jerrymat

<p>Just because you covered it don't assume they absorbed it. Have some practice sessions: set up a problem situation and allow students to discuss solutions. Have students bring photos for critique by others - ask 1. what is great about this? 2. how would you try to improve it? If you have enough students divide them into teams, solve a problem and then using one speaker from each team, summarize & compare their results. Discuss differences with group as a whole. Bring in some of your discards and have them analyze why you discarded each. Become a listener rather than the lecturer - they will teach you what you did not cover adequately. Exhibit a masterpiece by any of the worlds photographers and ask them how to make it better.<br>

I was in the classroom a third of a century</p>

<p>My wedding experience goes back to the days of film but I saw something happen to a friend that bears telling. He bought a new camera, photographed his family and friends on a picnic then used it as the sole camera at a wedding. Of course in the film days there was no automatic feedback. The lab phoned him three days after he dropped the film off. Camera shutter failure, complete disaster - all photos were gone.<br>

He immediately phoned the father of the bride, explained what had happened and scheduled a reshoot of the wedding party as soon as the b&g returned from the honeymoon. He paid to have the bride and bridesmaid dresses cleaned, for the rental of a tux for each man in the party, bought replacement flowers and a replacement cake. He contacted the church and arranged a time and paid the minister his usual fee. One groomsman could not be here, having returned to his home state. The photographer called a photographer in that state and arranged to have the groomsman photographed there in order to have an artist/retoucher cut him into the men's pictures. He also paid for having a tux rented for those pictures.<br>

When everyone got together he recreated as many of the pictures as possible, including groups shots, cutting of the cake, the first dance, etc. Several friends brought refreshments and it was treated as a party. He took pictures of the party. My friend also told the couple that he was giving them a free album and free prints, with a complete refund of the money they had originally paid.<br>

A lot of good came from this. The florist did the flowers for nothing and the bakery did the same with the cake. The rental company gave him a huge price break on the tuxes and a dry cleaners did similarly on the cleaning. Both the florist and the bakery began to send referrals his way.<br>

The bride and groom asked him to title the album Married Twice, and happily accepted it as a wonderful memento. He even provided pages for snapshots the family took of the original wedding. Over the next decade the bride and others in her family recommended him to over 37 other couples, many of whom booked with a man who would stand behind his work and fix his mistakes.<br>

I always felt that there was a lesson here.</p>

 

<p>Brandie, One possible thing to do is to contact photographers in the business and offer to work for them, even for free, in exchange to getting tutored, knowledge of the business, chances to be second shooter at an event, etc. If you master the elements of wedding photography you may find yourself in a situation where photo studios are calling you. Since the great majority of weddings take place on Saturdays or at least the weekend, most photo studios run short of photographers, even though they want the business. Years ago, at about the age of 22 I found myself, in Seattle getting calls from as far away as Portland Oregon to do a wedding, substitute for a sick photographer, etc.<br>

Regards,<br>

Jerry Matchett</p>

<p>No, I typed it directly.</p>

<p>In a critique I said "Your picture is well composed but seems both very dark (the black frame does not help) and is a bit over saturated. "<br>

When I tried to posts the message I get the error warning:<br>

 

<p ><strong>Problem with Your Input</strong></p>

<p >We had a problem processing your entry:</p>

<ul>

<li >Because of abuse by spammmers, we can't accept submission of any HTML containing any of the following tags: applet area base body button div embed fieldset font form frame frameset head html iframe ilayer input layer link marquee meta object option pre script select span style textarea /applet /area /base /body /button /div /embed /fieldset /font /form /frame /frameset /head /html /iframe /ilayer /input /layer /link /marquee /meta /object /pre /script /span /style</li>

</ul>

<p >Please back up using your browser, correct it, and resubmit your entry.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >For the life of me I cannot understand this. Can anyone help?</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Jerry Matchett</p>

