This touches so closely on a recent anecdote that I must share.
The FIRST Robotics team I mentor just finished their season this past weekend. Something they did last-minute was add a GoPro to their grabber because they wanted to see some neat footage of it working, and maybe use it to improve the design or fix issues.
Then one of the students had the idea to just put it in real-time mode and watch it live from their phone. Which instantly became an invaluable tool for controlling the arm effectively. They couldn't live without it after that. I think it was against rules to have a wireless device, so they took the idea and applied it to a USB camera that fed to a video output on the drive computer.
I'm sure other teams already came up with this, but I was just so impressed to see that organic process happen with a bunch of 10th and 11th graders. They learned a practical example of all the buzzwordy things like "think outside the box" and "no idea is a bad idea" and "don't engineer everything, sometimes just throw ideas and see what sticks." I'm just so proud of them.
They’re in good company, NASA got the idea for all the cameras during the most recent Mars rover “descent and landing” mission from a GoPro.
> Deputy project manager Matt Wallace said the idea to put video cameras on board to document the rover's entry, descent and landing came after he bought his daughter a small sports camera that she wore in a harness while practicing gymnastics.
> "She did a back flip, and I don't know about you, but I cannot do a back flip," he said. "But when she showed me the video ... I had a glimpse into what it would be like if I could do a back flip. And that was the moment that inspired a phone call to my friend (Perseverance camera engineer) Dave Grohl, and that's what led to this system."
That is a really lovely story; I'm glad you shared it.
I like these glimpses of the true joy and fun that can be had with the craft of engineering. Amidst the relentless barrage of bureaucracy that defines most modern SWE jobs, it's nice to know that there's still some good, pure engineering out there.
I actually feel jealous that the students get an engineering problem like this. By only having about 8 weeks from when the challenge is announced, they're forced to cut through bureaucracy. There is no Agile and project planning. There's just round-table discussions on what to design, a bit of CAD work to feel it all out, and then weeks of prototype, build, test, loop. It was so darn lean.
FRC was an incredible experience. Like you said, the fast pace round table discussions and develop as you go was a lot of fun and inspiring. The biggest takeaway for me was the positive energy and great sportsmanship I saw in every team and competition. Hope that still rings true 10+ years later. Coming from traditional sports and previously disconnected from the "nerds" and band kids, I came in with a very different headspace than I left with.
Thank you for mentoring!! I know every team needs all the mentorship they can get. I've thought about coming back too but cold feet so far.
Oh and a bit of fun technical story to relate to yours. Back then touch screens on consumer devices was still pretty new, I remember a couple kids on the team had the original Android and iPhone devices. A couple of years earlier I had followed an Instructables guide for a "touch" device with infrared/glass/webcam and in the process learned how cameras can see infrared after removing a filter. Then in my competition year there was a goal of autonomously interacting with some stage elements and this question of how do we do vision processing to make that work? Maybe it was implied somewhere and I don't remember the details anymore, but I immediately recalled that webcams can see infrared and the stage elements had reflective tape. So we butchered a webcam to remove the IR filter and add a near IR filter and then we slapped some IR LEDs on the front. Of course the software side (we used LabVIEW) was a whole other thing but the hardware side was captivating to the whole team and was a lot of fun to put together organically.
Other great memories of replacing 4 motors, soldering heavy gauge wires and all, 15 minutes before a match and walking around the pits with a deep cycle battery wired to a car AC transformer to keep my batteryless sponsor hand me down laptop running.
I love the stories you shared. When I was a team member 20 years ago (oh my god it was 20 years ago...), we did all kinds of wild hacky stuff. Our entire robot chassis was made from PVC and we felt super clever using the hollow tubes for cable management.
These days they put QR codes all over the field for vision processing. It's absolutely !@#$ing wild to see what some of the better robots can do in 15 seconds of full autonomy.
We also had a laptop that ran off a car battery =D Though we could afford a new laptop this year, so we finally don't need to use it as much.
>>[...] a bit of CAD work to feel it all out [...]
Which CAD program are your 10th & 11th graders using? It seemed that most well-resourced school robotics clubs try for AutoCAD through Autodesk's educational access program but always have to re-apply every year to determine eligibility.
They use OnShape I believe. I think it's something the school board has a license for, and it's 100% through the browser, which makes it a lot more accessible both at school and at home. We're also one of the least-well-resourced school robotics clubs you'll ever meet. The mere existence of the team and having a robot that leaves the starting line in a competition is a resounding success.
My informal survey was based on anecdotal information. Since Inventor, Fusion360 and AutoCAD are all under the Autodesk umbrella it could be that many school teams/clubs lumped them all under "AutoCAD". That being said, I did hear that Fusion360 can be problematic with the cloud-based (always-on) emphasis. No mentions of Inventor, and I was also surprised that nobody mentioned Solid Edge Community Edition either.
I don’t know whether you’re discussing FIRST Tech Challenge or FIRST Robotics Competition, but I know that at our team’s competition they specifically asked if we had any GoPros in real-time mode and the remote software prevented viewing any cameras and driving at the same time. Otherwise I think this strategy would have been a huge help to us!
