[sleeping]

To get a black background you don’t need pure black, just need a sufficient brightness difference to exceed the dynamic range of your camera, so you can do it if you can find a subject in bright sun against a background that’s in deep shade. Locating a framing without extraneous bits of sunlight in the background isn’t always easy though.

Thank you for that explanation–made total sense!

Oh, the other thing is you need to spot meter off the flower (or whatever) so your camera doesn’t try to expose for the background…

[sleeping]

To get a black background you don’t need pure black, just need a sufficient brightness difference to exceed the dynamic range of your camera, so you can do it if you can find a subject in bright sun against a background that’s in deep shade. Locating a framing without extraneous bits of sunlight in the background isn’t always easy though.

[sleeping]

You’ll get more depth of field (not a lot, mind) but less magnification if you use a longer lens on the end of the 55-200mm. I use a 105mm on mine mostly – that gets close, but not crazy close (2x life size, approximately): http://flickr.com/search/?ss=2&w=74356260%40N00&q=55-200mm+reversecoupled&m=text

[sleeping]

I don’t know if this applies to Elements, but is your color mode RGB? I don’t think you can “save as” a JPEG if it’s indexed color etc. Also, have you tried “save for web”?

[sleeping]

You might give UFRaw a try: http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/index.html

[sleeping]

I’m getting slow in my old age. I saw U-Man’s money shot and just thought “why has someone put glue on coins?” and kept going. It was only after I saw the comments below that I got it 🙁

If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one…

[sleeping]

I was choosing between pretty much the same cameras this year to replace my SD1000 as an EDC pocket digicam. The 28mm equivalent wide end is what sold me on the Panasonic instead of the SX110, but I got the TZ5 (mostly because it was on sale and the TZ4 wasn’t).

I haven’t shot with it a lot yet, just got it, but there’s a couple examples on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/awrose/tags/tz5/

What I really wanted was the Panasonic lens on the Canon body….

[sleeping]

That’s noise, not grain – it comes from a scanner trying to extract information from a very overexposed negative (not an entirely dissimilar situation to shooting high ISO with a digital camera)

[sleeping]

Tamron 90mm macro. I actually have 2, the f/2.5 adaptall that goes to 1:2 and the f/2.8 AF that goes to 1:1. Both optically excellent, and decently built. Sharp, sharp sharp, except (as you might expect) at the edges wide open. The AF version (at least for Nikon) has a sensible AF-MF mechanism unlike many sigmas that require a switch change on the lens and camera.

http://flickr.com/search/?q=tamron+90mm&w=74356260%40N00&s=int

Sigma 300mm F4 Tele-Macro. No longer produced, and not that common used. Also very sharp, goes to 1:3 magnification, not very nice bokeh, but most of the time you can blow the background so out of focus it doesn’t really matter.

http://flickr.com/search/?s=int&w=74356260%40N00&q=300mm&m=text

Sigma 15-30mm. Decent full frame ultrawide. Kind of pointless on a small sensor DSLR as it’s huge and can’t accept front filters. Flare can be a problem, but a very decent film/full frame wide angle that can be had pretty inexpensively.

http://flickr.com/search/?s=int&w=74356260%40N00&q=15-30mm&m=text

Sigma 28mm F1.8. Just got it, have hardly used it, but I like it a lot on my D70. 28mm is pretty close to the true normal on it. I’m not sure it works as well as a full frame wide angle prime, though.

http://flickr.com/photos/awrose/tags/28mmf18/

[sleeping]

You’re way, way overexposing these. Remember that the moon is actually being lit by direct sunlight, so the exposure you need is actually not that great. Not quite what you’d shoot at full sunlight during the day, but not far off – something like 1/125 at F11 at 100 ISO.

[sleeping]

The other big advantage of a bigger scanner is less loading of film holders. I can load 2 strips of 4 square 120 negs per holder, and that can become a big deal if you’ve got a ton of film to scan.

Actually, though, I only have the 750 because I got a very good deal on it, the V700 is cheaper and pretty comparable (same size scanning area and resolution). I don’t think the 4990 is still available new, the 700 replaced it, but it might still be in stock somewhere.

You could also look for a used one, sometimes people buy them to scan a bunch of film and then look to sell it when they’re done. That’s how I got my Coolscan.

[sleeping]

I have an Epson as well (I got a V750 because I shoot large format occasionally). The results from medium format film are great, I wasn’t so happy with the 35mm scans (they’re OK if the film is flat, but I had trouble getting usable results from film that was even a little bendy). Now I have a Coolscan V for 35mm and the Epson for larger formats, and I’m quite happy.

[sleeping]

[sleeping]

I was using a literal pinhole, myself. As in done with an actual pin:

It’s mounted in a shutter so I could shoot Fuji FP300B which is ISO 32000 (exposure in full daylight was 1/60)

[sleeping]

A hole stuck on the front of a lens in most cases is going to produce mechanical vignetting rather than functioning as a pinhole aperture (basically just blocking out light from the edges of the image). You can tell that NoBigDeal’s example isn’t working as a pinhole because the background is out of focus and the foreground is sharp. If the hole was functioning as an aperture it would all be more or less the same sharpness (or unsharpness)

Some lenses are designed so the aperture is near/at the front of the lens (like the lensbabies), in which case you could produce pinhole images by adding a pinhole aperture to the front of the lens, but the results would look like they were shot with a pinhole camera.

[Author]

Posts