then stitched up using Adobe Lightroom (actually very easy – select the shots, press Control+M, and it’s almost done). Each shot was captured at 70mm, which is rather tight, but I did that to try preserve straight lines while allowing for a ultra sized end picture result.

You could say this process is a hack. Sometimes, hacks lead to the future.

It’s me using tools to make for shortcomings in technology, but over time, this will change. I’m an early adopter with photography, but these kind of hacks and results are often what drive future technology.

In the future, there’s going to be all sorts of advancements in photography to the point that photography, as an art that it is today, will die. Or perhaps evolve…

There will always be those with an eye for a shot and an ability to compose on the fly to the point it’s second nature. But as technology advances, the need for those skills while on shoot are going to become less relevant with the progressing technology in post production.

Say you’ve got a camera that captures the following at:

• More resolution than you need
  • This would give the ability to crop the shot you’d like in post, if you shoot wide enough
• More focal points & depths of focus points than you need (i.e. multi
  • This would give you the ability to select which are you would like to focus on in post. Look at what Lytro are doing (at least trying).
• A 360 degree field of view
  • This would allow you to crop in the section you like.
• Multiple exposures all captured automatically
  • This would allow for shade and highlights to be manipulated easily – no issue of over or under exposed shots.

Now, my little future thought has issues. For example, portability with regards to optical quality. There are some rules of physics (with regards to light & capturing it) that will be very challenging. Equally, things such as barrel distortion make for surreal looking pictures (think of fish-eye), but again, this will increasingly be less of an issue; barrel distortion is getting better in consumer post production tools, and it’s only a matter of time.

What do you think? Will photography, as it is today, die?