FRC. Yeah, they're understandably concerned about what happens if every single robot has 1 or 2 extra wireless communications channels. They announced at least once to the audience to turn off any hot spots as they're getting tremendous noise and channel swapping for the RoboRios.
If you use a RoboRio and wpilib, there's first class support to feed USB camera into the Rio, through the official match/field wifi for your robot, and to your laptop's Game UI.
They also specifically limit teams to low bandwidth to guarantee quality of service to each robot.
The FRC camera rabbit hole is deep - we run a fully custom gstreamer setup this year, plus a full ML/hybrid vision pipeline and two Apriltags cameras on Photonvision.
In years past, we even designed our own camera scheme with an implicit surfaces calculator so we could drive with/ship wireframes.
>All this camera hacking was done hastily just days before the mission and on a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy.
That's a bit unkind. $40 in 1962 is would be about $400 adjusting for inflation and those Minolta fixed lens rangefinders were excellent cameras and pretty much state of the art consumer cameras, especially the auto-exposure. Of course it's no Nikon F or Hasselblad (those went to the moon later-on) but you could do a lot worse in 1962.
I think it's worth mentioning that a nice Nikon or Leica in 1965 would have cost about $400. So they modified a "cheap" camera that cost about 1/10th the price of a "nice" camera.
Yeah that was probably at the lower end of "real" rangefinder cameras. I'm guessing even something like a Kodak Retina would have been considerably more expensive.
I'm not sure what the real mass market consumer cameras were. Brownies from Kodak I guess--Instamatics were only introduced in 1963. Of course, part of the answer is that photography was a lot less mass market in the early 60s.
Real mass-market cameras for this era would have been things like the Kodak Pony line or Argus C3 (aka "the brick"), or the brownie box cameras you mentioned.
Anyway just as a general statement, photography was a mass-market thing throughout most of the 20th century - it just wasn't the glamorous pro-tier cameras that we still remember and care about today. Kodak in particular always catered to the low-end, getting cameras in people's hands to get them using Kodak film was their bread and butter, it was very much a "give away the razor, sell the blades" at least in the low-end market.
(and they introduced 620 and 628 film with different spool sizes to try and brand-lock you to Kodak! Today some cameras can be converted, or you can clip down the rim of the spool, or rewind 120 film (in a darkroom/darkbag) onto the 620 spool. It's a little bit smaller spool which can cause problems with film spacing on "automatic" cameras, but, red-window style cameras don't care, or you can use a 620 spool on the takeup.)
In the early days it was "postcard cameras" shooting 122 film (bigger than 120!) that would be contact-printed onto postcards, typically either folding cameras or box cameras (the latter being even simpler and cheaper - brownie launched at one dollar in 1900). Later, this evolved into viewfinder cameras/point-and-shoots.
But if you are contact printing (effectively 1:1 enlargement - the print is the same size as the negative), or enlarging only a small amount onto a 4x6 or 5x7 print, the lens isn't that critical. Meniscus is fine, rapid rectilinear or triplet is good, tessar is premium. Similarly, when you are shooting B+W film, a vague "instant" (usually about 1/100, sometimes 1/60) shutter setting is fine... the exposure latitude will cover you even though you're not perfectly on.
And it was sensational being able to send a picture of your own family through the mail on a postcard, like you were a movie star or something! Very very popular for the time.
And even then there were models that specialized in getting relatively decent quality at minimal cost, like the Argus C3. Definitely a cost-optimized camera but I doubt you could get anything better at the prices it sold at.
Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this - yes, a leica or a rolleiflex or a kodak retina or a contax was quite expensive, not a mass-market thing at all! But 90% of everything is crap, it always has been (it's equally true of PC hardware today, f.ex), and we forget about the Kodak Pony 135s and the crappy box cameras with meniscus lenses and guillotine shutters because they're crap. But those were the mass-market products of their day.
(I'm sure you know this, iirc we've interacted on photo threads before, I just like sharing. ;) But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit, box cameras and cheapo bakelite viewfinder stuff has been a thing for a long time and it's easy to forget that with survivor bias.)
I actually used my dad's old Pony for a time but got his German-made Kodak Retina IIIc when he went the SLR route. I had a lot of good use out of that and used it alongside my later SLR through most of college when some of the mechanisms finally wore to the point they couldn't be repaired.
>Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this
Yeah, there may be cult exceptions but most of the cameras considered collectibles today were probably at least moderately expensive when they were introduced.
>But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit
That's probably fair. Vacation snapshots were at least moderately popular. Kodak didn't get to where it is only servicing pros. Of course, it was at a whole different level than today with smartphones in everyone's pocket and the costs associated with taking a picture effectively zero. We have all become the Japanese :-)
The novelization of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) has a passage that discusses a photograph taken by "a Japanese student in England with a Leica". I doubt future generations will understand the multiple jokes encoded here.
