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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

It's nice when people get simple tools to do great work. The PowerShot A650 is a decade old point-and-shoot. He's installed a custom OS to get RAW support, and averaged several photos together to reduce noise, and what a great result. An EOS 5D wouldn't do much better.

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Photography seems to be one place where the exchange rate between better skills and better tech favors skills.

I have a friend who makes rock documentaries and his boss will often rent an $8K camera. My friend sometimes shoots on a $500 DSLR, and once mixed in some of his footage. His boss could tell the difference, but it wasn't significant, and it made him wonder why they even rented the nicer camera.

My wife is a good photographer. Not professional level, but pretty good. It always makes me laugh when people say "That's a great picture. What camera do you have?"

You could give me the best camera in the world and my pictures would still be "Meh". It's not the camera that makes the difference.

There's a (British?) phrase for the general phenomenon, especially with recreational sports: All the gear, no idea.

There is a joke: Couple walks into a photo exhibit, and compliments the photographer "these are very nice photos, you camera must be pretty expensive". After an exhibit they invite the photographer to their house for a dinner. Photographer finishes the dinner and says "food tasted great, your kitchenware must be pretty expensive too".

That $500 DSLR can definitely do some impressive work, but the issue is in how it processes the images.

A DSLR will read the sensor progressively, from top to bottom. So if an image changes from the top of the frame to the bottom (if the camera pans or an object moves horizontally) the top is recorded slightly before the bottom, leading to a "tilting" effect. This would be really noticeable if you were to follow someone around with a steadicam, or had objects moving across the screen with any real speed.

When I watch short amateur films on Youtube this effect can ruin the whole experience for me, since I can't stop noticing it. However, a shot of a rock show (crowd or stage) would likely be busy enough to make the effect unnoticeable. There are probably algorithms that fix it too, especially if the film is shot at a higher resolution than is being output (to allow adjustments at the edges of frame).

Is it possible that a high quality camera with a small sensor could actually be preferable to a full frame camera like a 5D in this particular case? My thinking is that it might be hard to get more than a sliver of the image in focus with a full frame camera. Does anyone with more experience know if this is true?

He does mention that, yeah:

> The smaller the focal length of the external lens and bigger - of built-in camera's optics, the greater magnification is achieved, but less depth of field is obtained. Compact camera, with a sensor of small physical size, have an advantage over DSLRs in the depth of field and mobility, allowing you to take pictures quickly and easily change the location and shooting angle. But small sensor have much higher noise level.

The sensor size doesn't change anything. A camera with a larger sensor would have the same image projected on the sensor but it would also capture more around it - basically, you could get the same image by cropping that part out of the larger image.

However, a larger sensor probably would have larger pixels, which would help with lighting and noise reduction.

Focus bracketing could easily solve that problem. In fact, Magic Lantern (the equivalent of CHDK for the larger Canon DSLRs) has a mode to do automated focus bracketing with the electronic focus controls.

I don't really know about focus difficulty, but I calculated the 35mm equivalent of the PowerShot A650 at 6x and it's 200mm. That long of a lens could be pretty awkward to work with, for a start (I still want to try it, my APS-C camera would need only a 140mm lens to get the same zoom, besides the external optics of course).

I used to use a 200mm lens with a reversed 50mm on a Nikon D70, and the focus is difficult. It sounds like the photographer here is using a sort of "spray and pray" technique and using focus-stacking software later.

You actually don't need the telephoto, though. You can get a reversing ring that mounts a prime lens directly to the camera. I took this using a 50mm lens on a full frame body, no focus stacking: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/498/19387253482_cfdb183b3a_c.j...

If you use a shorter focal length lens, you'll get a higher magnification. I've used a 28mm in the past but wasn't very happy with the image quality.

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