AJG

Unfortunately this link says no longer available. Another option is water base felt tip markers which can be found at art supply stores. I have a set of markers that were marketed for photographers that I bought 25 years ago that have worked well for print spotting. I doubt they are still made.

You are indeed correct that independent thought is not encouraged very often in our current society. I have often explained to my photography students that Picasso, famous for his non realistic paintings, knew how to draw in proper perspective but chose not to because that didn't allow him to say what he wanted to say. His work didn't arise out of ineptitude. And on the flip side a good friend of mine who went to a fairly famous art college discovered to his horror that they hadn't taught him how to properly gesso a canvas before making a painting, something he found out the hard way when paint started flaking off in a few months. I suspect that most of the students you talked to won't have the discipline to pursue a career in the arts, which isn't easy even if you work hard. There are only so many "conceptual artists" who can be supported by galleries and museums, and these artists will have to work hard at self promotion if they aren't making interesting art.

While I agree that most of the time the faults lie with ourselves, there is is lot of poorly designed equipment out there. Many of these items are designed by engineers and marketing people who are not photographers and while adding more features can be attractive from a marketing standpoint it doesn't always lead to equipment that is intuitive for photographers to use. The attempt to build in technical knowledge in the form of auto exposure and auto focus, while helpful for most people, doesn't always lead to the best results. And menus on DSLRs? How many hours have we spent learning how to control our cameras when something from the 1950s can be immediately obvious to someone with some fairly rudimentary photographic knowledge.

Try Freestyle--they seem to be the ones keeping older tech available.

I have always gotten more reliable exposures with my Vivitar 285 on auto than with my much more expensive Pentax 540 Z flashes with TTL auto. The Pentax flashes frequently over or under expose on TTL where the Vivitar 285's almost never do. The Pentax flashes are superior in many ways--they recycle faster on the same batteries, their manual output is far more adjustable and they are much more sturdily built but their exposure automation with every Pentax DSLR that I have used is hit or miss.

Possibly--SanDisk offers recovery software for its cards for free for a period of time after purchase. I don't know about other companies.

Another really useful book is Light, Science and Magic which is readily available in used editions. I prefer the 4th edition to the newer ones for my students. It does a great job explaining what works and why for particular effects. I have a lot of fun each year when my students photograph glassware for the first time since the approach suggested in the book is not immediately intuitive. This book also does a good job explaining its examples, specifying what types of light were used and their placement.

I took my class outside for the eclipse in upstate NY but we were not quite in the path of totality and the sky was cloudy with only a few brief breaks in the clouds. The sky did get very dark, the outside lights on the buildings came on and the wind came up for a few minutes. Photographically speaking, the most interesting things for us were the crowd reactions and the incredible cloud formations that changed as the light changed. It is interesting that the exposure automation that works so well for TV cameras most of the time failed for an event like this, but it doesn't surprise me. As I told my students, be sure to turn off the auto focus on their cameras and manually set their lenses at infinity when they used the filters that I provided for them to photograph the eclipse itself. I wouldn't be optimistic about TV people figuring out how to expose for the next eclipse--they don't listen to us old people about much else.

I own and use a variety of reflectors directly on my lights in my studio along with various reflector cards and panels depending on what I am photographing. I take your point about the confusion of terms since I teach a studio lighting class at my local community college and sometimes early in the semester my students get confused about what I am referring to. Part of the problem is some of the self appointed experts on youtube who don't really know what they are talking about, but are good at making a slick video presentation that sells a set of reflector panels. Reflector panels are certainly useful but they can't really give you hard light that is often necessary for good product photography. Only modifying the light at the source can allow for the different lighting effects that you can get with honeycombs and other narrowing light modifiers. Soft lighting is great for people most of the time but it can lead to boring product shots. What you are also pointing out are the limitations inherent in search functions. Whatever has gotten the most clicks in the past will now come up first when you search. And search is constantly being manipulated by companies trying to sell us more stuff. Since reflectors will only fit a particular brand and model of light, they will get less attention than panel systems that can be used by anyone.

If I remember correctly, these cameras sold for $25,000 or more in the late 1990's, based on the idea that newspapers would be happy to pay that much to get rid of the time and expense of film and processing. What they didn't expect was that Canon and Nikon would come up with their own cameras with similar technology for 1/5 the price in short order. Film and paper sales were so profitable for Kodak that the corporate impulse was to keep digital imaging a niche, expensive process. As we now know, the c-suite people were totally wrong.

The vignetting isn't surprising since this lens doesn't fully cover 4x5--the image circle is 152 mm and 4x5 diagonal is 161 mm. My Rodenstock 65 mm f/4.5 just covers 4x5 as long as there aren't any movements used, but the corners are still a bit darker since the law of cosines hasn't been repealed... When I shot interiors with it I got in the habit of adding more light to the edges of the frame than I did for the center to balance things out.

I think they might ship powdered chemicals but not liquids. Some of what they list is only available for store pick up.

Adorama and Freestyle still ship B&W chemicals; B&H stopped doing that several years ago.

Your Contax images look good this time. I think you're right that that Yashica lens is a problem and I hope that the rear element can be cleaned up, since that could account for the poor performance. I owned one of those back in the early 80's and got decent results at the time and only sold it because I got a deal on a Rollei 3.5 E with a Planar lens that was in excellent shape that I still own to this day. When I bought the Rollei it cost me less than a film back would have cost for a Hasselblad! The Planar beat the Yashica lens at wide apertures and at the edges but not by a huge amount. Your other potential issue is film flatness--Rollei always had a decent reputation for that, but I don't think the Yashica TLRs were known to have a problem with it. Lens hoods have been something that I have always insisted on for any lens that I own, especially older single coated or uncoated lenses. Vented hoods for your f/1.5 Sonnar are readily available on eBay for under $10 and are a worthwhile investment. If nothing else, they keep wayward fingers away from the front element.

Turkey Vulture: