Image capture

Mr. 3 and daddy. photo by Peter Siegel.

Our old friend Pete stopped by last night for dinner and a bed. It was great to see him, he's one of those people that once you meet him you feel like you've known him your whole life. He and his family live in Maine now, which is too far away.

Luckily for us, Peter's job brings him to the MidAtlantic region every now and then. Right now, he's on a trip down and up the East Coast demonstrating high-end imaging technology to museums, universities, and libraries.

How high-end? Click on this picture and then click on "All sizes". The camera he was demonstrating is something like 13 megapixels, a PhaseOne image capture module attached to a Hasselblad body. The originals of these images, which Flickr will not accept, are 115 megs and 7228 pixels on the long side. I could print them billboard sized with no discernable degradation of resolution.

He handed the thing to me, and even though it was beautifully balanced, I suddenly felt all butterfingery when he said, "That's about $40,000 worth of camera there."

"Are they heavy?" asks the lawyer. "Yeah," the kid replies. "Then they're expensive, put 'em back."