</p>

<p>Well I think every lens is worth having its front covered against dust, etc. Once in my life I had to throw such a filter away because it was damaged, but I was thankful it was not the front element of the lens that received the blow. A plain glass filter would do but you can't find one so I use a UV filter. Since UV light does not affect the digital sensor it does nothing to the picture. It is also handy if you want a series of pictures that have a faint soft focus effect. To get that just blow your breath across the glass filter and it will cloud over - you can take a series of pictures and keep the one where the vanishing cloudy effect is just right.<br>

I agree that a polarizing filter would be necessary, but I find I don't use one as often on digital as I did on film, because so much after processing to get an effect is available. In fact I don't think the PF is that necessary for skies anymore, just to stop reflections.</p>

<p>Phil, I thought I would throw in my two cents worth of opinion. Like you I used film first (more than 40 years worth). To express film to digital ideas in film terms: jpeg camera output is like drug store processing; Raw files are like negatives that can be printed in a darkroom. In digital terms: jpegs have 256 bits of information; raw files from most cameras have over 4000 bits of information. Even if the final jpeg file from the original raw has only 256, you have 4096 bits or more to manipulate before converting to jpeg with it's final 256. That is like saying that film negatives hold more information than the paper print and can be printed differently each time, if you wish. I am the kind of photographer who built his own darkroom (5 different times) and always did his own darkroom work or had it done by a professional lab. In digital I made jpegs for the first year and then switched to raw and never take a picture in jpeg any more.<br>

I keep all original raw files stored on multiple storage devices. I make all raw files into final tiff format files that are similarly stored. I convert the tiffs into jpegs for use on the web, but do not bother to keep them around. I can always make a new jpeg from a tiff. Tiff files do have a choice of being saved in a slightly smaller subformat that is lossless.<br>

I suspect that storage solutions and loses of images due to deteriorated storage media will be one of the big problems of the near future. Another will be that improved technology will abandon old storage formats. The U.S. government has lost access to plans and details of the rocket ships that went to the moon because they stored them on reel to reel magnetic tape, but surplussed all the machines that can read the tapes. The machines to read them are old technology and are no longer made.<br>

Some photographers have decided to keep using film and storing the negatives as their original source, scanning them when they need to make digital images. Their thinking is that film is superior in several technical areas and is less likely to vanish than digital images stored on discs or whatever.</p>

<p>Regards,</p>

<p>Jerry</p>

<p>Imagine the following situation. You are photographing a young lady who is marching in the dark, twirling a 4th of July sparkler. She walks forward in the dark twirling the sparkler while your tripod mounted camera, on time exposure, records the bright twirls against the black background. The flash goes off either (1st curtain) before she makes the twirls or (2nd curtain) after. If she is walking at right angle to the camera lens axis from right to left, you have a choice of having her dangling the twirl design behind her or it progressing in front of her, by choosing when the flash goes off: when the first curtain opens the shutter or as the second curtain closes the shutter.</p>

<p>Regards,</p>

<p>Jerry</p>

<p>To get point stars rather than trails, use a fast shutter speed - usually faster than 1/30th of a second. The trails are caused by the earth's rotation.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I'm a little confused. I looked up the article and found it to be about the Pentax K-7 ?</p>

<p>Well times really do not change. I became serious about photography in 1955 and have been avidly at it for all that time since. In the good old film days there were two kinds of articles in the photo magazines. There were those who tried to make the best prints they could by any means, as big and impressive as they could and there were those who loved to photograph high resolution test charts under laboratory conditions so they could post graphs of results from different lenses. Today the same interests prevail: fine print images and microscopic details of scientific technical comparison. May each proceed as they find meaning in what they do. Probably in the days of great oil painting some enjoyed creating meaningful images and others were concerned with paint brush materials and grinding of pigments.<br>