I mean what is there to say? (says the person who writes half a novel every time ;)
I don’t have any emotional attachment to DPReview in particular other than having read some reviews back in the early days, looking at Kodak point and shoots and such.
It still sucks, and Amazon did it in the most inconvenient and callous way possible. There is a huge amount of accumulated knowledge being lost, not just in the reviews themselves but also the forums. And a huge amount has bit-rotted away already, if it hasn’t been archived already it’s gone.
This is a problem all over the web. Web-1.0 forums are dying, and broadcast-style social media like reddit, twitter, or even HN (to a lesser extent) isn’t conductive to replacing it. Nobody is going to run a bunch of lens tests and then post the results in the HN comments section, and once it’s dropped off the front page it’s largely forgotten. At least usenet was archived, but, web 1.0 is largely not, and it's also more difficult to scrape or to handle after scraping.
Discord has replaced it somewhat in the sense of being smaller interest-focused communities but Discord content is not discoverable, and while that’s a benefit sometimes, it’s not a good model for “original research” and documentation. The people putting wikis in their discords are doing it wrong and that’s bad.
Youtube is also an awful medium for analytical data. Today, people would be putting these resolution tests/etc into vlogs or GN/HUB-style reviews and eventually they get deleted by google or copyright claimed/etc, plus they're low-info-density even when they're online. Video is awful, it's just that we've monetized attention and video keeps people's attention for longer.
I supremely enjoy the threaded/non-tree-based and non-gamified model of web-1.0 forums. Like discord I think it builds communities where you know the people and it’s not just about getting maximum updoots, and the threaded model is a lot easier than discussions that go fractally into tangents and smaller points many of which are repeated.
There are still a number of these interest-forums - Photrio (formerly APUG), LargeFormatForums, probably FredMiranda, MFLenses, PentaxForums, and some others. There are also some major interest forums for other hobbies of mine - HomebrewTalk, RCGroups, and others. The interest forums on SomethingAwful are actually a beacon of decorum and civility, despite the site's reputation.
But every year there’s fewer and fewer, and what is undeniable is the consolidation that is being undergone here. From many web-1.0 forums to a few, from web-1.0 forums to centralized platforms like Reddit. It’s inexorable and depressing.
It’s gonna be a dark dark day when MFLenses and LFF and Photo.Net and a few of the other biggies finally turn off the lights. A lot of content lost. The Internet Archive Project are truly doing god’s work here, they are the Foundation holding off the dark ages that google and reddit are bringing on us all. And someday someone may finally get a crack at them and the library will burn. Copyright holders would love to do it.
The only way content is safe is if you can keep it safe yourself. It's ironic that cloud everything has rotted the foundations away from 50 years of decentralized content.
The Hi-matic was not a top-of-the-line pro camera like a Nikon or Hasselblad, but it was not a cheap toy camera. It was a good-quality rangefinder with a decent lens and new features like the auto exposure.
Yeah full frame cameras like the Minolta himatic viewfinder model were considered entry level back then. Thank God the mission wasn't delayed by one year because Kodak developed the truly terrible instamatic 126 camera in 1963, with awful resolution and picture quality ...
I can vouch for that-- I still have my Agfamatic 126 from the mid 60's which may look like the $40 camera (same selenium meter), but it always took crappy pictures. Nothing close to John Glenn's. The Argus C3 did though.
Just adjusting for inflation is not charitable. A $400 commercially available camera today would be about $0.25 adjusting for NASA. If it were for military use it would be the equivalent of $0.10.
Hardly NASA has a long history of getting good value for money. Just look at their funding of SpaceX and how cheap many of their probes have been. The shuttle was something of a rare exception, but it was also infected by the DoD’s requirements.
Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.
> Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.
Exactly. I find it ignorant when people claim NASA is some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money. If NASA played fast and lose (move fast and break things), people would die and shit would explode, and they'd get crucified by congress. Private companies play the risk game because they don't have to meet the same extremely high bar of safety that a government org does. I'm not saying there's some waste, but it is a complex process for a reason. Does it go too far, perhaps: I've fallen into ISO hell before, and it can be mind numbing, but maybe I'm just not smart enough to be the person reading those docs.
>some kind of cash-cow that drags its feet to get more money
just for the record, a cash-cow is a business you can just keep milking cash from, not one that you keep feeding cash to. It comes from the BCG (Boston Consulting Group) "growth-share" matrix to describe the lifecycle of startups.
the basic idea is, a company with a large market share in a growing market will just keep making cash in the future but requires investment now, as opposed to a company with a low market share in a market that's not growing, or the other variations. "Stars" are essentially potential unicorns, worth investing in.
So if I were a contractor, and I was billing ridiculous prices for common items from a government agency that couldn't object due to no bid contracts... basically milking an organization for my own profits... what would you call that government agency?
One of the issues with NASA is that the centers are a source of alot of political capital for their congressional sponsors. So things get funded on that basis.
The big deal made about it is because government is more transparent. Big companies are often far more wasteful of shareholder dollars, but they generally don’t have boards as insane as congress.
