As photography enthusiasts  we concentrate on our efforts on ground-based photography, or sometimes from the air. Photographic imagery is also a valuable tool from space – to assist weather forecasting (of course), and also to monitor ash plumes from volcanoes.  The ash can be very dangerous for airline operations, but isn’t always easy to detect when there is lots of cloud around.

A new polar-orbiting satellite was recently launched (Suomi NPP) and NASA has just posted an image from it, showing the ash cloud from Mount Tongariro, around an hour after it erupted late Monday evening.  You can see the impressive  full image at the NASA site, but below I’ve cropped in to show the central North Island with the ash heading east towards Hawke’s Bay.  This image was from around 12:55 am NZ time – note the lights from major population centres as well.

I’ve always been fascinated with time-lapse imagery – especially of clouds and weather, naturally.

I’ve dabbled a bit myself, with my most recent examples being of Comet Lovejoy last Boxing Day (I also posted a still image on our KCPS blog), and cloud over Kapiti Island in January.

Around then I was in touch with a friend of a friend from Taupo, Bevan Percival, who was just getting going on time-lapse photography. Boy has he got going.

I highly recommended you check out his “NZ Landscape Timelapse Volume 1” on Vimeo or YouTube. Do watch it in HD (1080p).  It’s a series of time lapses mostly around the central North Island, and just stunning.

Here’s a bit of techy fun – Google streetviews as you’ve never seen them before.

A very clever person has taken the full streetview images in every direction and warped them around geometrically so you can see the whole view as one image.  And if you click and drag on the image itself you can interactively change the shape, and view and warping.

The image above came from this view from Bowen Street, Welliington, near the Cenotaph and Beehive.

But you can use Google Maps to go look anywhere. Big Ben, for instance.  Have a play, and enjoy!

Well look here – another public beta from Adobe to play with.  They have just released Photoshop CS6 Beta.  But be careful with your Internet datacap – it’s a 1.7 GB download for Windows!  The Mac download seems slender by comparison at 984 MB.

Russell Brown has done a video on his six favourite features of this release. It’s available on the Photoshop Youtube channel, along with a lot of other “sneak peeks”. The “Content Aware Move” tool is particularly interesting.  The Raw processor is similar to the new develop tools for the recently released Lightroom 4.

CS6 does look nice. But remember the Beta will expire in a few months, and then it’s time to pay the Adobe Tax again for those who wish to upgrade from an earlier version.

My very first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 950, purchased 13 years ago. It was a 2.1 megapixel camera, producing 1600 x 1200 pixel images. I really enjoyed using it, until one day I accidentally left it behind on a plane. And so the never-ending series of digital camera upgrades ensued. But that’s another story.

Today’s camera phones range up to around 8 megapixels. For example, the iPhone 4S produces images which are 3264 x 2448 pixels.

DSLRs provide, of course, even more resolution, with the latest 36 megapixel Nikon D800 clocking in at an impressive 7360 x 4912 pixels.

Clearly, today’s cameras are capable of producing digital images of much more than the 1024 x 768 pixels which is the current gold standard for “projected images” or “digital images” in competitions and salons.

That’s why our committee proposed last year that we would move to a new allowable maximum digital image size for our KCPS salons of 1600 x 1200 pixels. We thought it was time to move on, and this decision was endorsed when discussed at our AGM in November 2011.

It’s important to mention that this is a maximum allowable size (i.e., no more than 1600 pixels across, and no more than 1200 pixels high).  Less is OK as well. And this will also allow for more freedom in aspect ratio for cropped images, within those constraints.

Image resolution is important at four stages – capture, production, judging, and display:

1. Capture – as noted above, there is no difficulty in capturing images of at least 1600 x 1200.
2. Production – this will depend on the photographer’s computer display. Many monitors these days are tending towards the HD aspect ratio of 16:9 or 16:10.  Common resolutions now are 1920 x 1080, 1920 x 1200, and on up to the 27 inch iMac resolution of 2560 x 1440.
3. Judging – again, this will depend on the judge’s computer display. But it is very likely that they will have good resolution displays.
4. Display. For projection at the KCPS salons our own projector has a native resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels (WXGA). We did consider limiting images to this, but decided that it was time to “move on”, even if not all the detail in an image of (up to) 1600 x 1200 could be projected just now. Technology is advancing rapidly. For example, rumour has it that in early March Apple will announce their iPad 3 with a “retina” display resolution of 2048 x 1536.

So don’t forget that starting with our 2012 Summer Salon (images due by 12 March) you can submit digital images of up to 1600 pixels across, and up to 1200 pixels high. The process for submitting these images is about to change, but that’s also the topic for another post.

Finally, for more than you ever wanted to know about display resolution, check out the Wikipeda entry.

Wikipedia Display Resolution Graphic