[sleeping]

film will for sure

Yeah, but generally you’ve only got a 36-odd shot buffer (unless you have one of those crazy 250 shot long roll backs)

[sleeping]

I shot film as recently as two years ago. I settled on […] Sensia (whatever ISO) for negatives.

I think you mean Superia? (Sensia is Fuji’s non-pro slide film).

[sleeping]

I’d generally go with color negative film if you’re looking for exposure latitude. True BW film *can* have more exposure latitude than color neg film, but that generally requires expert development and a whole lot of testing to get the development and exposure in synch. If you’re just shooting film and sending it off to a lab, you’re not going to see a huge advantage, and it’s usually a lot more expensive to process.

There are two black and white films (kodak bw400cn and ilford xp2 super) that can be processed using standard c41 color negative processing, and xp2 in particular does have a reputation for truly enormous exposure latitude. Without getting into highly technical BW development that’s probably the best you can do.

Color negative film in general has a fair bit of exposure latitude, but generally it’s strongly biased for overexposure – the rated speed is pretty close to the fastest you want to use it. So if you have 400 speed film you can shoot it at 200, and probably 100 and get decent results, but 800 might be iffy. That means that if you’re in a complex lighting situation, you’re often better off rating negative film 2/3 to a full stop slower than it says on the box.

Color negatives are not exactly permanent, though. You can expect them to last maybe 20 years or so without significant degradation if you keep them out of the light and don’t get them too hot. They will last quite a bit longer in cold storage….

Of course if you’re really serious about archiving the film, you can still get Kodachrome 64. It’s slow, fairly expensive, and there’s only one lab processing it commercially any more (Dwayne’s Photo), but it does last a long time. Here’s a 40+ year old slide that I scanned fairly recently: http://www.flickr.com/photos/awrose/293550402/

[sleeping]

I’m really quite surprised about my Vegas entry. I thought that was my best one far and away. But alas only 4 votes? This process never ceases to baffle me. All I can figure is that I should have cropped out the left side to help focus on the effect. Honestly interested in a serious critique/criticism. Here’s an update:
http://www.speedpicks.com/vegas2.jpg

That image doesn’t show a very strong “miniature” effect to me. I might try moving the zone of focus down towards the bottom of the image and see if that works better – from what I’ve seen you need an obviously out of focus background behind the subject for this to work well, and the background you’ve blurred here is far enough away that the blurring isn’t really obvious. You’re trying to simulate shallow depth of field, but it could as easily be atmospheric haze in this shot.

[sleeping]

It didn’t occur to me to post the original versions of mine either but I am almost tied for my best vote getters already so I guess it wasn’t too important. My o’s would have been pretty boring anyways

Oh, no I wasn’t implying it meant more votes (often my lowest vote getter has the most hits recorded, and I didn’t get a ton this time), I just thought it was interesting.

[sleeping]

Interesting – apparrently people were quite interested in comparing a modified photo to the original. Usually my flickr viewing stats show a bit of a spike on Thursdays from contest viewers, but this week it’s huge, and most of them were from people clicking the link to the unmodded original version of my photo. I thought that seemed like a natural thing to add to the post, but it looks like almost no one else decided to do it.

[sleeping]

Anyone know why they started putting fewer aperture blades in? I’ve been looking at old m42 lenses and it seems like all of them came with

Aperture automation, I think – RF lenses and old SLR ones weren’t stopped down to shooting aperture automatically by the camera so closing and opening rapidly wasn’t an issue.

I have a Canon 85mm F1.8 in M39 that has something like 19 or 20 blades…

Micro 4/3rds looks like it may be an interesting platform for old RF lenses – there’s a leica M adapter, so you can use screwmount RF lenses with an M39 – M adapter.

[sleeping]

A built-in flash just isn’t going to have the required horsepower to bounce successfully in a lot of situations. If you stick to High ISOs and small F stops it might be somewhat useful, but a real external flash is going to give you orders of magnitude more flexibility.

[sleeping]

That probably works the other way, 620 spools are the smaller ones:

[sleeping]

It was probably made for 620 instead of 120 – it’s basically the same thing but on slightly smaller spools. You might need a proper 620 roll as a take up spool, but if it fits in the compartment (they don’t always) you can generally get away with a 120 roll as the feed spool. I believe 620 exists because 120 was a non-proprietary format, and Kodak took out a patent or something on the 620 spools.

[sleeping]

I’m going to have to disagree here, I don’t believe any of those color IR shots are film. Almost all IR film is black and white, there have only ever been a handful of Color IR films and they are very hard to get and expensive these days (they were developed and are mostly used for scientific aerial photography). The ususal one, Kodak EIR, is incredibly distinctive: http://www.flickr.com/groups/colorinfrared/pool/

I think what was done in a lot of those shots is swapping the red and blue channels in post-processing. That’s pretty commonly done with digital infrared photos, it makes what was red, blue and vice versa.

[sleeping]

response to you both – *sigh* actually, the problem is probably a combination of me and olav… i believe he had it set to his vision (not good) and i need to re-set it to my own (better than his, but far from perfect) … although i think that only applies to AF?

No, it’s quite the opposite – if the diopter correction in the camera isn’t set correctly for you it will be quite difficult to accurately focus manually, but the camera’s autofocus isn’t affected by that at all, it will work fine.

[sleeping]

One thing to be aware of is that while AF tends to get you to think about focusing in terms of a small specific spot, that’s not necessarily an ideal way of thinking for close up/macro work. You may find you can get better results by thinking carefully about the angle of your camera in relationship to the subject, and how to keep as much of the subject as you can parallel to the camera so it’s in the plane of focus (and if you are using AF, it’s quite dangerous to move the camera to recompose after focusing, as that’s very difficult to do without changing the angle of the camera.)

[sleeping]

i get what you mean about centered shots , but with the shape of the leaf it was on, there wasn’t really a better way to frame the shot. 😯

That’s why God, in his infinite wisdom, has provided us with the crop tool 🙂

[sleeping]

What NBD said…. Except I haven’t gotten them for my 70-300 yet, but have used them alot on my 55-200. I like them as far as general purpose, but they have been gathering dust as of late since I’ve been using the bigger glass and extension tubes.

That’s the part I can’t figure out. Why would you ever use one of these when a set of extension tubes:
a) costs about the same (non OEM)
b) doesn’t introduce any new glass and therefore doesn’t affect image quality
c) gives you more flexibility (different combinations)
and
d) will work with any lens you own?

I find that both have their uses. Extension tubes can have some significant disadvantages too.

– Close up lenses don’t usually interfere with a camera’s automation, extension tubes can.
– For a long telephoto, close up lenses can give more magnification than tubes (conversely extension tubes have a stronger effect on shorter focal lengths).
-If you’re looking to get just a little bit closer with a wide angle, extension tubes also may not work because you can’t get one that’s small enough.
– Close up lenses will work on fixed lens cameras
– It’s not actually true that extension tubes don’t affect image quality. Especially for lenses which aren’t well corrected for close up work you can get increased field curvature, etc.
– Extension tubes can increase mechanical instability especially with a heavy camera body or lens.
– Close up lenses don’t decrease your effective aperture.

[Author]

Posts