Hard to say if that’s a good track record or not. Shuttle had 2 fatal missions out of 135, Soyuz had 2 fatal missions out of 147 manned missions. Nothing else is particularly close to those number of manned flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soyuz_missions
Meanwhile, 17 people worldwide have died in on attempted space flights, while 169 people have died on in space flight related accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... (Excluding the original V2 program which had even worse numbers.)
Delta II is from the same era and had only 1 failure that would have killed people aboard out of 155 launches.
Those weren't "manned flights", but if anything Delta and the later SpaceX rockets show that "human rating" isn't adding any safety worth caring about.
Of course you'd want to certify the life support equipment, but that's not why these rockets have failed.
I don't know about Russia, but the US human-rates the "launch" part of the system, e.g. the "stage 1" of the rocket. What I was pointing out is that given the available data it seems odd that we're engaged in that at all.
Especially if we consider SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 should probably have gained automatic human rating based on its record, but the bureaucracy persists.
I think saying the SLS only had one launch failure amounts to creative accounting, STS-107 was also a launch failure, just a delayed one.
If the orbiter had been boosted to orbit by magic it wouldn't have broken apart on reentry, it's only because of how the launch system works that it did so (tiles damaged during launch).
So, getting back to a Delta II (or a successor system), in that case the reentry system would have been a capsule protected by a fairing, and mounted on top of the rocket, and therefore debris falling onto the reentry vehicle during launch wouldn't be a failure mode of the system.
The astronauts on STS-107 could have survived if returned to earth via other means thus it was an issue but not inherently a fatal one. There were really 4 separate failures: the initial damage, failure to assess the damage, failure to have a standby vehicle, actual reentry failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx
As to man rating the Falcon 9, SpaceX CRS-7 is a great example of why you man rate things. The Dragon CRS-7 capsule “could have been recovered if the parachutes had deployed, but the software in the capsule did not include any provisions for parachute deployment in this situation.” You really don’t want that kind of oversight when human lives are at stake.
Anyway the Delta II is reasonably close to the Soyuz but again the rocket itself is only part of the story. You need to look at everything from vibration and g loads to how you get people safely onboard. In the end it was simply cheaper to use the Soyuz and it’s proven systems than independently recreate nearly identical capabilities for minimal gain.
Or to put in another way, NASA only had two shuttle disasters.
Two is such a small number, right?
Funny now numbers can be used.
However I can see the glaringly obvious omission in my post that NASA, in its near 70 years of existence has had numerous casualties and explosions. But that's literally my gist: massive checklists, standards, and regulations are a result of that.
The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it.
All the other solutions currently are just kind of space buses (for equipment and people).
There are different estimates for the shuttle launch costs -- between $500m - $1.5b. However for LEO there couldn't be anything more useful. The SLS launch costs run between $2b - $4b. It hasn't done anything useful so far...
The shuttle worked, which was amazing considering everything it could do. But the program was a huge money pit because the shuttle had so much capability that went unused on most missions.
You can quibble about the numbers, but a rough calculation puts the program at US$196 billion in 2011 or ~262B in 2023 dollars for 135 attempted flights. So 2B per flight in todays money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
SLS is aiming for 130t to LEO vs 27.5t to LEO for the Shuttle. 4B a launch would have less than half the shuttle’s cost per kg to LEO, if it’s roughly 2B that’s almost 5 times the cargo for the same budget. Granted the shuttle sent people up on every mission, but spending 60m/person to the ISS lets them stay in orbit for vastly less money / day. Essentially the shuttle launched and returned a large useful space into orbit, but then returned it at the end of every mission, which was extremely expensive.
Both the SLS and shuttle have their advantages but the shuttle was only really useful for LEO as getting that much mass into higher orbits was untenable despite what various movies have suggested.
> The shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it.
I'll concede that NASA did an excellent job, all things considered.
The Shuttle itself was terrible(although gorgeous) but that's not NASA's fault. They had to get money from the Air Force so they were subject to Air Force requirements, like the incredible cross range capabilities and the oversized cargo hold.
Then there were other requirements – like having to build solid rocket boosters from far away locations and transport by train, purely to get political support – that caused further problems. NASA didn't even want to use solid rockets in the first place.
The Soviet Buran copied the project (without SRBs) even though it made zero sense to them – but the US obviously had a reason to develop such a vehicle, so they wanted to be ready. Their Energia rocket worked better without an orbiter attached.
What NASA actually wanted to build would have been incredible. Sure, maybe the cargo hold would have been smaller, but if it could have a lower turnaround time and cost less to refurbish after every launch, maybe it would still be operational.
The SLS is also bogged down by politicians. And still uses the accursed SRBs.
Right, unless it breaks and Americans have to launch from Kazakhstan :)
There were two spy satellites with the same mirror diameter as Hubble. Launched by normal rockets! Without spending money on shuttle, US could launch new Hubble every 5 years or so!
> Both NRO space telescopes have a main mirror nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), rivaling the Hubble Space Telescope,
. . . compare it to the funding of their actual priority: the series of Constellation: Ares, SLS: Orion. Just look at how despite their best efforts, they accidentally funded something successful.
