david_ralph1

The new interface is new. That is its only apparent virtue, it is new and different. It is not facile. It is not clear. Huge amounts of screen space are wasted with large boxes. Drivel. Wasting our time and eyes. It is slow. Firefox wanted to block it for lack of a proper certificate. This last is not a problem. What is a problem is that it is poorly organized. That fact that there are colorful, huge boxes occupying the screen does not help anything. You know, most of the people who read this site in the past can actually read, and they are for the most part pretty good at reading. That skill of being literate is not much help in encountering the new look. Trying to find what used to be was pretty futile. Little buttons work just as well as huge ones. Better when they actually have html in them. So, what is the organizing scheme? What was the point of the change? How does the collection of huge boxes help the members locate photos, discussion, etc. The old organization pretty much put the entire site up at the top of the first screen, via well known and accepted drop down menus. The fact that there were other indicators below was nice, and in the end dupicative. Sorry, folks. This was not a welcome surprise today. Not helpful. My time is precious, and life is short.

<p>That old Nikkor 55mm 3.5f Micro, AI'd, is a very nice macro lens. Reaches 1-1 with an extension tube. Use one myself.</p>

<p>Still shooting film, both 35mm and medium format? Amazing! Doesn't the Pentax require a tripod for best sharpness, especially for landscape? Tell us how you make out.</p>

<p>I haven't tried this, but I see no reason why the ES-1 and an Fx body, and no extension tubes, such as one of the D800 series, could not be used with the 40mm Dx Micro in Dx mode. Still a reasonable number of pixels for most images but with the advantage of autofocus to speed things up.</p>

<p>Depends on the size of the sensor and the magnification of the lens. You raise the possibility of other lenses, and I do not think you indicated what kinds of camera body you were thinking of using. That leaves us to speculate on what you have and flop around rather than just to provide a dedicated response. Nikon or somebody else's?</p> <p>For crop sensor Nikons, the new 40mm autofocus Dx macro lens is new and unique IF you are using a Dx camera -- any Dx camera body will do, although the modern ones with higher pixel density would likely do better for resolution. The 40mm will autofocus on the slide just fine, are the reports.<br> <br /><br />For Fx, full sensor sizes, some of us have used the old manual focus 55mm Nikkor micros, 3.5 or 2.8. They are sharp and are known to have a flat field of focus on the sensor -- often regarded as superior to many lenses for copying flat subjects because everything will be in sharp focus. For this lens on Fx, one needs extension tubes as it does not natively go 1-1. [Google the lens if you want the history of the extension tube developed to go with the lens for macro work -- but not necessarily an Ai or better interface for use with a digital body.] Take a look at the Nikonians blog which I linked to above. I use my 55mm f3.5 Nikkor Micro, which I have had for a very long time, the ES-1 and Kenko extension tubes.<br> <br />If you do much macro work a set of extension tubes can be very handy. The Kenko tubes maintain autofocus and metering info for many Nikon cameras; Nikon's tubes do not. Some of the older Nikon extension tubes should not be used on a modern Nikon digital body. My old 55mm was converted to AI which made it safe to use. The old lenses tend to be pretty cheap on the used market, but pay attention to whether the lens is AI or you will need to spend a little to get it converted by the folks out there who do that pretty reasonably.</p> <p>The most simple solution if you have a Dx body is to get the new 40mm Dx macro lens from Nikon. Less than $300 at B&H, and about $30 less than B&H but refurbished from Nikonusa.com.</p> <p>Oh, and for any of these easy Nikon solutions you need the ES-1 slide copy attachment which just screws into the filter threads on a 52mm lens front. I suppose you could use step down rings for other lenses. And, extensions tubes would enable larger magnification of a portion of a slide, where the simple rigs are basically a set up to copy the entire slide. Since the ES-1 is attached to the camera, you do not even need a tripod because it is one rigid unit. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/37453-REG/Nikon_3213_ES_1_Slide_Copying_Adapter.html</p> <p>Either way works. Pick your poison. Or, you could spend a lot more $$ on rails, bellows, mounting other lenses, reversing lens rings, etc. That could be a lot of fun though, especially for other macro work.</p>

<p>In the Nikon camera world, you might want to read this Nikonians blog post about slide copying solutions for Fx an Dx cameras, myself being surprised by the Dx solution. There are more elaborate equipment rigs, and much more expensive, with bellows on rails, which will not accomplish anything more if that is your goal copying slides.<br /> http://www.nikonians.org/forums/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=169&topic_id=58028#58057<br /> I have used a commercial service to copy old slides. While convenient for a large number of slides, the quality is a rather low resolution jpg file. Good for the web, but not very good a for a print.<br /> Copies made with my Nikon D800E and an old manual 55mm f3.5 Micro P, Ai'd, have been quite good using the ES-1 slide copier attachment and extension tubes. [i believe the early manual 55mm Micros had the option of a dedicated extension tube to get to 1:1, which is essentially what you are doing with Fx and 35mm slides.] With a Dx body, and the new autofocus 40mm micro, and the ES-1, reports are quite good, with autofocus seeming to work well, with no need for an extension tube.<br /> I have an Epson V700 flatbed, which I bought several years ago for photo and slide copying. While I think it very good for most photo copying, I just do not want to mess with it for slides. YMMV.<br /> In years past, I had a bellows arrangement on a film SLR; the resulting images, from a color lab, were so harshly contrasty that I gave it up entirely until digital came along. We are in a better era now.</p>

