Hyper Accurate Camera (uses smoke and mirrors) .:. grubbykid.com

Hyper Accurate Camera (uses smoke and mirrors)

Photo by Clifford Ross courtesy of the NY Times

Via Boing Boing, comes a story of a hyper-accurate camera (image above) by Clifford Ross which uses 9-by-18-inch negatives and once scanned yields a 2.6-gigabyte file.

[The camera was] unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.

Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.

"We're good at making big computers," said Carl Diegert, lead computational and imaging scientist at Sandia. But, Mr. Diegert said, when scientists look at pictures of the space shuttle, for example, they may not see things as clearly as they might. "We're trying to find how the human emotional part comes into play in finding a crack in the space shuttle. Clifford has figured out how to catch all this information at a moment in time."

I have seen large format cameras before, which allow you to take very sharp pictures due to the fact that your negative is larger than the standard 35mm film size. I use 4" x 5" negatives for my pinhole cameras and the resolution is great because there is close to 4 times the amount of information on the negative (web resolution does not accurately show off the resolution). What I was interested in, was how he got the negatives so crisp. I figured it was a combination of large negative, very slow film - probably in the 10-20 ISO range, and using a view camera. This AP report starts to shed light on how Ross' camera achieves the high level of accuracy:

...the camera's precision focusing is achieved with what Ross calls "meat and potatoes" innovations.

A vacuum pump ensures that the film is flat to within one-thousandth of an inch, and a dual-mirror device keeps the film parallel to the lens. Sand bags strapped to the camera and tripod prevent the machine from shifting, and a reinforced aluminum cradle maintains the parts of the camera in perfect alignment.

Because the camera uses film meant for aerial shots, its negatives must be chemically treated to reduce their unusually high degree of contrast. That leaves sharp details but muddy colors.

Mirrors, huh? I wonder if his camera operates much like a modern telescope. In modern telescopes, such as Keck Telescope and The Multiple Mirror Telescope, you could use either adaptive optics or active optics and multiple images combining them through interferometry to form a hyper-accurate image. I am sure Ross is using small mirrors focused together though adaptive optics - where the mirrors move to reshape the overall shape of the mirror. In this case, I bet the extra mirrors also operate as a focus aide and brings additional light to the negative. But who knows, if I were him, I would pay out to the highest bidder and continue making great photographs.

The vacuum induced suction for the negative is a nice touch - I wonder if that alleviates dust or creates even more particulates he must worry about. My guess is that the vacuum system also acts as a filter removing particulates in the photo chamber. A great trick would be creating a full vacuum, removing all the air on the inside of the camera, so that there would be zero image distortion due to the slight air mass.

Hyper Accurate Camera (uses smoke and mirrors)

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