The use of so-called alternative glass on Canon EOS bodies has been popular for some time, and sometimes the reasons are compelling and the reward is great. However there are also people experimenting with medium format lenses on Canon EOS cameras via an adapter, perhaps in the hope of achieving something closer to medium format levels of detail. Unfortunately this is not the case. Medium format lenses resolve more detail overall mainly because they have a much larger image circle and use much larger pieces of film, or larger digital sensors. However, the amount of detail resolved per millimeter may even be less than a good 35mm format lens.

Using medium format lenses on a Canon makes little sense to me for the following reasons:

- medium format lenses are generally larger and heavier than the 35mm format equivalents of the same focal length
- medium format lenses are generally slower (smaller maximum apertures)
- medium format lenses are generally more expensive
- you will generally lose functionality such as AF, EXIF, auto-aperture, etc

There are two notable exceptions. It makes sense if:

- you already own the medium format lenses, or
- you need the extra image circle because you are using a tilt/shift style adapter

On November 1, 2009, Imagerights.com will be launched. It is a simple solution designed to help protect the copyrights of photographers. It works by applying visual search and image recognition technology to track photographs and illustrations across the internet, assisting rights holders to discover and ultimately recover fees for the unlicensed use of their works. Images will still be recognized regardless of small amounts of cropping and possible other subtle changes.

A very similar website is already running in beta mode: Tineye.com. I have already tracked one unauthorized user selling prints of one of my works!

It is becoming a popular passtime among some photographers these days to bemoan the increasing dominance of web-based advertising and the slow death of print, especially magazines. Some are even suggesting to throw out the very high resolution cameras and replace them with 2 or 4 MP models, with the justification that you won’t need more than that for a web-dominated future.

Although I agree with the trend away from high-resolution, that is not the whole story and not a reason to sell your 30MP camera for a 2MP model anytime soon. This seems like another case of an author trying to appear prophetic (although he is about 20 years too late in this case to be prophetic and too early for the article to apply in the real world).

Even if print used to comprise 90% of your work and by 2010 it will only comprise 20% (for example) you will still need the extra resolution for that 20%. You would not want to abandon high-resolution unless the cost of having more resolution exceeds how much you are making from it.

Personally I don’t think print will die in our lifetime any more than TV killed off radio, although like radio I expect it will become a niche rather than the dominant medium. And although the current figures for magazines are not looking good, my mailbox is still filling up regularly with printed catalogues and other junk mail, printed in high resolution.

Even if an image is targeted at the web, many clients would prefer that the image be produced at high-res to give them flexibility in future should they decide to go to print.

Even if e-paper does take off, and there’s a good chance it will, I expect that it will have to be higher resolution than 72dpi, to make text really crisp. Same goes for computer monitors – how long will it be before we have smaller pixel pitches for sharper text and images? I can easily imagine extreme resolution screens taking off before too long. So the screens won’t necessarily become much larger but the pixels will be a lot smaller. Instead of HD’s 2 MP resolution, with half the pixel width and height they could be 8 MP screens, or with 300dpi rather than 72dpi (but same screen size), that would result in 34 MP.

Whatever resolution the medium will be, you will always be happy to have extra resolution to support multimedia zooming, or plain old cropping.

And with bayer filter arrays on our sensors, images always look more detailed when downsampled properly, so an 8 MP camera will give you a better 2 MP image than a native 2 MP camera, all else being equal.

So it seems there are good reasons for shooting in high res for some years to come, and if high-resolution screens take off soon enough, high-res will have a healthy future. Or perhaps, like cars which can do 250kph in countries with speed limits of 100kph, people will always get extra resolution for nothing more than the fun of it!