elf

<p>I'm nearly at the end of scanning all my old film and I've accumulated many hundreds of slide mounts, pakon, plastic, very refillable. I would prefer to not have to put them in my blue bin. If you can use them, let me know at elf@landsedgephoto.com</p>

<p>Sorry, you guys. I don't agree about discarding this stuff. I'm in the middle of a similar project right now and have about 5% keepers of my film material. Despite years of slide shooting, where I discarded some material according to sensible critera, there are still binders of negatives, both color and b&w which could not be discarded because 1 of every 25 or so was worth keeping. Now I have an opportunity to get rid of the junk.</p>

<p>Here are some of the options I'm choosing:<br>

1. Donate material of historic or subject value to historical societies and interest societies that will take proper care of the material.<br>

2. Distribute some of the material to people who are connected personally to the subject matter - family, friends etc. (Pass the buck...)<br>

3. Scan the best of the material at the highest reasonable quality (4000 dpi, Adobe RGB, keyworded, captioned, etc.) and store the originals responsibly while also maintaining the digital collection in a proper manner.<br>

4. Discard the rest - cardboard slide mounts into paper recycling, plastic slide mounts reused for mounting of scanned negatives, film pitched into the trash (collected by town weekly and sent for incineration at local trash-to-energy service).</p>

<p>I see no reason to cling tenaciously to every stupid shot, especially since so many of them are variations or experiments which led ultimately to the final thing worth keeping. At this point, aside from the innate historic interest in the content, there is such an overabundance of visual material that the stock licensing industry is impoverishing those who participate in it. Film was a difficult and cranky medium compared to digital to boot. Family snaps were largely done on grainy, high speed film which was sloppily processed by the 1-hr shops, to boot. In addition, all the corresponding prints will be much more valuable to the casual subsequent family member - especially if attention is paid to identifying who, what, where, when, how on the print. Finally, distributing small printable jpgs to the people in the images is likely to be appreciated, while endowing the poor souls with your inability to throw stuff out will not be greeted with such good will.</p>

<p>I don't do this very often, so I'm not sure I have this correct, and the Metz58 won't fire.</p>

<p>So can someone using real American, not Japanglish, explain to me how to set up my 7D to fire my Metz 58 as a slave.</p>

<p>Step 1 - do X<br>

Step 2 - do X</p>

<p>etc.</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

<p>Interesting photos, Sheldon. What did it look like in color?</p>

<p>Well, check out this link:</p>

<p>http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/impressions.shtml</p>

<p>Lotta noise there. Try dropping your ISO to as low as the camera will go and see what kind of speed you need to get blur. And get the camera on a tripod. My sample shot was ISO 100 and has no noise in the original.</p>

<p>Well, do your blur studies - we all do somewhere along the way for the type of ecosystem we specialize in. Draw up a little chart, tuck it in your camera bag and use it for a while until you have a sense of how the factors interact. I'm not certain you can purchase a ND that's more than 4 stops, add your polarizer and you might get 5. After that, you might have to haunt the theatrical light gel store if you still can't get the effect you're after.</p>

<p>Arg I hate typos IS) 100, overexposed 2/3rd stop</p>

<p>Arg I hate typos IS) 100, overexposed 2/3rd stop</p>

<p>The sun isn't the only thing that will have blur. You can't hand-hold that long without blurring everything just from the hand-holding.</p>

<p>As for which ND or whether to use an ND, you'll need to determine the exposure data for the effect you want and then work back from there to an exposure time you think you can hold. If the correctly exposed combination is f16 at 100ISO for 1/60th and you want to blow out the sun to what it would look like at f/8, then without blur you're looking at 2 stops density at a 60th.</p>

<p>So if you want 15 seconds, you'll need one helluva filter, nearly black!<br /><br />But, since you're going to get lots of blur with just a 20th of a second anyway, you might as well not sweat the long hand held exposure and simplify your calculations. Put the rig on a tripod and let the natural action of the situation create the blur at a 20th or 10th with a 2x or 3x filter. </p>

<p>Finally, read the warnings with your digital sensor about exposing it too long into direct sunlight. I know my 7D has them for video, so the warning may also apply to still.</p><div></div>

<p>Really Right Stuff makes an L bracket as well. Cheaper than the Arca - only $140</p>

<p>Yes. Lock the tripod when you use it.</p>

<p>The black bands are something you can't evade without lots more trouble than it's worth. Either you back out and shoot more sky/foreground than you hope to keep in the pano, or you crop them off, or you reconstruct the areas with the rubber stamp (clone) tool.</p>

<p>If you're fussing with a level on your tripod but your horizons aren't level in each shot, why are you fussing with a level on your tripod? Keep your focal length identical for every shot, keep your horizon horizontal for every shot, keep your horizon in the same place in the veiwfinder for every shot, keep your focal point identical for every shot. Zoom out further so you don't resent having to crop off the stuff that doesn't match up at the top and bottom or spend hours reconstructing sky and foreground.</p>

<p>Them's yer choices!</p><div></div>

<p>I refocus for each shot, but often I complete the process of making the shots the same in the RAW converter (Adobe Camera RAW). Then I create the pano from the adjusted files.</p>

<p>You have to be very alert to the way light drops off, so that's the controlling factor for how wide you shoot the shot. You pano app can't really fix that if it gets too obvious.</p>

<p>Here's an example of that problem.</p><div></div>

<p>The black stuff is your background. The software you're using won't presume to crop it off. You have to do it yourself.</p>

