Camera Owners of the Bay Area

The July 2004 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

Cold Weather Photography

Mark Jaremko and Stan Jirman (http://www.phototrek.org/) will discuss lessons learned from shooting in the Arctic North in the winter and in Antarctica. Topics that will be discussed include battery life, sensor condensation, and weather proofing.

Gigapixl Camera: The Landscape Beyond 1000 Megapixels

Advances in precision optics, film technology and digital processing make it possible to create imagery with an information content in the 1000 megapixel regime. Having demonstrated such imagery in the context of landscape photography, Graham Flint and his wife, Catherine Aves, now are pushing the technology toward images which contain as many as 4000 megapixels. While still remaining razor sharp to the human eye, images containing this much information can range in size from 6×12 feet (1,000 megapixels) to 12×24 feet (4,000 megapixels).

In describing what now is referred to as the Gigapxl Project, Graham first will lead the audience through the technical intricacies of ultra-high-resolution photography; showing how the understanding of these intricacies has led to the development of specialized cameras. After which, Catherine will discuss the challenges which are faced in the transformation of multi-gigabyte digital scans to final prints.

Recognizing that many in the audience may have interest primarily in the art of landscape photography, rather than in its underlying science, plenty of the former will be used to dilute the latter.

Catherine Aves Bio

With a background in Fine Arts, Anthropology and Geology, Catherine Aves brings a multidisciplinary perspective to the Gigapxl Project. The founding of her desktop publishing business, TechEditions, in 1989 was prefaced by nineteen years experience in positions which included Technical Editor for the Air Force’s Developmental Optics Facility, Office Manager and Editor for several environmental research organizations, and Document Specialist for the Albuquerque Cultural Resouces Division of the Bureau of Land Management

During recent years, she has become intimately familiar with the sophisticated aspects both of Adobe Photoshop and of pigment ink printing; especially in those aspects which relate to ultra-high-resolution imagery. Working closely with software engineers at Adobe, her multi-gigabyte files have been used to exercise the latest versions of Photoshop and to emphasize the need for digital processing tools which can handle ever-increasing file size.

Graham Flint Bio

A physicist by profession, Graham Flint has sought to bring the perspective of a physicist to other fields; especially architecture, astronomy, medicine, military science, photography, and, most recently, information display. Early in his career, he was co-inventor of the world’s first infrared laser rangefinder and subsequently has pioneered the application of lasers in areas as diverse as eye surgery and space-based weaponry. In the context of photography, he has designed cameras for applications which range from cold-war espionage to the Hubble Space Telescope. He has published more than a hundred technical papers and holds a dozen patents.

Graham has held positions as Chief of Lockheed Martin’s Laser Devices Laboratory, as Executive Vice President of International Laser Systems, and as Director of the Air Force’s Developmental Optics Facility. Most recently, and until joining the ranks of the semi-retired last year, he served as President and CEO of Photera Technologies, a California-based corporation specializing in ultra-high-resolution imagery and laser digital cinema. Along the way, he has been Chairman of the Laser Division of the U.S. Electronic Industries Association and Co-chairman of the Channel Islands Alternate Energy Commission. As an avocational endeavor, he has pursued the Gigapxl Project, a project which brings together the cutting edges of photographic optics, film technology, and digital processing so as to create landscape photographs which contain unprecedented amounts of information.