Mid Week Music Post!

[aggienaut]

   Another round of thanks to everyone who recommended music in comments after my music post last week. In fact I still haven't gotten around to looking up everything suggested, but intend to.


Song of the Week: The Avett Brothers - Murder in the City -- It's sweet and sad and so damn good that I can't find a song that doesn't sound like shit when it's the next song you play after it. Seriously it's kind of a problem. Thanks whoshottheshot for the recommendation!


Circular Arguments about Photography
   It was recently pointed out to me that camera lenses take circular pictures. Obviously. But pictures are square (obviously).
   It makes sense that film was square since it would be a hassle to deal with circular film. But with digital pictures it would be extremely easy to get the circular raw image and crop the portion you want into a square.
   With the current pre-cut square you lose a lot of data in the "corners" of the circle that aren't within the square. Esp since most (all?) cameras don't make a square but a rectangle of a 4:3 ratio.
   The sensor in the cameras is presently that rectangle shape I would imagine, but can't they make it circular? I think the only reason we're getting served up square pictures from the cameras is because that's what we are expecting!


Picture of the Day

Meet Dan, a drone (male) honeybee

Also, new pictures posted yesterday and day before! Including one of fan favourite Melissa, on livejournal!!

Comments

[failaga.livejournal.com]

ah, but pixels aren't round!

[failaga.livejournal.com]

For a slightly less throw-a-wrench-in-the-works answer: a picture wont be perfect right to the edges of the lens anyway. You start to get all sorts of aberrations, and the way a lens and sensors have been designed is intended to catch the best -- as it were -- of the picture.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, obviously the edges would be crap, but what I'm saying is obviously the left and right sides of a 4:3 rectangle are decent but the top and bottom (ie as if it was arranged 3:4 instead), which are presumably just as decent, are discarded. I'd rather get my big circle of data and decide which part of the cookie I want to make a square out of. (:

Indeed!

[failaga.livejournal.com]

Well, viewfinders are designed to show only the image you capture anyway! So assuming you use your viewfinder to focus on what you want, whats outside that -- thought it may well be interesting -- would be an unintended capture?

Aside from the the mechanics of this (you could go into problems with the way cameras move and store pictures) this is also one of those 'freedom of choice' arguments, and theres no real answer to it other than 'it'd make life difficult for someone'.

[tribalw0lf.livejournal.com]

I'm curious, do bees look different or do they have similar characteristics?

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Love the Avett Brothers.

It's always nice when someone else knows who they are!*g*

Well.... it's not that simple.

[gythiawulfie.livejournal.com]

The lense is not flat. It is rounded, and it inverts the picture onto a flat surface.
That surface, whether a electrified field or a sheet of film, is still flat.

It is like trying to place a globe on a flat sheet of paper. What the digital camera and the old fashioned film cameras do, is capture the image that is completely covered by light. If it misses the electrified array, or the film base, then it doesn't get transferred.

The way a digital camera works is the same way as a film camera, except that the light stimulates little tiny electrodes which measure how much light is incoming. There are three different types of electrodes. One that picks up the red, one that picks up the blue, and one that picks up the gree. They measure the intensity (from 0 - 255) of each of those and then covert it to color.

True, you could make the receptical round, but like another commentor stated, a pixel is square and the technology behind it is square. (squarish) in shape.

Re: Well.... it's not that simple.

[gythiawulfie.livejournal.com]

And that is the quick and dirty explanation. If I find my remote sensing notes, I can give you a more accurate description of exactly how it works.

[gratefuladdict.livejournal.com]

This photo shape conversation would be so much more fun (and less educational) if you were talking about cake. I mean, really, who would argue with more cake?

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I like the way you think!!! (I can relate to this!)
chocolate or....chocolate?

[gratefuladdict.livejournal.com]

Chocolate... with berries. And cream cheese frosting. :D

[fsk8ing-judge.livejournal.com]

Agree, agree, agree . . . although I could do with a second conversation involving pie, in particular the cherry variety.

[gratefuladdict.livejournal.com]

Only if the cherry pie is also accompanied by a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream.

Come to think of it, ice cream is the shining example of delicious circular portioning that we have been looking for!

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

How come nobody is asking you how you know it is a male?

[geniusinmaine.livejournal.com]

I actually hadn't thought about traditional camera lenses taking circular pictures, but that makes sense, since all of the ones I've seen have been round.

[painindesire.livejournal.com]

Umm, so I think I accidentally fell asleep in the middle of talking to you yesterday, not because you were boring me but because my medicine is making me nuts.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha yeah I was wondering where you went. (:

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I think it would be difficult to make a circular sensor. If you really wanted to do this, you'd just make a SQUARE sensor that was big enough to include the whole circular image.

One reason is that the sensors are most likely made in huge batches on silicon wafers and then cut up into lots of little sensors, which are then packaged. Rectangles tile nicely, but circles don't.

It would also be annoying to have to transmit and store "circular" data. With a rectangle it's easy... you just have an NxM array of data. Again, most likely the simplest solution would be to go to a square format that includes your circle.

[whoshottheshot.livejournal.com]

Glad to help!