<p>I can't help you with the levelling stuff. I do it all by eye using the focus points in the viewfinder as a rough guide and most of the time without a tripod at all. Photoshop generally figures it out for me, although sometimes there are problems with scenes where the horizon is directly in front of me, like with your second pano there. PS usually distorts at the edges and I have to use the Transform tool to correct.<br>

When I do use a tripod, my tripod has two controls - one for the ball head and one for rotating the head on the base. I usually lock each shot before I release the shutter in order to keep the horizon in place in relation to the focus points in the viewfinder. Mostly, however, I swivel the camera on the ball joint, rather than rotating the entire head. The horizon has to be horizontal, no matter what the adjustments might make possible.</p>

<p>But most of the time I do these without the tripod.</p><div></div>

<p>I guess I'll have to get a GPS. It's not a gadget I see much use for, since I'm not map impaired, but I've started a year-long shot-a-day project and expect to publish a locator map at the end. Reconstructing 365 shots seems kinda dumb if I can deal with it as I go along.</p>

<p>For those who don't care about EXIF info, I hope you're not licensing your shots, because if you are, they're probably being stolen.</p>

<p>In addition to shooting RAW, I always underexpose at least a third of a stop. This contributes to keeping the whites from blowing out most of the time. With colors that intense and post production in Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture so feature laden, I can't imagine risking my brights in pursuit of perfect in-camera exposure.</p>

<p>That's a helluva iris, by the way. I wonder whether it comes in rose, lilac or purple! A real beauty.</p>

<p>Are you shooting RAW? If not, do so and adjust the color in post-processing. Are you taking a white point? You have to do that with Nikons if you want accurate color.</p>

<p>Look, flash is a really big subject, and your success with it depends on more than when to use it. But here are a couple situations in which you will probably be happier with your flash turned on that if you'd left it off:</p>

<p>Bright light or big bright area directly behind your subject and subject in shadow.<br>

Subjects dressed in very contrasting brightness - primary example black tux and white wedding dress. But it can be white cat and black cat or lady in light colored dress standing next to Christmas tree.</p>

<p>Now the other important point about flash is that you get a better result the more control you exert over the flash and camera. Here's where it gets more complicated because a big piece of your success will be in the tool you're using. If you're using a pocket point and shoot you can exert some control, but nowhere near as much as if you're using more professional equipment. But the p&s can give you some quite acceptable results if you learn to take advantage of those cute little modes it offers. For sure one of them is going to be something designed to make good photos of people - some sort of portrait mode, whatever they call it. Use that kind of mode when you're taking pix of your friends, their pets, the pyramid of beer bottles they've built, them with their dogs - whatever. Especially when there's a big bright area behind them.</p>

<p>So read the little booklet that came with your camera and try out all those little modes, especially in the situations they're designed for.</p>

<p>I bet your photos will make more sense.</p>

<p>3. Of course you can manually control everything on a pro digital SLR. Go look at dpreview.com at the top end Canons and Nikons and see all the controls that are available. The biggest adjustment will be getting the locations and features of the controls into your physical memory so you stop having to check the manual every other shot.</p>

<p>4. Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. No professional uses the packages that come with the cameras.</p>

<p>After you spend some time with the camera of your choice, zoom in to 200% and check the noise in the sky or some other large monochromatic area.</p>

<p>Take your boots off with your disposable gloves on. Wash your boots in hot soapy water with a scrub brush. Wash your tripod feet, too.</p>

<p>Mostly learn what poison oak/ivy/sumac look like in all four seasons. And don't touch any of your mucus menbranes with any part of you (hands, clothing, shoes) that touched the plant.</p>

<p>Finally, as soon as you get home, get in the shower with a good scrubbing sponge and soap and shampoo your hair as well.</p>

<p>A real case of poison oak/ivy is quite disabling. Some people are so sensitive they end up in the hospital, and the cortisone shots are not fun either.</p>

<p>You need a tripod anyway, because that sun blast needs at least f/18 to tame it a bit into a sunstar.</p>

<p>Whoops, wrong image, let me try again.</p><div></div>

<p>Here's a sample of trying to extract both versions from your single image and then combine them.</p><div></div>

<p>Clearly the camera can't see into that murk, while the human eye can. One standard cure, but problematic where there is no unobstructed horizon, is the neutral density grad filter.</p>

<p>Another way to manage this situation is to expose for the midtones or darks, and then another shot for the sky. Then process the darks to get the colors you like. Then process the sky. Drag the darks on top of the sky. Then erase the overexposed sky from the darks so the good sky shows through, flatten and be thankful. </p>

<p>You definitely need a tripod for this solution, or need to be prepared to crop and level along the way.</p>

<p>I find my digital capture in low light to be very forgiving. One time the compensation dial on my camera got set 3 stops underexposed and I shot a sunset at South Beach on Point Reyes. The adjusted result was completely satisfactory. Ånother time I pulled two shots out of one with this sort of contrast problem. One shot needed a great deal of pushing, the other needed some pulling. That almost worked, but the noise wasn't real good.</p>

<p>Every once in a while I see something out there that's actually vivid, like in Velvia. </p>

<p>But most of the time the vivid resides in the eyes of the beholder.</p>

<p>In that case the Saturation slider of ACR helps a lot, as does the Black slider, and the Contrast slider.</p>

<p>Since your memory of accurate color is non-existent, unlike perfect pitch, I suggest you take advantage of the capacity to shoot RAW and adjust the colors to what you recall, in so far as what you recall will be different from what it looked like by the time you hike on to the next shot.</p>