Not going to say anything about the inflation figures.
But the general tone of Petapixel is a perfect example of photography media still not getting it with the constant tone of "cheap things are toys" and fancy things are "serious tools". Nothing used to take the photos in space taken handheld can be a toy by definition, hindsight is 20/20 and yet they still make this remark.
It's like no matter what happens people who write about photography can't figure out it's what you do with a camera that makes it a tool, not how much money you spend.
Most of the people playing with toys are buying the expensive toys most of the time, but realistically there is no correlation between buying luxury camera gear and making serious photos.
There are two axes for types of people in photography: technicians and artists. Some go all in on the technical aspect of photography, obsessing over numbers, features and functionality. Others see photographic equipment as a tool for art, they don't care about what they have in their hands, as long as it is in their hands when they need it to. All the best photographers you might have heard of fall on the quadrant of "competent enough to understand the mechanics of photography but cares more about getting the shot". You can use camera equipment from the 60s and still take amazing, beautiful, evocative pictures. Even an out of focus, blurry, improperly exposed picture can be amazing.
The "problem" is that the technical features of these tiny, amazing machines can be quantified and argued over ad nauseam. Does it matter if a lens has worse fall off than another? If the chromatic aberration is high? What about the pinchushion distortion? If you are gonna print the picture in a fashion magazine, yes. Does it matter if your shutter speed is 2000 instead of 4000? Does it matter if your lens is f/1.2 instead of f/1.8? If you're a wildlife or sports photographer, maybe. But if you have a camera on you, that's good enough, and you have the basic understanding of photography, you can capture an event that would otherwise be lost to time. Cameras in cellphones have destroyed the market for point and shoot cameras, but brought the advent of completely popularizing photography at a scale that could never have been believed before.
Of course this is no different to cars, or computers, or bikes, or...
When I was in Japan, in America-mura in Osaka, I saw an exhibit by a local skateboarding-culture photographer. I had been carrying around a Nikon CoolPix point-and-shoot with which to take tourist pictures.
It turned out that the photographer himself had been hanging around his own exhibit, and we got to talking briefly about my visit and my interest in his work (his English was pretty good). He pointed to the camera and said "Can I see?" I let him leaf through my camera's memory filled with photos from the trip, random things that caught my interest. He handed me the camera back and said "These are some good shots."
I was really chuffed to hear this pro compliment my random tourist shots. He must have liked my eye and my composition instincts because the camera was rinky-dink by pro standards and didn't allow me fine-grained control over exposure, aperture size, etc.
I know this sounds a bit like a "things that didn't happen for $400, Alex" story, but it totally did happen. Maybe he was flattering me, I dunno. But it helped me appreciate casual photography with cheap equipment as something with its own aesthetic merit.
He liked your photos because for serious photography the technical side is not as important as the subject matter or artistic, compositional, or journalistic aspects of the work.
The technical side only needs to be "good enough" and the photo can still be great. The artistic sides have to be great to make a great photo.
The whole "technician" side of photography often loses sight of composition & subject in the quest to have the perfect aperture/ISO/shutter speed and get maximum sharpness.
There’s being nice and then there’s just being nice. Sounds like he’s a nice guy and he also meant what he said.
For what it’s worth, I find it very believable because it matches my experience of positive pro/amateur interactions in other fields from both sides. Something about the shots signaled to him “this person gets it”. It’s not that it’s pro level, but it seems possible to multiply what’s already there by time and intensity and get something that is pro. This is very different from someone who wants to talk about the best lens caps, and you look at their photos and it feels like they really missed something.
i have been pretty reluctant to take photographs in general. i do enjoy a nice photo for sure, and i have taken a few that i actually like too.
> [I]f you have a camera on you, that's good enough, and you have the basic understanding of photography, you can capture an event that would otherwise be lost to time.
i like this thought. and i will perhaps try to take more photos.
> Others see photographic equipment as a tool for art, they don't care about what they have in their hands, as long as it is in their hands when they need it to.
As a cinematographer/photographer…ehhhh yes and no. I care a lot what I’m using because it controls what I can capture. I’m fine using a $300 canon rebel or a $30k red package with Cooke glass. But I definitely care which I’m using depending on the objective of my work. I need to know - and again I care - what sensor and codec I’m using, because it has a big impact on how and what I can shoot. There are some things a cheap rebel with a cheap kit lens simply won’t let me do.
Being a “technician” or an “artist” is hardly so stark. You have to be both to be good at your craft. It’s a tool, but one that I have to understand the capabilities and limitations, both of which I need to weigh when planning my “art.” Just as a painter needs to choose their paints and brushes.
That's is why I called it two separate axes and not two ends in a single axis. You need a base level of technical competency to understand what the limitations of your equipment are to leverage it to the fullest extent and avoid doing things that will just plain not work, and the technical features are needed to accomplish specific things, but artistry is till required. Feature films have been captured on iPhone (you can say that is little more than a stunt, but it still exists).
