Alec

@ Paul, I could say how more advanced Buran was vs. the Shuttle. You could say how it only had one flight and the program had gone nowhere. We'd both be right.

If you look at a lot of the Russian projects and inventions, be it the Cola borehole or the Antarctic station, they place extra value on big dreams and big things, even without much consideration to commercial drivers. By contrast the Americans, who are at least as (and often better) at executing complex scientific and technological projects, would not just get up and do it full-on without a commercial driver. You just won't get the funding. You know where Saturn 5 would be without the Sputnik and Laika and Gagarin and Leonov and the first moon impact and the first photo on the back side on the moon (Russian achievements). Saturn 5 would still be on a drawing board.

So the Americans and the Russians can't really go far without each others. You need both the Russian "Let's go!" and the American financial wisdom to keep going.

N1, and Energia-Buran complex, were transported using two parallel train tracks. In all fairness the cost of the erector mechanisms for such big vehicles can't be ignored.

No play and no breathing - when you touch a barrel or use any control, it does not shift even 0.01mm - irrelevant for photo but needed for vid

If a pilot about to fly you, or a doctor about to operate on you, displayed a cavalier attitude about natural abilities v. tools etc., even if they made a valid point not dissimilar to what you expressed, most people would become worried. The reason I listed these two professions is because it is intuitively clear the predictability of the outcome is IMPORTANT.

In pro video and movie making, there is accountability to people paying hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars. Even a small business owner who pays $10K NEEDS the commercial to succeed does not have that money just kicking around spare. These people worry and worry a LOT - if I get their business the least I can do is treat it with professional accountability and respect.

This isn't still photography where you pick an AF point on the subject or lock focus and recompose.

In motion picture, the focus and the manner of focus transition between points is a part of the visual vocabulary - not some technical hurdle to be automated.

On close indoor shots it has to be at the exact deliberate point to within a millimeter and it has to slow down a particular way arriving at that point. Do I need to say "no overshooting and back-tracking!" ??? :-) :-)

Some days cameras will have off-board machine visions systems, powered by lasers or holography or ultrasound or whatever, that observe the scene in real time from a couple of vantage points (not merely through the lens) and anticipate the right cues for actor motion and compare it to the pre-scripted notation in regards to focus iris and (where applicable) zoom objectives. These systems, eventually, will be as good as humans at pulling focus for motion picture production.

I hope this clarifies the "AF" relevance

Excellent summary Joseph. For a number of practical reasons not just cost (friction is one) a lot of modern lenses are put together very loosely. There are engineering considerations they simply ignore, like consistency of resistance of the manual focus and iris action (and zoom, on other such lenses) throughout the range.

In the movie business focus, iris, etc are pulled by hand - nowadays usually by means of a wireless servo that a separate crew member wears around his-her neck. That way the camera, however huge, isn't bumped when these controls are being operated (sometimes vigorously). That's what those white rings are for - they have pencil marks on them for various target values for the present take. Actors observe blocking and all distances are tape-measured. Focus and iris (and manner of transition between points) are utterly deliberate. So these lenses' distance scale is consistent to within a tiny fraction of a percent - not teens of percents as with reg photo lenses.

Earlier today I found myself on the business end of a Big Black Camera, lol, being shot in a film scene. ... the camera being RED5 (in a 4K/800iso/24p mode - I'd spied a look! :). A couple of useful things about that setup:

1) The camera supports 3 monitors: the cameraman's, the focus puller's, and a large director's one. This wasn't some cheapie video output replication - each of these had different markers and things exposed, appropriate for their role.

2) The focus puller uses a wireless manual focus servo worn around his neck. Basically a detached focus ring, with focus marks to be executed in a given scene penciled in on the focus ring's white band. Everything was measured with a tape measure and I reckon this ring had adequate length of travel and fidelity of calibration.

3) Sound is completely separate. A separate crew member manages a shotgun mic on a boom with a recorder. That's what the clapper board is for.

Interesting point about the handheld 4x5" for candids. Henri Cartier-Bresson used a small camera (Leica) early on for that reason. The way I look at it, equipment choice is ultimately up to the photographer, but by the same token (meaning insofar as the artist is considered to know what she or he is doing) no allowance is made for equipment in the final result.

Using a Minox or an 8x10 or anything in between has tradeoffs and implications. If the ultimate result is meh, the fact that a really bespoke gear or method were used to make that, would not somehow salvage it - I do not see how it ever could. Likewise, none of the iconic shots are one iota less so to me because the photographer happened to be equipped smartly and anticipated the right time and place and / or exercised extreme technical prowess or say bravery.

That's a Soviet T34. Note the hull number 666!

This reminds me of the "we, real photographers, ..." LiveView discussions and decades earlier ones in other media about autofocus. :-)

This allows you to achieve
* Single-shot stacked focus (everything in focus)
* Single-shot, single-lens 3D (actual 3D depth map - not stereoscopy)
* Adjusting the focus after the fact.

Page 25 of the company's CEO's Ph.D thesis makes it clear what they are doing: http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf

Necessarily, this method of capture trades off resolution for ability to "play" with the 3rd dimension and how finely. I.e. if you take a 20MP conventional sensor and use it for this application, if the fidelity of depth control is to be similar to what is indicated on the demo pic above, the image resolution would be somewhere around 1 megapixel.

This sounds like a non-starter; however if one were to take the compact camera or cell phone pixel density and put it on a full-frame sensor, one could counter the resolution problem.

Stan, thank you so much for your especially warm and thought out comment.

I'd like to use the comments on my web site - pls let me know in case of any issues.

Wishing everyone here the best of luck and success in 2010

-- AK

@ bus352: thank you for your kind words

Everyone, thank you for your votes of support