BWJones's Journal: SLC to LAX

New JonesBlog update. SLC to LAX

Air Korea up close

[G4from128k]

I was flying Hong Kong-LAX one time and around midnight mid-Pacific time I looked outside to see an Air Korea 747 not too far away on a parallel course. It was probably +500 to 1000 ft in altitude and laterally off our wing by 1/2 mile or so. Distances are hard to judge, but it was close enough to read the lighted tail insignia. I attempted to make a long-exposure photo of it. When I pulled the camera away, the plane was gone and the photo, which did show the stars, didn't show the streak of the navigat

Re:

[BWJones]

Yeah, I'd love to get a really low light sensitivity camera for shots like that among others. It would have been cool to hook up a telephoto lens to a fast camera and I'm betting that a 1D mkIII with a reasonably fast lens could have done that exposure. The ironic thing about lots of cameras that are in the higher megapixel race is that they are actually getting slower in terms of their exposure properties due to the shrinking photosites. Technology for making those sites more sensitive can only go so fa

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[G4from128k]

Yes, the photosite size problem is a real issue. As the photosite dimensions drop, the fraction of the pixel that is actually light-sensitive declines (the various charge-transfer, gate electrodes, etc. take up a growing fraction of the space). Smaller photosites are also shallower in terms of the full-well depth (maximum number of electrons that the site can hold) which translates into higher noise at all exposures. Marketing can't win over physics.

Now if one could only find the ready cash for a 1D mkII

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[BWJones]

Now if one could only find the ready cash for a 1D mkIII and 400 mm f/2.8 lens. SIGH!

No doubt...