Not everyone is filming Barry Lyndon with f/.95 aperture in candle-lit scenes. Watching older films where both the glass and the film were subpar compared to what's available today, where the grain was high, the focus puller wasn't at the top of their game leaving characters somewhat out of focus (when looking closely, maybe not noticeable at 480p or 720p), but the films are still enjoyable. Parts of The Batman were filmed on a Helios 40-2, an objectively terrible lens when it comes to it's optical characteristics, but it can evoke a look that you can't otherwise get which helps with the mood the cinematographer was trying to capture. You won't be able to capture the vast expanses of night time scenes of Nope (filmed as day for night with infrared cameras) with subpar equipment. You need full sharpness for easier rotoscoping when dealing with VFX. You want the best cameras available to capture miniatures of spaceships like in 2001 or Interstellar to make people believe these are real spaceships. You can leverage a new technology in a new way, like 28 Days Later used new at the time digital cameras (that would nowadays be considered subpar) for easier application of effects like undercranking and lower production costs, or how they used 360 shutters in Collateral. But you can also make a film like The Man From Earth that was shot in a single room, with a bunch of actors and an camera that was average at the time, or Saving Private Ryan simply undercranking and using really short shutterns to ensure that the beach landing scene was crisp through and through. Everything Everywhere All At Once didn't have Marvel-budget level gear, but they still made one of the best movies of the past few years.
I don't fully disagree with what you're saying: better tools expand the envelope of what you can accomplish. But technology is in service of the art, not the other way around (unless you're producing marketing material for the manufacturer, I guess ^_^).
I love combing over features, and learn about the mechanics of these amazing machines, and the theory of the physics of light (even knowing how it works, it is still feels like magic that you can take a full picture of an object that is partially obstructed as long as you can make that foreground element blurred enough). I'm a shit artist, but I trust one with a point and shoot to make something better than I can with my DSLRs. I can't wait to see what new story telling tricks people will come up with new tech, like Nope did.
I mean yes, you technically put them on separate axes, but there was a ton of implication in your comment about an either/or mentality and that one is superior to the other. Just wanted to provide a soft push back there and provide a little context for why. I get what you’re saying though!
No hard feelings! It's important to have a nuanced view of the subject. I guess there was an implied pushback from me to the very common undercurrent of "number chasers" that dominate online discourse, because that can absolutely discourage someone that wants to learn unless they buy the latest gear of whatever line the manufacturers are launching this week, when they would be better served spending an afternoon eBay diving looking for used gear. But without that context I might seem wishy washy and disregarding of the amazing technical achievements made by countless people, from the manufacturers to the large teams of technicians bringing the production's vision to fruition.
Yeah, people in forums can have a nasty tendency to want to flex. Either about what they know or what they own. It’s very easy to find people discouraging others. Luckily, I find most of us that actually do this for a living tend to tell people “get a basic DSLR, a nifty fifth, and go to town.” At least that’s my experience haha
Part of the article's characterization of that camera as a toy seemed to be how simple it was to operate and designed, and that's what allowed a non-photographer astronaut to make use of it, or the engineers at NASA to remix it days before the launch for their priorities. So at least it makes some case for the value of 'toys' while it might simultaneously look down a little at them. The toy-like approachability and simplicity is what enabled these people to play with it and have space photography taken seriously as a result.
Well the idea they might look down at John Glenn or think a fancy camera might be too challenging is absurd too.
The article misses that John Glenn was himself an engineer who had an exceedingly good grasp of operating exceptionally complex machinery. Of course he could figure out how to use any camera on the market.
There are lots of people in photography who are not technically inclined but pretend they are cause they can use a camera, after all being technically inclined is not what makes you good at photography.
It's totally possible John Glenn & the other engineers bought a whole bunch of cameras and did exposure tests and ergonomic tests in terms how easy their modifications would be and then selected this camera as superior to what the Petapixel guys might have thought was the superior prosumer camera of the late 50s.
>bring technically inclined is not what makes you good at photography
I think you would be hard-pressed to find anybody who asserts that is the primary skill/inclination needed to be a good photographer, but as I said, in another comment, I wouldn’t necessarily frame being technical as useless or particularly secondary. It is as integral as “having an eye,” which frankly is just another way of saying somebody understands the technical aspects of how to frame a photo, even if they don’t know how to articulate it (which they will eventually have to if they actually want to be good at photography). Even affordable prosumer digital cameras require some technical proficiency if you want to get the best results out of them.
I have a $500 camera and a $5000 camera. They have a fair few difference, but by far the most important differentiating factor is one:
The expensive camera has more buttons.
That's literally it, the expensive camera lets me take photos without taking my eye away from the viewfinder, the cheaper camera has me fiddle with the menus to change things (I've missed photo opportunities because of this).
If you aren't a professional photographer, the RX100 is a great camera. You generally don't need the expensive one. Hell, I've taken many of my favorite photos with my phone.
