[anneb]

*sigh* I just accidently edited anneb‘s post instead of quoting it as I intended…My childhood blonde is apparently showing today…I’m sorry!

ROFL! I guess that means I’m not the amazing sleepwalkerposter I might otherwise have appeared to be!

And, oblig.technical.content: I am regretting buying a ranch style house. It means that when I pitch my scanner out my window, even off the top of my roof, it will not have a very satisfying fall at ALL. GRRRRRR. Solutions?

[anneb]

Here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth:

This is Art, not technical Work. I personally worry too much about “following the rules,” coming from years in computer systems administration, about “getting it RIGHT.” I have to keep reminding myself that the rules in this kind of context are far more subjective. Everything looking identical is a good feature for a production computer environment, not so much for a group of photos.

[anneb]

I’m left-eyed. I need to make sure my nose doesn’t bump controls when I put the viewfinder up to my eye, causing something to reset. (I sometimes worry, actually, as P&S cameras become more ‘lenses with buttons’ that they’ll lose their shape and become even more right-eyed and right-handed, as computer mice did.)

I have this problem, and I usually wear glasses which further complicates things. I went with the Canon 30D over the Nikon D50 or D70 partly because the ergonomics of the Canon cameras (even the RebelXT–my hands aren’t all that big) worked better in my hands than the Nikon cameras. But one beef I have is that my exposure lock button falls right under my right eyeglasses lens, so when I go to push that with my thumb, I invariably smudge my glasses in the process. It isn’t a huge deal while I’m composing/shooting, cause I’m looking through my left eye, but as soon as I take the camera down from my face, I look out through a smudgy right lens. I don’t know if the Nikons would work better with that or not (can’t remember what buttons they had there), but it’s something else to consider, though it’s a minor thing.

But to get back to the original question, as much as I love my Canons (and I have 2 digitals and my Dad’s AE-1 Program film slr on extended loan), I think Nikon for the price would serve you better than the Olympus, though I seriously considered that same camera myself. If you had the money to spring for either a Canon or a Nikon, then your choice might be harder, as they both have pretty equal (and equally minor) pros and cons. But as someone else said, the smaller 4/3 sensor Olympus uses (which gives more high ISO noise) and the limited and more expensive lens offerings might be the larger detractors in the long run. The Nikon D50 is an excellent camera, and should be found pretty reasonably priced given the D80 is out now. I don’t think you could go wrong with either Nikon or Canon, but your budget, the ergonomics of how each camera fits in your hand, and the features you want/need will ultimately have to make the final call.

EDITED TO ADD: I’m sorry anneb–I hit the edit post instead of the quote post button. The above is from Elsinore quoting the post anneb originally had here. Mea culpa!!!

[anneb]

I, too, prefer the B&W- the red is just too much, right behind the cobweb, I end up seeing it instead. However, you might get something you like by desaturating it some.

The blue is nice. It looks to me like it’s falling out of the cobwebs and down into the gears- or, maybe, the blue brings me around the gears and up into the cobwebs, I’m not quite sure.

[anneb]

Ok, I’ve got two so far for the farktography, haven’t really thought about the photoshop one. This was fun, and I learned a couple things again. Which, for me, is really the point. I like the way the photoshop contests do that. Thanks for the fun, O-Pickers-of-the-Theme!

[anneb]

Just vote for half the pictures like I did. Seeing everyones pictures this week made me wish I wasnt having so much fun with band literal that I never got around to going out to find some flowers to photograph for this week.

‘Course, around me, most outdoor flowers are now rather dead. I didn’t even THINK of going to Giant and stare at the florist section.

It was nice to see what people did!

I have yet to take pictures of flowers that don’t evoke much more than the reaction, “Yup, that’s a flower.” /-: Trying to stuff the better examples in the back of my brain for spring.

[anneb]

Well anneb it looks like Lorton Prison is a wash. The site is patrolled by armed security and he said the entire campus is off limits to the public. (except for the ball field) Contruction equipment is there and it looks like they’ve stripped everything out of the structures. I did meet a site supervisor who was kind enough to let me inside the fence to take a few pictures but after I entered one of the units he asked me to leave. Oh well… The kids loved it!

Diggin,

There’s a couple of ways to shoot parts of it reasonably easily and legally. First off, check out the link in my first post, for the cross-county trail. This is a good place to take your bike, car parking stinks along there. The southern terminus is at Occoquan regional park, with scads of car parking. If you follow the trail north and uphill out of the park, suddenly, the trail breaks off to the right, goes behind the landfill, and back around the prison. Watch carefully, trail marking signs are teeny. Yeah, you are supposed to stay on the trail, and you can’t get through the double fences, but you’re close enough to the towers and buildings to get some reasonably decent shots, before it comes back out again near the one-lane RR bridge. I believe further on up the trail, you pass near more buildings, as well. I should play with what I took this summer, and get some of them up.

Another place that has interesting angles is along Silverbrooke Rd., near South County Secondary. The new Laurel Hill senior housing development that is going up comes flush up against some of the older parts of the prison, along with some of the Laurel Hill golf course. I find the new construction next to the crumbling prison jarring as hell; I’m having trouble with getting the cumulative effect inside of one tiny viewfinder, though.

This is in contrast with other parts, such as the former Youth Detention Center, which is locked off and actually a bit dangerous. The county uses it for training, in part because some of those buildings are about to come down. I had access there recently to shoot a S&R excersize, but had to scamper after to pick up $KID, and wasn’t able to get many shots just for me for fun. The football field behind the fences and guard towers was just super hard to wrap my brain around.

