Tag Archives: compression

The Benefits of Lens Compression

The stormy waves coming ashore in Yachats were providing some great splashes as they broke on the shore.  They would crash into the rocks and send spray high into the air.  If you were further along the shore and looked back at the people closer to the rocks, they would occasionally be silhouetted against the plume of spray.  The cool thing about shooting this with a long lens is that it looks as if they are almost being overwhelmed by the waves.  Get a bit closer and they are clearly a long way from the water and in no danger of getting wet (except for a bit of the mist if you are downwind of the impact point).

High ISO Raw File Size

On my previous camera bodies I had occasionally shot at very high ISO settings as a result of the lack of light.  I had not paid a huge amount of attention to any secondary effects of doing so.  My current cameras had a work out in some very low light when I decided to test them in some rather unfriendly conditions.  When I was at home, I was running some disc backups and I found I could not get the normal number of files onto a single disc.  A quick bit of investigation and I could see why.  The high ISO shots had a significant increase in file size.  As I understand it, RAW files, while containing all of the data from the sensor, do have an amount of compression applied.  I imagine that the noise inherent in high ISO shots means that the compression is less effective as there is so much variation across pixels.  As an example, a shot at ISO 320 will average at about 22Mb.  The shots at ISO 51,200 are coming in at over 30Mb.  At ISO 204,000, the files can hit 40Mb. That is quite an increase!  Something to keep in mind when planning to shoot in very low light conditions.

Compression of Perspective

C59F1027.jpgShooting with a long focal length lens has the effect of compressing the image to make elements appear a lot closer together than they really are. When shooting from the helicopter over LAX I was using a 100-400mm lens. The aircraft themselves were quite low to the ground, particularly those on short final to land. They weren’t a long way off the ground but the lens in use had the effect of making things look a lot closer than they really were. Some of the shots I got of the aircraft over parking lots or near the In’n’Out really make it look as if the jets were barely airborne. I like the extra drama this adds to the shots.