For those interested in the "automatic exposure" mechanism mentioned in the article, Technology Connections did a great video on it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwm_Dya0PFQ
Thank you for linking to that. The default of vertical orientation as a result of "half frame" exposures meant that device was about 50 years ahead of its time
So while everyone in the comments section is amazing us all with how inflation works, what's the cost of camera today on Perseverance?
I'm having a rough time searching for costs on google and official pages, guess it's not a word that they like to put in PR pieces. There's 23 cameras onboard and it's not easy to work out what a single one cost.
Thanks for linking Justin's paper, he has been the lead of the engineering camera system for Perseverance and, IIRC, for Curiosity before that (https://mastcamz.asu.edu/team/justin-maki/)
That paper is largely about the engineering cameras (for localizing obstacles, path planning, EDL diagnostics, etc.) -- as opposed to the science cameras (see paper Table 1) which would often be even more exotic from a hardware POV (e.g., spectral sensitivity and photometric calibration).
The table links the following articles on science cameras, for example:
I guess the cost of the hardware might be of some interest, but as you can guess from a look through these papers, it's the supporting engineering (e.g., calibration and I&T) that dominates the system cost.
Lower pixel count means larger individual pixels, which increases their quantum efficiency. This gets you more accurate information about the light itself; think of it as more bit-depth.
In scientific applications especially, this is often a better tradeoff than going the other way. If you need fine detail of distant objects, do it with lenses rather than raw pixel count.
The cameras on Perseverance are also mission critical for the rest of the 1B+ Rover.
John Glenn’s camera wasn't mission critical. Failure would have had no impact on the mission success. It sounds like it was a hobby project for the Astronaut and NASA engineers.
This is interesting and hits close to home. My dad and I are collectors of flown cameras from NASA missions. We have a few early digital cameras that flew on Shuttle missions in the very early 90's and they were modified similarly (minus the pistol grip). They were essentially film camera bodies with extra modules attached that had the digital components. We also have the extra large film magazines that were used, etc.
There were a lot of avid Shuttle photographers. When the astronauts landed they'd develop the film and mount them to a cheap matte-off-white cardboard, sign them, and they'd go out to the various centers. When NASA JSC decided to "upgrade" to Discovery Center & boot the public out, they also threw away thousands of these photos. A friend's dad had taken some photos between spacewalks to repair the Hubble (STS-61?); I picked up some of these photos, and I really love them!
> In a frozen vault in Houston sits the original NASA photographic film of the Apollo missions. For half a century, almost every image of the Moon landings publicly available was produced from a lower-quality copy of these originals.
> Now we can view them as never before. Expert image restorer Andy Saunders has taken newly available digital scans and, applying pain-staking care and cutting-edge enhancement techniques, he has created the highest quality Apollo photographs ever produced. Never-before-seen spacewalks and crystal-clear portraits of astronauts in their spacecraft, along with startling new visions of the Earth and the Moon, offer astounding new insight into one of our greatest endeavours.
I love what they’ve done here to get they grip to attach, using just the cold show and what looks like a pin rivet and quite possibly some epoxy. The thumb actuator to depress a custom cable release extension is gorgeous!
Why can't more articles be like this? The headline was a one-sentence summary of the full article. It took a couple minutes to read. It was full of detail. I feel happier than I was five minutes ago.
The shape of that vessel makes me feel unreasonably angry. Which, isn't all that angry to be honest, but it manages to press that "don't f with my coffee" button somehow. I think I'd prefer a mylar bag with a sippy valve.
This design allows you to smell the coffee, something the mylar bag wouldn't allow. It also uses capillarity to prevent liquid bubbles from escaping while you drink. See more:
If you gently squeeze on the mylar bag in space, the liquid will cling to the surface of the spout. I'm sure that the over-engineered design is great at what it does, but it's an unnecessary skeuomorphism.
Even though it's probably at the lower end of rangefinder camera, I'm even a bit surprised you'd buy something like that in a "drugstore." That said a lot of stores were much more mom & pop back then and some probably carried things that wouldn't pass muster in a modern CVS.
While not exactly a drugstore, one fun one that others might not know is that Sears' camera lineup was actually quite extensive and serious, featuring premium models rebranded from Asahiflex/Pentax, Nicca/Yashica, Mamiya, and others. A Sears/Tower brand camera wasn't bad at all!
It sounds odd, but "white-labeling" by importers was quite common in those days - Pentax cameras were often sold as Honeywell Pentax, and large format camera lenses traveled through extensive networks and partnerships (Calumet, DO Industries, Graflex, etc). Today's distributor networks are very, very centralized in comparison, and there are a lot less players in the market. Today the closest analogy is probably CCTV lenses where there's still a pretty thriving industry and lots of sub-vendors.
Given the historical nexus of drug stores to film developing... I guess I could see a drug store carrying some products, especially popular ones, and maybe having the ability to order some stuff too. Ansco was a film brand too (actually it's part of Agfa iirc, quite a large one!) so they could have been able to order cameras.
Ansco and Agfa merged in 1928. I forgot that the Ansco brand continued to be used independently. I never used Agfa film much. I was always mostly Kodak consumables although I used Ilford B&W materials quite a bit for a while.
