Getting Wired in the Mornings…
Two news stories on Wired’s website that caught my interest. One of fairly specialized interest, and the second of more general interest. The general interest story first.
Wired News reports that a recent leak of the pilot episode for the new Doctor Who series might have been intentional.
Earlier this month, the 45-minute premiere episode, entitled “Rose,” showed up on BitTorrent. The appearance of the episode generated a flood of discussion in online forums, blogs and the mainstream media. As a result, interest in the show, which debuts March 26 on BBC One, has skyrocketed.
To one advertising consultant, the leak is clear evidence the BBC is taking advantage of some recently learned lessons on the power of viral advertising it got from a collection of hired guns known as the Broadcast Assassins.
It would be interesting to find out that something as mainstream as the BBC has determined that the marketing power of p2p networks is worth exploiting. While the RIAA and the MPAA still don’t care, it would mark a major leap forward in the legitimizing of p2p sharing.
Of course, the BBC denies responsibility for the leak. So even if the above theory is true, it’s not that much of a leap forward. We won’t see that kind of leap until a movie or television show is “leaked” to p2p networks and the company behind it is willing to admit that they released it to stir up word of mouth. To date, the closest thing to that is Michael Moore saying that he didn’t mind folks swapping Fahrenheit 9/11 and the release of Going Upriver over BitTorrent. And both of those were motivated more by politics than promotion.
Now, something for the photography geeks among us. I still shoot the majority of my work on film. Film, as it turns out, is incredibly high resolution. Unfortunately, it’s also expensive in the long run. But it’s cheaper in the long run to buy a roll of film and develop it.
Still, I can’t help but feel that it must be nice to have a rig that can shoot a digital picture with a resolution of 144 megapixels.
New York photographer Tom Watson and his business partner, Rob Howard, make a living by creating large-format digital photographs. They believe the technology they are using is “pushing the limits of location photography.”
Watson and Howard use a large-format 4-by-5-inch view camera and attach a BetterLight scanning back in the slot where the large sheet film traditionally goes. The scanner is tethered to a 10-GB hard drive hooked up to a laptop where the photographers monitor and make adjustments to their work.
Each image is at least 140 MB—a massive file size. By contrast, a typical high-resolution JPEG file taken with a 5-megapixel camera is around 4 MB.
The article includes some (reduced size) sample photos, including some details of the full-size photos to show just how well they blow up.
Amazing results. Well worth talking about. Of course, the high-speed model of the camera back they’re using is $6,495. Then you need a high-capacity hard drive to hook to it. And the laptop might not be absolutely necessary, but it would definitely make the job easier. So. You wanna talk prohibitively expensive? I don’t think many of these pictures will end up on iStockPhoto any time soon. Still, it’s an interesting look at the future of the technology – and certainly drool-worthy for amateur photographers like yours truly.
EDIT Actually, looking closer at the BetterLight website, it appears that the minimum these photographers paid to get these results would have to be a camera back costing $14,995. Now we’re in the “A New Car!” range.