Your Cameras

Regarding the 50mm summicron, maybe just see what Youxin Ye quotes? He responded super fast to my email.

what a bummer -- did you take any other cameras on your trip??

and more importantly - did you get a window seat so you could take a window photo before it broke???>???

shooting blind is not so bad imo

gbx, youxin is probably good - I also know a dude out in michigan who does great work

youxin is nothing if not prompt, yikes

while we're talking mail order, who is good for bulk development?

dunno about bulk development

google 'dave's camera repair' to get the number of the dude in michigan if you're interested - calling him is the quickest I think

only place ive done bulk is Dwayne's and we've discussed ppl's likes/dislikes abt them before

North Coast Photo is good. Expensive, tho, IIRC.

Brought the rollei 35 out here too, thank god. Gonna shoot at least one roll blind in the m2 to clear out the camera tho.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/0006_9.jpg

Office Depot near me is closing, I got a Fuji Instax 210 and 100 shots of film for $25!

woah

where's my camera
who the hell signed for its delivery today
argh

sweet relief, got my hunk of metal back.
should prob insure this thing I guess

if i wanted to start fucking w/ an 35mm SLR/Telephoto setup, what would be my cheapest option? Ideally i'd like to be taking pictures of surfers half a mile away i guess?

do you have any good thrift stores? at the better ones I always see some old SLR or other, usually with some lens options. like a canon ae-1 or olympus om-1 or something similar. just run it through all shutter speeds, check the mirror, open and close the back, etc. and grab it!
these things seem to be priced in the $50 range usually (at least back in CA, I haven't priced any out in NYC, where I see them less at thrift stores and more often at flea markets).
otherwise... craigslist?

you're thinking 35mm SLR + something in the 100-200mm range?

I don't know where in Hawaii you are (or even which island...) but this would be interesting to check out maybe: http://honolulu.craigslist.org/oah/pho/3225770333.html

woah good lookin out

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yashicamg1_zps0e4850a2.jpg

bought for 1 usd. had a working battery in it.

i love chinese tlrs :(( fingers because i hated the way the bare bulbs in the room reflected in the lenses digital point and shoot fukc

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/1pearlriverand3fingers_zps66d17617.jpg

pretty name for a camera

u need a manicure, bro

i am simultaneously intrigued and insulted. could they be worked on as they are or would i need to grow them out?

ha don't be insulted I'm just fucking around. but since you ask yes they could be worked on as they are now.

is that a lot smaller than most medium format cameras?

TLRs are smaller than you'd expect (aside from the Mamiya Cs) - whether Rollei/Minolta Autocord or the various Chinese TLRs. About half the weight of any given medium format SLR, I'd say.

yeah, it's the same size as its rollei and yashica cousins. quite carry aroundable.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/03790006.jpg
http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/03790005.jpg

overexposed from the pearl river. i think portra 800.

how were those scanned? I'm sure you could get a lot more out of an exposed negative (are they from negatives?).

I mean "over-exposed negative"

epson v750? or v500. from negatives. you mean that i could get a better scan out of the negative?

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/comparison222.jpg

first, need to learn how to make proper exposures and focus this camera.

yeah, I'm sure you could. it looks like you're scanning the entire range of the *negative* (like white and black points determined by the unexposed sections, or pure black sections covered by the negative holder) but not the image itself.
it looks like you're scanning a lot of the "blank area" outside of the normal range of the histogram of a negative and are picking up a lot of gray as a result.

here's where I cut off the RGB channels when I scan fuji superia 400:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/various-curves.jpg

...which is already pretty low contrast, but your images look as if the highlights especially could be cut off a little closer

xpost

so your images look as if the lines on the right (determining where to cut off highlights) are much further to the right, which would create that gray tone. on my histogram you can see that there is *information* to the right to scan, but it's just the pure black of the negative holder. so if the scanner were to calibrate its white point based on the *purest white* it would come out somewhat gray since the purest white is much brighter than anything that actually appears in the image (since it's that negative holder shadow, essentially).

ah, alright. that explanation + diagram is excellent.

cool. I don't know the Epson scanning software or I'd be able to get more specific.
camera looks like it's making good pictures in any case!

disclaimer- i do not know much about photography, sorry for dumb questions.

i've got a superzoom p&s that allows for a fair degree of manual and programmed controls. it is often very sunny here. this is making dynamic range a bit of a problem when i shoot outdoors, i seem to get a lot of clipping. so, i tried to counter that by adjusting EV -1/3. this gave me a histogram shape without clipping, but i then have to go back in shop and adjust the curve both to the right and left. if i go full auto, i don't get as much clipping, but i can't force flash unless i'm in P or M.

is this a normal way to handle this problem? i mean, it seems to work, but i'm not very good at photoshop.

you're shooting digital? if so, that's kinda normal. you underexpose a bit to avoid clipping, and then later you go in and adjust levels or curves etc. to bring up the overall brightness.
it's one of the things I don't like about digital, since I can never seem to get the same sort of vibrance by bringing up an underexposed picture as I can by just exposing for a bight image at the outset. Recently I just decided to screw the highlights on a job I was doing in very mixed light, just to get the actual subjects right and it seemed to work pretty well.