<p>Interestingly Brad Hill's continuing comparison of the 200-500mm 5.6 to similar zooms finds that the Nikon 80-400mm zoom goes soft after 380mm relative to <strong>all</strong> of the competing zooms. His original analysis of the 80-400mm about a year ago was much more glowing. Most of look for sharpness at the longest end of zooms in this category as we tend to already have pretty capable mid range zooms at more modest cost. If the long end is not sharp, why buy it? That was the complaint heard from many about the earlier Sigma zooms, soft at the long end. Those of us who want the long end for wildlife may have to re-think the 80-400mm as it appears not to compete well at 400mm with the Sigma sport or the primes. </p> <p>See, his notes at http://www.naturalart.ca/voice/blog.html, at paragraph "3. Optical Quality - Preliminary Findings and Thoughts...", under the heading, "23 September 2015: Nikkor 200-500mm f5.6E VR - A Cautionary Green Light?"</p>

<p>How about using safe, solid, and cheap substitutes while you save up for the tripod for the rest of your life. One that will still be used when the D800E is tired, obsolete technology? Bean Bag? Heavy duty clamps? On this latter check out Adorama or B&H. You have $US 4,700 in camera and lens. The camera requires rock solid support to operate at its potential. Like some of the others, I have several pods which were wasted money, and now serve as the occasional light stand for a speed light.</p> <p>Thom Hogan's "classic" how to buy a pod article. Circa 2003. Choices change, but the truths remain.<br> http://bythom.com/support.htm</p> <p>Nikonians article to the same effect. Some bias on choices as they sell pods and heads as well. But the truths again are true.<br> http://www.nikonians.org/tripods/</p> <p>http://diglloyd.com/articles/Recommended/tripod.html</p>

Contact an attorney. Some states have statutory protections against the commercial use of images without permission. (E.g, NY where I practice.) Some uses may constitute a tort. If this really matters to your professional standing and development, invest some money in professional advice. Penny wise and pound foolish is not a good course where your future may be at stake.

<p>Jon Eckman, I love classic sports cars, and yours is a special classic. It looks very nice in BRG.</p> <p>The Exif reveals that you keep classic cameras around too. I was thinking that these days, digital cameras age faster than cars.</p>

<p>One wants the solution to a problem to be the simple one, even if it turns out to be embarrassing. Most of you got it. The camera came with an SD card, which I did not want to deal with, preferring the CF cards. At some point I must have put it back in the camera as an emergency backup or for lack of a better place to keep it. And, as Mike Halliwell noted, the SD card is nearly invisble. The camera must have defaulted back to to the SD card when I put it back in.</p> <p>So, all is well. Although it took slightly longer than forever for the SD card to copy to my machine.</p> <p>I apologize to everyone whose time I burdened. Though, it was not wasted. I was prepared to go ahead first with the cable, and then to try to the recovery software. Reminding me about the SD card was the solution.</p> <p>No excuse, but every digital camera I have used from the get go, a Canon point and shoot from 10 years ago or so, to the D70s up through the recent D800E all used Compact Flash cards. I really never wanted to deal with SD cards (and still do not), in part because I shoot a lot of landscape and in the woods, and SD cares are just too easy to lose, drop in the grass or whatever, and so the blinkety blink thing was totally out of my mind. Then, there is that slow download too.</p> <p>Again, sorry to have taken up folks' time, although do not think that I am not grateful for the responses as I am. This site is a great resource.</p> <p>Dave Ralph</p>

<p>I took a few macro shots today with D800E with a Lexar 800x 32GB UDMA7 memory card.</p> <p>The images can be seen on the D800E screen. However, using a Lexar USB 3.0 card reader, the computer "sees" that it is from a D800E, but it says the card is empty and that there are no files on the card. Putting the card back into the camera reveals that all the images are there, the good, bad and the ugly.</p> <p>How can I read the files on this card?</p> <p>By way of history, when I got the Lexar cards, my old Lexar reader could not read the cards. Truly frustrating. I had to get the updated card reader as Lexar's previous reader could not handle their own UDMA7 cards. In trying to figure out what occurred on the cards, I swapped one or two of them into my D700, where they worked fine, but also could not be read by the old card reader. I put that history out there as perhaps there is more than one directory, or maybe I flumuxed the formatting in one camera or not the other.</p> <p>I use Photomechanic to download and preview images, and it will not ingest the files, though it senses the D800E on the card. When I use Win7's Explorere/My Computer, the machine reports the empty card with a DCIM folder/directory, which it reports as empty.</p> <p>I have not yet tried the cable for the camera, buried in the box somewhere, and I am having thoughts about downloading Lexar's file recovery software.</p> <p>I have avoided formating as that elminates all images, unless, of course, they can be dragged out using file recovery software.</p> <p>Ideas cheerfully considered, but not necessary adopted. TIA<br /> Dave Ralph</p>