[anneb]

Cliche opportunity: Full moon coming up this weekend, and the current overnight forecasts are for pretty clear. Does anyone ever go down to shoot monuments, etc? Where is good to set up, and not get hauled off by the Park Police?

[anneb]

I haven’t been over to Ft. Washington in ages! There’s certainly more there than across the river at Ft. Hunt, which just a few batteryworks still standing. (Neat, but not nearly as neat.) The turning and dying foliage really adds to the shots, I think.

I didn’t know Fort Foote existed, I just knew about Fort Washington. I’ll have to check it out one day.

[anneb]

What it all comes down to, of course, is whether I have something that I can make work. I’d love using a single tool, and I do have some RAW shots I’d still like to get to light up. But all the precision in the world isn’t going to help an image if I can’t get it working :?. Just submitting that %@^!^@%^!_^%&)*&^%@)_* error box from CS2 that I was getting SOOOOO familiar with this week will get old to all of us. (Never mind the fact that someone’s just likely to complain when I submit it for all 3 of my entries. ‘Gee, anneb, your “forest” looks a whole LOT like your “Industrial Park!”‘)

If anyone does have luck with split RAW images and photoshop, though, I would feel greatly vindicated in knowing how the heck it is done!!!

[anneb]

i was just hoping for an easy fix like ‘oh hey, there’s a chicken in your flux capacitor, that’s your problem right there!’

“easy fix”- spoken like someone who has never removed all those chicken feathers from a flux capacitor 😉

[anneb]

hey all, my compact flash card has somehow generated a folder that is locked. it definitely should have pics in there, but it’s showing as ‘no items to view’ and i can’t figure out how to unlock it. is this something i did with my camera somehow while shooting? is my CF card possessed by underpants gnomes?

Have you found the missing little 1’s and 0’s, yet?

If you are technical or brave, send me a message offline; I can send you what I hacked up for my Mac, (OSX) I use the ‘dd’ command to rip off an entire disk image, and then sic a quick and dirty perl script on it to separate anything it can find that looks like a JPEG. (I haven’t done the mods for finding RAW on there, since I haven’t had it fail when I was shooting RAW. This is, of course, dumb luck.) Since the FAT FS is nothing but a whole bunch of files, in this case, pictures just stacked back to back on the card, you get *everything* on it, even stuff you’ve deleted, so long as you haven’t shot on it again and overwritten. If you have disk corruption, you won’t get everything, but most things this way.

Usually, I hate M$ not having a real file system. When my CF card gets garbled is NOT one of those times.

[anneb]

hehe… I don’t know as I’m an expert in this area.. I use Photomatix to make HDRs. The reason that photoshop gets upset is that when you change exposure and save the images again, the EXIF information no longer has an exposure value for photoshop to work with. Photomatix takes it’s best guess as to what the exposure values are when you tell it to make an HDR.

You could probably use an EXIF editor to add the EV into the image.. you might try that.

Heh- or toss it through an older version of GIMP, that strips off EXIF, and then send it back to Photoshop. Or is that cheating?

I hadn’t thought about PNG, I usually think “TIFF” for lossless. I’ll have to see what each does.

[anneb]

However, I doubt very much that anneb is using Linux, so to return to her question to me…

Ha-HA, right you are! I’m actually using a FreeBSD system! Well, ok, and a Mac, but even it is BSD under the hood… I do have GIMP on both boxen, I just find going through folders of photos just easier on the Mac. The real trigger that moved me to photoshop a while back was that at that point, GIMP wasn’t giving me the batch RAW processing (let alone single shot processing) that CS was. Then CS2 appeared, when I could get a student discount.

I’ll tell you, it was really cool playing with the curves on the HDR merge in CS2, I felt like I had some semblance of fine tuning control, even on my first real attempt at it. And, in the interests of keeping my life simple, I’d rather get things to work in Photoshop. But I popped over to look at Photomatix, I probably will at least get it and play a little- probably quite high on my to-do list for my Copious Free Time (ARGH)

Don’t believe for a minute there isn’t enough dynamic range in a single RAW file, despite Adobe’s protestations. A digital camera is capturing a lot more data than it can display in a single image, and RAW contains even more data than .jpg. So assembling an HDR from a single RAW file is just using more of the information already locked away in it.

Having stared at the histograms of what worked vs. the ones it claims didn’t have useful dynamic range, I’m quite convinced of that myself. The problem is trying to fool photoshop, it seems.

… but I would strongly suggest you also get the Shadow Recovery plugin as well. The combination of the two (or in same cases one over the other–every image is different, after all, and may need different treatments) seems to work very well for LDR approximation of HDR.

added to [ever increasing] list…

On thing that might be in GIMP’s favor is that you say you want to do some HDR stuff with your nephew.

Quite possibly, eldest nephew is definitely more interested in the camera stuff than my son is. That’s indeed a thought for him.

Thanks for all the thoughts, I’ve got more to play around with, now 🙂

[anneb]

Thanks Bob!

I for one will miss the HDR contest and eagerly await another- unlike some people.

Oh, I dunno, I’m slowly starting to get the hang of it, and I would very much like to play around with it some more, contest or no. But the learning curve has been a steep wrestle, and until I do get it, I don’t want to fight with my CPU up against a deadline!!

I’m certainly not all for light, forky goodness each week, either 😉

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