The title of this post was just one of many facts which Professor Rosenthal imparted during our first class.  I think about this every time I consider picking up my camera.

Above is the image sensor of my camera (.jpg lifted without permission from Nikon).

According to the manufacturer’s specifications it possesses 36.3 million pixels and measures 35.9 mm x 24.0 mm

In full-frame (FX) format the device employs 7,360 pixels by 4,912 pixels.

If we disregard that:
1) the image falling on the sensor is round (as in round, not rectangular optics), that about thirty percent of those pixels aren’t used (because the image from the lens isn’t falling on them)
2) there are a chunk more pixels which are cropped from that circle to make the rectangle which we eventually do see, in an ideal situation, we have:

35.9 mm wide /7360 pixels = 0.0048777173913 mm approximate distance between each horizontal sensing pixel
and
24 mm wide / 4912 pixels = 0.00488599348534 mm approximate distance between each vertical sensing pixel.

This means that movement as little as 0.00244299674267 mm in the vertical plane or 0.00243885869565 mm in the horizontal plane will degrade the acuity of my images by half.

Vitor Freire and I teamed up for this assignment.  We set our white balance using the gray card given to us by Eric, made certain we were in manual mode and went to work.

We soon realized that we were unable to acquire a a single sample image which included the park’s fountain and trees that did not include an area which was either under or over exposed.   You can see the images with their respective histograms on this flash animation:
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://www.terezakis.org/itp/flash/park.swf” width=”800″ height=”500″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

[/kml_flashembed]

I found myself bemoaning not being in a stage to shoot our tests; I am very comfortable lighting sets – which is why I usually like the challenge of shooting on location.  Close to despair I turned to an area of the Washington Arch to which whose face was in shadow.

You can see our test results of photographing CaMg(CO3)2 (aka dolomite)  by clicking here and letting a new window open.  The .jpgs on that page are linked to original .tiff files.

If you are curious about the title of this post, it turns out that Washington Square’s Washington Arch was fabricated from a local material called Inwood Marble.   Gneissly speaking while it itsn’t schist, it also isn’t the marble of Carrara.

I like mineralogy and geology a lot so I checked it out.

(BTW – if you didn’t know that the hanging tree was either where the fountain is now or where the arch is located, or if you didn’t know that the 9.75 acre park was once a cemetery and is built over the remains of 20,000 people, you might want to read this fascinating Wikipedia entry for even more information.)

Acutance: A physical rather than subjective measure of the sharpness of a photographic image.

“In photography, acutance is the edge contrast of an image. Acutance is related to the amplitude of the derivative of brightness with respect to space. Due to the nature of the human visual system, an image with higher acutance appears sharper even though an increase in acutance does not increase real resolution.” – Wikipedia

Camera phone Milestones:

1838 First known photo of a person
1901 First consumer camera: Kodak Brownie
1960 2.2 billion photographs taken
1979 First commercial mobile phone cellular telecoms network, in Tokyo
1981 First commercial electronic still camera (Sony Mavica)
1983 First U.S. cellular mobile phone service, in Chicago
1989 4 million mobile phone subscribers in the world
1991 Second generation (2G) of mobile phone networks
1999 740 million mobile phone subscriptions — one in eight humans had a mobile phone (more mobile phones than personal computers or automobiles)
2000 First camera phone, made by Sharp, distributed by J-Phone in Japan. Resolution of 0.1 megapixels — 300×300 pixels.
2004 End of film cameras (according to industry group PMA)
2004 Camera phone sales exceed sales of stand-alone digital cameras
2006 Camera phone sales exceed sales of stand-alone digital cameras and film-based cameras combined
2007 More than one billion camera phones in use — a feat which took seven years, in contrast to TV (65 years) and personal computer (33 years)
2009 4.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. 2.5 billion camera phones in use
2009 2.5 billion camera phones in use
2011 380 billion photos taken in the year; 3.5 trillion photos taken in history
2011 Apple iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr
2013 Apple iPhone 5 is the most popular camera on Flickr

http://photosecrets.com/rise-of-the-cameraphone

Nokia Lumia 1020 41 MP camera phone debuts July, 2013….