an example:
http://www.altairnouveau.com/IMG_1781.jpg

not even worth worrying about the highlights here, imo
subjects are in deep shadow with backlighting. nobody really cares about lost detail in the trees, which are out of focus anyway.

looks good.

yeah, it's a canon sx40 i got pretty cheap, i wanted something that was versatile and easy to carry. at 35x i can take pics of my kids games and good video, and images are acceptable. i wanted a panasonic fz150 but i couldn't find one in time for a trip i was taking.

my pocket p&s is mostly ok, but really, for the kind of use i put it to, i might as well just use my iphone.

oh yeah the other thing is that it's hard to make *anything* look good in direct midday light.

yeah, i'm trying to learn the basics of like, just shooting good pictures using the basics. i need first to understand basic rules of lighting and composition. i want minimal fiddling around after the fact.

i am gonna descend on this thread like a plague of locusts next week. i need to start negative scanning, because i am shooting too much to afford to be able to process it all, & processing-only is feasibly cheap. i have some time off to play around with a negative scanner, but the seeming complexity of it scares me! it is amusing to me to hear hunter disclaiming a query w/"i don't know a lot about photography" & then going on to talk dynamic ranges, everything seems to get way complicated when you're into that side of things.

ha well i googled "highlight overexposure" or something and was thrown into forum hell, but it seemed like they kept talking about dynamic range and histograms.

THE ANSWER IS ... HDR

"okay so open up your negative scan, then choose 'edit', then select 'curves'"
"mm-hmm, done that, i'm looking at a straight diagonal line?"
"yeah you're going to want to make that into a right angle in the top right hand corner"

I can't really believe I was ever paying for developing + scanning before. there's no way I could afford that at the rate I shoot these days.
maybe when I've got a little time + energy, I'll outline how I scan, since I do a few things differently to get better results than the silverfast defaults would give. some stuff is going to be specific to the advanced version of silverfast 6 though. I shelled out for a used plustek w the advanced software and it's been worth it considering I would have otherwise spent over $5,000 developing and scanning the same quantity of film at a lab.

considering I would have otherwise spent over $5,000 developing and scanning the same quantity of film at a lab

i mean yeah this is a pretty compelling argument.
i would really be into reading about your process. it maybe just exists in my own head but i always think there's maybe a politics to analogue becoming digital, and being subject or not subject to whatever kind of techniques make this possible - all of my photo scanning is super quick & ready - ie untouched up, preserves selvages of photographs, &c - just because it has the vague integrity of 'i put an object in a scanner & this is it', without me necessarily having intervened in what the object was like, which i think kinda gets into some of the instagram-issues of 'what does it mean that i enhanced the colours'. (& i know that's pretty arbitrary!, & collapses when we consider the various interventions that have happened to a photograph before i scan it). but part of the slight nervousness i have re: negative scanning is having to accept a slightly more active role, which is just more stuff to think about. it's gonna happen, anyway, maybe starting next week. maybe i'll post some examples. i'm gonna be using a pretty basic setup, because i prefer scanning at the library to at home.

yeah there are so many technical decisions and changes made to an image at every stage from before pressing the shutter up to the final output (camera settings, developing settings, scan/print settings, color adjustments etc.) that I don't see how you could ID a point at which those adjustments are supposed to stop. I mean the real object is a negative with an orange cast, so there isn't going to be anything *but* massive adjustments from that point on. and the film itself might add a color cast, and the scan might add a slightly different color cast (it's not as precise as I'd like) and so finally I will once again change the color cast in post. I couldn't tell you whether each of those adjustments was a "correction" that got closer to what the colors were supposed to be, or just additional stages of my own transformation. none of those stages were the authentic, real deal object. because there *is* no authentic object. it's a photograph.
and man, if it were me, I'd suggest scanning at home because it can end up taking FOREVER and then you've got beer and music.
also I'd suggest getting archival sleeves that you can store in a binder, a sharpie, and a pair of scissors.

first graf of that super otm & worth remembering.

and man, if it were me, I'd suggest scanning at home because it can end up taking FOREVER and then you've got beer and music.

:/

see this is the thing that is bumming me out. my setup at the moment is an 11x17 only-slightly-scratched-up library scanner w/adobe elements* where i can do 36 photos in an hour. which is awesome. i am keeping a log & being able to process a couple of days shots in an hour is almost the maximum time i can afford it for it to be able to feasible. i'm not gonna ply you w/all my neg-scanning questions right now, but: this isn't realistic wrt scanning from negatives, right?

the sharpie/sleeve combo is one of the more appealing parts of this, the aesthetics of flagged up contact sheets are mega appealing to me.

http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2009/feb/robertfrankatwork.jpg

*which is dope!, btw. just in case anyone does none of this & is looking for a solution to their problems, this is a kinda perfectly refined & light & straightforward image processing tool.

i am dreading some scanning i gotta do this week-- some local rag wants to run ten of my photos which is awesome but none of my drugstore scans are high enough res for print :(

http://www.mirrorlessrumors.com/the-biggest-camera-acution-ever-over-1000-cameras-in-one-single-auction/