My regards to everyone,<br>

Jerry</p>

<p>I wonder if spot metering is the problem. Spot metering only works well if you are aiming the spot at a neutral gray reflectance source like a Kodak Grey Card. If you spot meter anything lighter or darker the system assumes the target is a central gray spot and misadjusts the exposure to make that come out neutral gray. When I taught photography I explained to my students that all light meters assume that the overall target is neutral gray. The classical example that helps one understand it is the bride dressed in white and the groom dressed in black. An overall reading assumes that everything averages to neutral gray. However a spot meter reading off of the bride's dress will cause the dress to come out gray and the groom's jacket will be so dark as to lose all texture. In reverse, if the reading is taken off of the groom's black jacket it comes out neutral gray and the bride's dress is overexposed and blown out.<br>

Many years ago I used a Honeywell Spot Meter to learn the zone system with film and a 4x5 view camera. The spot meter had a dial where I could actually glue tiny triangles of photographic paper of each zone to create a grayscale dial from white to black in 10 zones . If I took a spot reading of something light gray I set the number opposite the light gray chip and then took readings of all the other tones and found out what shade of gray they would become. The only use I can figure out for the spot meter reading in a digital system is to put a gray card in the existing light and to take a reading of it. It should never be used with any other shade of gray or any color that does not normally translate to neutral gray.</p>

<p>Regards,</p>

<p>Jerry</p>

<p>Sean, I am wondering if you are getting one of the two types of distortion called barrel distortion or pin cushion distortion. If you are photographing a perfect square barrel distortion causes the sides of the square to bow outwards and in pincushion they bow inwards. All zoom lenses will exhibit these at different parts of the zoom range. The expensive way to avoid this is to go to prime lenses. However Photoshop can fix the problem afterward. Just include extra cropping space around the subject and use the sequence filter-distort-lens correction. You will have a menu that allows correcting the bowing but requires re-cropping of the image.</p>

<p>Regards,</p>

<p>Jerry</p>

<p>I guess I qualify as some kind of a photo nut, but I use regularly a 30D, a 40D, a 50D, a 5D and last week I bought a 7D. I must be getting old because I could not absorb all of the manual in one hour. My suggestion is to buy a 50D as it represents much better thought-out control lay-out than the earlier models and is approaching discontinuance. My bet is that they will be on sale as we approach Xmas and maybe will be offered very cheaply after the holidays. Since they keep making the technical aspects of digital cameras better (as they used to do film) it will just make sense to upgrade every couple of years. If you stay one model behind the latest, you will get more bank for the buck.</p>

<p>Jerry</p>

<p>For some time now I have followed this workflow: Any of several Canon cameras -> flashcard ->download to empty folder on Mac computer ->convert using Adobe DNG converter -> open in Bridge -> select groups of files and rename using Bridge ->edit, sort and store. This has worked fine for a long time. Today when I renamed the files in Bridge, the photo icons vanished and were replaced by a DNG converter icon. When I click on the icon, it does not open the picture file, but reopens The DNG file converter. I downloaded the latest version of the file converter and started over but it still does the same. Does anyone have any suggestions?</p>

<p>Jerry</p>

<p>Consider rephotographing the slides rather than scanning. It saves considerable time. I had an old Honeywell Repronar that I used to make duplicate slides and superimposed titles in the past. I removed the Honeywell camera, bellows and lens. I made a simple piece of hardwood plywood serve as a mounting plate for a Canon 50D and used a 1960s MicroNikkor 55mm copy lens with an adapter to make it fit the Cannon. Rather than connect the built-in electronic flash to the Canon, I rewired it to a push button. I set the camera on 4 seconds exposure, using it in a darkened room and focus using the magnification available in live-view and trigger the flash once or twice during the exposure. The histogram tells me how close I am and I can easily take a second image and improve the exposure. The lens has a preset f/stop ring that can be set to move smoothly and I have gotten quite good at adjusting it after looking at one histogram. I open the images in A. Bridge and do all initial processing in Raw. I have found that the white balance dropper can almost always be used on some element of the image and get very close. My Nikon Scanner sits unused. I am working on 40,000 slides.</p>

