How do you 'normally' shoot and process (and organise, if you like) your photos, etc?

Good idea!

i'm in!

+1

alriiight going to have a busy one and a half weeks so look for a start date of around the start of July

idea/q: can google docs share RAW files? or could we just use hi def jpegs on someones Flickr? or create a dedicated Flickr that seeds starter files?

yah I think you can upload to google docs. or e-mail to a ILP gmail account and give everybody the password.

thanks for reminding me of this! I will write up the details tonight or tomorrow

yay

Wow, I can't believe I never knew about this board.

I usually process my images using lightroom, find a shot I like from the shoot, crop it, adjust the colour temp, contrast etc etc. Make a preset, batch process all the shots using the preset, then take the best ones into photoshop to retouch.

guys what is bridge for anyway

just to slow things down when you're almost done

i realized the other day that my LR library is woefully disorganized and i'm sort of determined to cut it down to size and get ride of a bunch of junk

do y'all generally just keep every single thing you shoot, or are you pretty ruthless. bear in mind that since i'm just shooting for fun, i don't feel the need to keep several versions of the same shot. three similar shots, one is better than the others imo? GONE

my lightroom s/n might not have been the world's most authentic, and now it's bust. Damnation. Over to Aperture it is.

william eggleston claims that he never shoots the same thing twice to remove the need for that doubt in the first place

Yeah I'm now trying to get myself to take a bunch of different shots rather than trying to get that one shot perfect (which I'm not great at anyway)

william eggleston claims that he never shoots the same thing twice to remove the need for that doubt in the first place

― dayo, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 3:22 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i like this

I agreed at first, but on second though I disagree w/that. If he means not spray-and-praying then sure, but some of the best shots can be the second or third exposures in succession, especially of people. Expressions are so fleeting, and with an SLR you by definition don't get to see the moment of exposure, so you can't ever be certain you've got it.

Looking at the contact sheets of photographers I love is illuminating. They nearly all take multiple shots. (Even Capa, who will make 2 or 3 frames of some things, but often times has the uncanny ability to know that he's got the shot and will stop after making one cracker, the bastard)

I keep everything, even utter crap. Disk space is cheap and stacking in Aperture/Lightroom makes it pretty easy to deal with multiples. I do kind of feel like I should delete some of them someday, but then 1TB more is always easier and quicker to do.

my disinclination to store everything is mostly due to the horror i feel when i, say, look in the storage closet or sort through boxes of old clothes.

like why am i keeping this, am i really going to make prints/publish/appreciate these 1000000 cack-handed snaps of boring parts of the city or w/e

I think Eggleston is just a dude who just 'is' and as such the rules warp around his presence

I think another thing to remember is that hit rates in photography are very very low, even for the greats, so don't get too hung up about having detritus in your library (that only you see) because every other photographer alive has the same problem.. even william eggleston

I haven't been much of a photog lately. :(

need inspiration.

tho I'm gonna shoot a mtb race on Sunday I think

action shots will be hard with the stock gf1 pancake, but I think postrace pain faces could be good?

Very little gets deleted on first pass, obvious blown exposures/focus/etc.. I usually don't really start looking and editing for months, then I narrow it down a lot.

Garry Winogrand didn't develop film for a year after shooting, so he could see things with a clearer eye.

your race already happened gbx but you don't need specialized equipment to shoot well at a race! remember lartigue's shot

http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/tech/_img/lartigue.jpg

I would probably prefocus at a spot I knew the racers would pass, then do a burst shot?

that is a cool shot.

I showed up late and was only able to shoot te finish line. boring :(

thinking about presets....

right now i've got a preset that i just sorta made up, not modeled on anything (ie - i don't know about the filmstock ppl try to emulate), and i don't really know if it's stupid or not, or if i should try and download some or what.

i'm pretty drawn to the idea of keeping things as simple as possible, and just having two presets, one color and one b/w, and always starting from that (like you would with film), but maybe that is dumb/lazy? i dunno

That's probably a pretty good idea - I think setting those kinds of controls for yourself are good for learning, whether that's making your post-production fairly basic or only shooting with one lens or w/e.

yeah, i've got one (functional) camera, and one lens.

i'm trying to focus on the basics (hence all my questions about metering) and not get distracted by Lightroom shenanigans. the preset i use right now (basically just an s-curve, desaturated colors, v lightly boosted blacks, and i think that's it?) works for me now, though maybe it's sorta "trendy" looking, i guess? i like being able to slap it on p much anything i shoot because at least it means my output has a consistent "look." when i was going through the pics i took in uganda, i was messing with each photo individually and the results were wildly variable, and it took forever. i'd much rather focus on content when it comes to editing.

Plus, if you want to put together a portfolio of images, you want them to have some uniformity of style, so that's a good habit to get into.

Most of my photos get a basic s-curve, presence boost and sharpening, then I edit from there if I need to. Or I flatten the curve, boost presence, sharpen and export into Silver Efex 2 if I want to go B&W.

my habit is s-curve, up the black point, using the 'shadow' slider to bring out shadow detail (in aperture), maybe bring down the highlights a little bit with the highlight slider...

yeah you don't have to get crazy and having a more or less uniform 'aesthetic' makes your portfolio more cohesive. I think the important adjustment is the s-curve since digital sensors return linear data. don't overcook your photos.

and yeah presets are definitely 'last mile' - you can't polish a turd.

