Two new snippets of interesting photography news over the past week. The first is a rather sad one in that Kodak will discontinue all E6 reversal films (more commonly know as slide film). While I moved over to Fuji colour reversal filsm some time ago, this is still sad news as it puts further pressure on maintaining E6 processing lines in photo labs. While I admit that taking, processing and then scanning 35mm E6 film is a bit of a chore when I could have just taken digital, the quality from medium format prints from slides is just staggering. It would be a great shame to lose that option.
The other piece of news is that Nikon have finally released the long awaited sucessor to the D700, called unsurprisingly, the D800. This has the frankly staggering resolution of 36.3 Megapixels. Nikon has rather wisely kept out of the megapixel race for some time, but this does put the cat among the pigeons. I have to wonder what anyone will do with that resolution. My favourite lab, Peak Imaging uses a Durst Theta printer which outputs at 254 dpi. This means that the rather meagre 6 MP of my D100 can print perfectly good full frame prints at 12"x8", which is the usual size I print to. A D700 at 12 MP can print to 17"x11" which is quite big, but nice for hanging in a large room, while the new D800 could print to 29"x19", which to my mind is a little over the top unless you want to make a billboard. You could of course say that it gives you more options to crop in post-processing, which is of course true, though to my mind it is always better the get the shot right 'in camera' in the first place.

The warm end to February has also brought out the bats, with several sightings of pipistrelles in the evenings. I wonder how they fared this winter, being mild then very cold for a short period. Not an easy thing for a hibernating mammal to deal with, unpredictable winter weather.