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Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

rijksmuseum.nl

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Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#11

Post by gyomu »

Those 100MP digital medium format cameras are the most exciting tech in photography of the whole 21st century as far as I’m concerned.

For my “serious” photography work I shoot medium/large format film, and every digital camera has left me non plussed. I may be a little obsessive about image quality, but what’s the point of dropping $5k on a setup that gives worse results than a wooden box and a sheet of film?

Then I got the Fuji GFX100 (the Hassy was a little out of my range :-) and… wow. Totally different ball game. I can finally produce digital images that rival film scans.

Seeing what museums have been doing with them has been super cool.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#13

Post by tigerlily »

keepamovin wrote: post #5

Oh wow, that is so cool. I thought I was at max zoom, normal blurry tiles. Then BOOM! It came into focus and I saw tiny cracks, smallest areas of paint, no loss of clarity. It's like you're standing right up next to it. That's incredible! Wow, all I can say. That's insane, that is totally insane! I would love if there were a depthmask or something and a synthetic "keylight" feature you could drag around to really get…

Yeah I noticed this too, incredible, I was thinking "how did they do this?". It's zoom like it should be.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#14

Post by perihelions »

curiousgal wrote: post #8

To be honest I don't understand the obsession about documenting things that are done to the painting. Going through that section of the museum I felt like the curators cared more about showcasing their efforts to store the painting than the painting itself.

I suspect there's selection effects in play: museum curators who don't aggressively make the case for more museum funding, don't end up curating the most well-funded museums.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#15

Post by jl6 »

> To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera.

Looks like they had the ability to move the camera precisely to one of 97x87 grid positions. I wonder if they had any headroom in the precision of that movement. Could they have used a lower resolution but much cheaper camera and compensated by taking, say, a 200x200 grid of images instead?

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#16

Post by ozim »

re wrote: post #9
Freak_NL wrote: post #3

An older, lower resolution image (11206 × 9320 pixels) can be downloaded here: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=nachtwacht&p=... To avoid the dumb mandatory account login, just use https://bugmenot.com/view/rijksmuseum.nl . It worked just now (so be nice and leave it working). Despite the ill-advised mandatory account (really, what's up with that?), the Rijksmuseum is providing a better service than the…

Wikimedia has a slightly higher-res image more easily accessible: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Nightwatch_by_Re... (14,168 × 11,528 px)

Cool wiki has people recognition on paintings so you can click the link to see note about person in the picture!

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#17

Post by lqet »

Aachen wrote: post #7

Not sure if off topic, but this German TV ad did a creative recreation of the painting that I found amusing as a Dutch person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6XQXhr7LQM

Ah, Frau Antje [0], still shaping the image most Germans have of the Dutch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frau_Antje

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#18

Post by wkat4242 »

I worked at this museum a few decades ago on a contract job, it was cool to walk around among so much history. Though I never really could appreciate the "old masters" from the Dutch Golden Age. Their work was part art and part record-keeping for which nowadays we have photography and video. The subject of many of these works are stuffy rich people posing for the "family album". Artfully done yes but boring subjects in my personal opinion.

I did like some of the landscape views though. But overall I'm more into modern art where the art and the message is the only goal.

One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it. In contrast, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre was disappointingly tiny.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#19

Post by WithinReason »

jl6 wrote: post #15

> To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera. Looks like they had the ability to move the camera precisely to one of 97x87 grid positions. I wonder if they had any headroom in the precision of that movement. Could they have used a lower resolution but much cheaper camera and compensated by taking, say, a 200x200 gr…

I'm sure they registered the images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_registration

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#20

Post by formerly_proven »

gyomu wrote: post #11

Those 100MP digital medium format cameras are the most exciting tech in photography of the whole 21st century as far as I’m concerned. For my “serious” photography work I shoot medium/large format film, and every digital camera has left me non plussed. I may be a little obsessive about image quality, but what’s the point of dropping $5k on a setup that gives worse results than a wooden box and a sheet of film? Then I…

There’s a trade off between sharpness and noise, the GFX have an intentionally lowered fill factor to, essentially, produce a sharper image. Meanwhile noise is one of the most important things when marketing mainstream cameras (next to AF), so they go for gapless microlenses etc.

The reason this impacts sharpness is because a lower FF gets you closer to Shannon’s ideal point sample, while a 99% FF is like a pitch-sized box filter.

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