<p>I remember years ago being asked why I did not just use drug store processing for my film. Others did it and got results they liked. I built and operated a darkroom (5 times over my lifetime with film) because craftmanship was important to me. I dropped jpeg and went to raw for the same reason: control over the process = craftmanship.</p>

<p>Of course, sometimes you might want the reflections to show in glasses</p>

<p>I can't upload any pictures. It says they are too large when they are a fraction of the limit. Is anyone else having this problem?</p>

<p>I have preferred the type of bracket that allows the flash to stay in position and the camera to revolve from horizontal to vertical. Does the 233B allow rapid changes from vertical to horizontal automatically keeping the flash directly over the camera?<br>

As a side line, as one who used a square medium format camera to do weddings, a square format allows you to composed a vertical or horizontal image without changing the orientation of flash to camera what-so-ever. I drew crop lines on my focusing screen so could mentally compose either vertical or horizontal as I worked, yet change my mind when I laid out the album. <br>

I probably will not live long enough but I want to see a digital square format camera. Cropping later in the computer would make more sense than anything else. Then the flash bracket becomes a non moveable device that keeps the flash in one position at all times.</p>

<p>I have preferred the type of bracket that allows the flash to stay in position and the camera to revolve from horizontal to vertical. Does the 233B allow rapid changes from vertical to horizontal automatically keeping the flash directly over the camera?<br>

As a side line, as one who used a square medium format camera to do weddings, a square format allows you to composed a vertical or horizontal image without changing the orientation of flash to camera what-so-ever. I drew crop lines on my focusing screen so could mentally compose either vertical or horizontal as I worked, yet change my mind when I laid out the album. <br>

I probably will not live long enough but I want to see a digital square format camera. Cropping later in the computer would make more sense than anything else. Then the flash bracket becomes a non moveable device that keeps the flash in one position at all times.</p>

<p>Not only does the glass reflect light but the prescription changes the way the eyes look; nearsighted people's eyes are made to look smaller through the lenses and farsighted people have their eyes magnified. If there is time before a shoot, one solution is to ask the person to go to their provider of glasses to see if they can borrow empty frames of the same style they wear. The empty frames have no reflection nor modification of eye size, yet allow the person to look as they normally do in their portrait. At one time I knew a photographer who regularly was given discontinued eyeglass frames by a local glasses provider in exchange for free yearly family photos. He offered portrait customers a selection of frames they could wear rather than their own glasses. He used to joke that if the customer wanted to wear only their own frames, he had a hammer that would solve the glass problem.</p>

<p>I just bought a ray-flash, with intention to use it as flash fill outdoors. When attached to camera it seems very large and a little awkward. The single support system, by attaching only to the head of the flash unit is a design flaw, it needs additional support to keep from changing angle and feeling sloppy. I intend to supplement the rigidity by creating a second attachment bracket that will attach to the camera tripod socket.</p>

<p>The problem is that copyrights may become impossible to inforce because of the sheer size of the internet. I understand Google has Billions of pages. If you look at sites at the rate of one per second, a billion sites will require you to spend almost 32 years, day and night, no coffee breaks just to check them out. Maybe our images are just like the leaves on trees.</p>

<p>If I can enter my 2 ¢ worth of opinion. I have been reading photography magazines since 1953 and long ago decided there were two kinds of photographers who published there: those interested in photographing test charts and coming up with mathematical and scientific evaluations of lens quality and film quality versus those who love image making, with whatever equipment they can get hold of. I spent two years taking nothing but pin hole images and still regard that period of time as one of the best in my life. Another was a similar period of time with a view camera, learning the zone system. Even the least expensive of the lenses now available is better than I was able to use in the first 45 years of my photography. If modern society crashes, as some predict, should I survive, I will coat egg albumen on glass plates, paint them with silver nitrate made by dissolving a piece of silver jewelry in nitric acid and fit the glass plate onto my old view camera and take pictures with any old lens or even a pinhole. Does the resolution of every lens matter that much? </p>