I'm a terrible man for the presets (I just installed another 100 or so last night!); chiefly the "300" family that I discovered a couple of years ago. Addicted to their look on portraits. But, yeah, generally: deepen blacks, S-curve, little clarity/vibrance boosts, attend to any noise/colour temp/geometry issues (that last one is a cinch in LR3 with the lens profiles) and then *maybe* get into local adjustments.

My portfolio has no coherence whatsoever.

i've still never figured out how to fix noise/geometry (nor have i really looked into it)

Well, LR3 is very good on noise but it can get a bit...android-smooth if you overdo it. I just knock up the luminance fader a bit for ISO 1000-1250, a bit more for 1600, a lot more for 3200 (and the color fader too) - checking out the shadow areas at 1:1 - and dial back in a bit of detail if I feel it's losing too much definition.

For geometry, I rely entirely on lens profiles. I used to use a trial version of DxO Optics Pro, which was great, but the workflow with LR wasn't quite what I was after, so the introduction of lens profiles in LR3 was ideal. With portraiture it's sort of a peace-of-mind thing; I may not be able to tell that a headshot with the 28mm is a bit convex but I can immediately see that applying the lens profile flattens it like it's a 50mm shot, and I like that. (Also: chromatic aberration and vignetting disappears without having to fiddle manually). Even fancy L lenses like the 24-105mm need quite a bit of correction at the wide end.

Hello you,

Is there a thread where we talk about cheap home scanners and whatnot. I want to scan 120 and also 16mm movie negatives and I see this:

http://www.amazon.com/Epson-Perfection-4490-Photo-Scanner/dp/B000ALCJT4

It claims "Convenient film holders accommodate multiple 35mm slides and negatives, plus medium format film.". So what exactly are these holders and can I jerry-rig one for the 16mm?

the http://www.amazon.com/Epson-B11B189011-Epson-Perfection-V500-Photo-Scanner/dp/B000VG4AY0 is the more recent version

holders hold two strips of 6 negs at once (for a total of 12 frames) in 35mm

for 120, you can scan 3 frames at once w/ the included holder

you could probably scan 16mm in the 35mm slide

Cool,

what does this new version have over the old? I'm really a dabbler so was looking for something refurbed rather than the newest latest

You could DIY a 16mm holder with black matboard, most likely. That's the strategy people use with oddly-sized large-format film.

what's the refurb price? i believe epson also sells refurbs from their website.

dunno what the difference is but the price difference seems minimal! neither are 'new' - the v500 was released in 2003

how much film do you have to scan? I spent a year scanning negs for a paper, and the thought now makes me shudder; it's so laborious to get really good results. Next time I have a load of scanning I'll just get a lab to do it, I think.

i know nothing of film scanning but was looking into getting one and i guess some ppl find lab scans to be subpar?

Yeh, I think they are as well. There's a real trade off to be made, and it depends what you're doing. I mean, if you get your own scanner, and some compressed air, and hoover the place thoroughly, and get white gloves, and calibrate everything, and spend a fair amount of time post-processing everything, you can get some really stunning results from scanning film.

But that one shot takes hours, so if you're trying to get your entire neg archive into the computer, taking to the lab and quickly tweaking each scan is massively better than the alternative of putting them into a box and waiting until you retire so you can get around to it.

with a v700 it takes about 1 hour to do a roll of 38-39

What's the quality like? We used to have one that would do a 38 roll in about 20 minutes, but the results needed a lot of work

I've settled on scanning as a quick 'n' dirty way of getting negs digitized. I toyed around with the idea of getting a dedicated 35mm for getting a high quality version of negs that I really like. but I decided to set up a darkroom instead. if your main goal is to show on the web, I think scanning with default options and cooking your files a little afterwards in post is fine...

maybe if I had a decent printer...

the v700 is great for b&w - I wasn't so hot on it for color negs or slides, though. the konica-minolta dual iv dedicated I had, oh, about 6-7 years ago? was noticeably better for color. otoh, I never messed around with the settings for scanning color. people use vuescan with great results from the v700, or so I hear.

there is no question that scanning can be tedious. I do remember that one of the nikons had an attachment that would let you scan a whole strip of film, up to 36 frames, at once.

otoh a v700 is nice in that it does 24 at once - you set it, surf ILX, do other things, and replace the negs when done.

unfortunately the v700 I had always seemed to be on the verge of mechanical failure and a trip to the warranty shop did not fix things. I'd probably think twice about buying it again for fear of bearing shipping costs in the event of a warranty claim.

hmmm

all this is making me a little skeptical of getting a scanner/working in film

I use a V500 now which performs admirably in that it never returns a preview scan full of rubbish (which my v700 always did)

but yeah, there aren't many advances being made in the field of film scanning. most of the scanners we have now are from 5-10 years ago.

if the bottom on the film market really falls out, maybe I'll be able to pick up a norita or other lab scanner for cheap. ^_^

I mean, noritsu

gbx you can get a plus-tek which is a dedicated film scanner, offers really high quality scans from what I've seen. I think chinavision has one. downside is you can only scan one strip of 6 at a time before you have to change holders, I think. and it's slow.

you may also need to invest money in quality scanning software like vuescan, which is about $70. film is expensive! :[