Digital Camera Know-Hows | Hacker News Reader

Digital Camera Know-Hows

av.jpn.support.panasonic.com

71 pointsIndySun11 comments

I'm so glad I've found the primary source of this diagram explaining the relationship between focal length and field of view, with a clear diagram and some example pictures: https://av.jpn.support.panasonic.com/support/global/cs/dsc/k...

These are around 15 years old (example: they say that CMOS sensors are mostly used in toy cameras - how the world has changed in the meantime...). On the other hand, optics did not change so much (they actually skip the whole DSLR years, as now the mirrorless cameras are the same as the ones they present). But now there are a lot of better resources, with videos and way better examples.

It's more of a curio with many unchanged facts on focal length, lens, and cute 'how-to's'.

I was happy to find such a lovingly made explanation tucked away, almost hidden, on the Panasonic site. Plus, the layout and hand drawn like graphics appealed. Glad some people found it interesting.

I found it helped me get my head round some dusty thoughts on photography.

They don't skip, they focus. Pun intended.

Can you post one of your 'lot better' examples?

Aside: I love the design of Japanese websites. They're high-density, extremely legible and clear and perhaps the only bad part is that a lot of headers are actually images, not sure why.

If this was done in silicon valley, it would be a horrendously wasteful page with scroll jacking, large amounts of negative space, huge padding, magenta/purple gradients, unnecessary animations, massive fonts, and would take 50% CPU usage, 836 MB of ram to load after 20 seconds. If you're running Firefox on Linux machine, it would crash it.

There is nothing unique to the Japanese to this website. Nothing about this website would stand out to any Western visitor roughly 15, maybe 10, years ago.

Headers as images was the only reliable way to use custom fonts on the web until about 10 years ago. Before that you had to either use images or rely on the hope that your end use would have your particular chosen fonts installed on their machine. I did this exact same things for quite a few clients around 2007 +/- a few years.

Japanese websites that not intended to PR (like this) is fine or great, but most PR sites sucks (for instance, see Rakuten that's full of chaos). Japanese engineers likes SV's PR site style.

But is there any reason to get these from the Panasonic daschshund character on this site, instead of any one of a hundred other "how to digital photography" guides on the Internet? There are surely many alternatives.

It seems to be a fairly clearly laid out, easy to access, summary of some key photography concepts. It seems like a decent resource to have just to glance at.

It's been a while since I learned photography stuff, just skimming through it refreshed some stuff I'd forgotten.

It doesn't seem to be unique in its information, but it's decently put together and covers a bunch of different things.

The "How to digital photography" guides are more like a cookbook, which tells you what steps to follow to get a result, where this is more like a technical reference, that tells you what the camera is doing and why you'd want to take a given action to get a certain result. Personally, I don't consider myself to really understand a subject until I find (or reverse-engineer for my own use) a good technical reference: I might be able to get results, but if the black magic doesn't work as expected, I'm stuck calling someone who does understand the 'why'.

I suppose a better question might be why hasn't Panasonic updated this guide? I don't think the subject matter has been nearly constant enough. What about Panasonic might have had the finances and institutional willpower to task a group of engineers, web developers, and technical writers/drafters with the job of creating this, but not had the power to keep it updated or recreate it today? It's very old - are their customers all 15-year veterans who got into the field needing this reference, but subsequently kept informed of news developments with piecemeal updates?

> I suppose a better question might be why hasn't Panasonic updated this guide?

Because, in a general sense, it's completely unnecessary. Cameras are used in the exact same way these days that they were 25 years ago. All of the knobs and dials are the same, they just go to 11 now. Almost everything about even a fairly modern camera is covered, including going so far as colour filter arrays and demosaicing, which is stuff that the vast majority of photographers don't concern themselves with -- but if you do need the intro to it, it's there.

There's a few small anachronisms, and those anachronisms mean absolutely nothing to even the most technical of end users: The best example is their statement that CCDs are more common than CMOS sensors: Not anymore, but also the exact electrical mechanism by which the light is picked up is useless information for anyone reading the guide: By the time you are so deep in the weeds that the difference between a CMOS & CCD matters to you, you're not reading 101-level guides from a consumer camera manufacturer.

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