Late reply but I just remembered: many Agfa products were actually rebranded as Ansco for the US market. I know the Karat series were for example. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an Agfa equivalent of this model too.
I mean, it's a cool story and an awesome hack. Perfect HN distraction when I have better things to be getting on with so thanks danboarder for posting. It just slightly irks me that the article refers to it as a $40 camera so many times (14, in fact). I would imagine if you factor in several days' work by a Nasa engineering team the actual cost would rise slightly higher.
It was near-mutiny by the astronaut corps at the time (all seven of them!) that made NASA bend enough to put a window or two in the capsule (which name the astronauts also hated, apparently, preferring the term "spacecraft").
NASA was woefully unaware of exactly what people could do in outer space, since they'd never sent a human up for more than a few minutes. They wanted to get people up and back down safely, to prove to the Russkies we were as good as they were. They simply weren't thinking about things like taking pictures. The astronauts, in contrast, were hotshots (even staid, conservative John Glenn). They spent their lives pushing the envelope, and going round and round in a highly automated tin can was less than they imagined doing. John Glenn taking a camera along for the ride was probably the tamest thing he thought he could get away with.
Storytelling is both incredibly powerful to people, and also super easy to forget or deprioritize in the face of challenging engineering demands.
It’s far more prosaic than the space program, but I’ve seen many examples of fantastic web engineering projects that went unappreciated (by customers, by management, by the press) simply because there was no story of what happened and why it mattered.
NASA has definitely learned this lesson; look at the effort they put into storytelling with images like Hubble Deep Field, the photos of Pluto, and (especially) the Mars rovers.
I'm as surprised as you are. But the more I think about it, the more I can see how this could happen.
It's kind of a hindsight thing given we know how the space program played out. But at that time, the entire mindset might have been, "we just need to get to space and not kill our pilot."
How about 'let's get him back alive'. If that had not happened there quite likely would have been no program or a big delay in the program.
The writer (as is typical looks at upside not downside of attention to certain details) is predictably glib with that as if 'geez why wouldn't they thought pictures were important!'
Some credit should go to Wally Schirra, who was a photography enthusiast, and took his 70mm Hasselblad on the third Mercury flight. Nasa ended up using modded Hasselblads right through the Apollo missions (and after).
If I were being snarky I could say that this makes one reminisce of days when the engineering was so important and everyone was so focused on it that there was not even time to think of the publicity and marketing of what they were about to do. Versus now, where it sometimes seems that you prepare the product launch marketing materials even before the product.
But of course, even NASA soon had those kinds of considerations to worry about as well, even in the 60s/70s.
Hate generally the 'if not for' type stories (usually by writers about certain inventors or some technology) . They would have figured out even if this hadn't happened that photography made sense to do.
Also in addition to what others have said about $40 and today's cost the modifications and time for that were not factored into the actual value of the camera.
I'm interested to know what type of film was used ? I don't mean the brand but was it transparency or print ? I mean I assume transparency but given the article's suggestion, perhaps contrived, of the whole thing being outside of normal NASA structures it's possible it was print ?
Difficult but not impossible — I think there's a "selfie" halfway down the article.
> "A photo of astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. aboard the “Friendship 7” Mercury spacecraft during the Mercury-Atlas 6 spaceflight."
The grain and quality seem to match the external photos, so I think it's the same camera. John must have had enough media training to know not to spike the camera like we usually do for selfies, he's valiantly scanning the horizon instead.
The old adage of the only way to ensure you're not in the picture is to be the one taking the picture doesn't really work now. Now it seems to be reversed. The only way to be sure you are in the picture is to take a selfie
What GP meant is that he was taking a picture of Earth, hence every living human but him was in the picture. That doesn't quite work for Mercury given the orbit, but certainly does for the pictures taken in the Apollo missions.
> During his three-orbit mission that lasted 4 hours and 55 minutes, John Glenn took the first human-captured colored still photographs of the Earth using this camera.
Weird: in these photos the Earth's horizon looks rounded, rather than flat
I'm really confused by what you're saying. Clearly, you're talking about the lens distortion that hasn't been flattened yet, right? You're not insinuating the preposterous lies that the Earth is round are you? /s
The FIRST Robotics team I mentor just finished their season this past weekend. Something they did last-minute was add a GoPro to their grabber because they wanted to see some neat footage of it working, and maybe use it to improve the design or fix issues.
Then one of the students had the idea to just put it in real-time mode and watch it live from their phone. Which instantly became an invaluable tool for controlling the arm effectively. They couldn't live without it after that. I think it was against rules to have a wireless device, so they took the idea and applied it to a USB camera that fed to a video output on the drive computer.
I'm sure other teams already came up with this, but I was just so impressed to see that organic process happen with a bunch of 10th and 11th graders. They learned a practical example of all the buzzwordy things like "think outside the box" and "no idea is a bad idea" and "don't engineer everything, sometimes just throw ideas and see what sticks." I'm just so proud of them.