klaus.sailer

<p>Another sample, both shots are from my last dive in egypt some days ago, so these are not some "selected best from years of trying". Some experience with buoyancy control and shooting underwater will help to get a good angle.</p><div></div>

<p>To get started, even as an advanced photographer, I would use a small digital camera with a good housing. Most of the latest small ones with a good light sensitivity and low noise will do.<br>

I currently use my old Fuji F31fd with the original Fuji housing.<br>

Images are not top quality, but for a start, it does quite ok.</p>

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Mine looks round too, and is from the side.

 

<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/nw-fetch-msg?msg_id=00L7sj">See it here</a>.

 

Deformation is probably due to the wind speed when falling from a higher altitude.

The one time I was there, I used a non-AF 50/1.8.

At that time I only had the Fuji S1 and manual lenses.

Manual focus was ok for most of the steady animals. I did some pre-focusing for moving subjects.

 

Most important for all moving fish (sharks etc.) is to learn panning and shoot a lot of photos, you WILL have to throw away many.

 

I got away with 100 ISO most of the time, but I was really good at panning there and then. Steadying the camera against the glass walls helps too.

 

See some of the results on my portfolio.

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IT8 Targets... can be bought. They are sheets, posters or transparencies with defined, known, measured and published properties. On these sheets there is a set of colors and contrast scales with known color values and brightness. When you scan, photograph or otherwise process IT8 targets, the workflow can be adjusted to yield the correct color/luminance values further down in the processing pipeline.

 

See this link - http://www.ddisoftware.com/prism/help/it8.htm

I think a fairly large soft-edged eraser brush with 30% opacity will help to avoid hard edges when painting back the colours.

Most definitely dust on the sensor.

It depends on the aperture. If you stop down, they will be more visible.

Wide open they may fully disappear, depending on the size of the dust particles.

 

Clean your sensor.

Clues?

 

Possible problems:

 

- Shutter priority means, you can shoot even if the cam thinks you're out of focus. So maybe the camera wasn't able to focus before you trip the shutter.

 

- Slow shutter, you stop down and lower the shutter speed. Here you should be able to spot motion blur where the kid moved.

 

- Wide open lens. With f/1.8 there's shallow DOF. Close it and you get more in focus.

 

Try flash and see if with small aperture you get enough sharpness.

Also interesting to know WHAT you focused on!?

As a last possiblity, your AF may malfunction, but only think about it, if everything else is know not to be the cause.

Google's Picasa can do it, too. For free. Also useful to adjust colors / rotation / crop, auto-correct, effects etc.

When I dropped my Fuji S2 in the river, it was gone for good. It now serves as replacement body parts.

 

However, I restored the lens, a Sigma 400 APO, to full working condition. Opened it up and dried the aperture leaves, removing some fine grained dirt afterwards. The glass couldn't be fully removed or disassembled, but I managed to clean it from the inside with a "speck grabber" (these long sticks with rubber tip to clean sensors).

Works as new!

The electronics pieces had to be polished a little and I put some grease at the moving parts of the focus mechanics.

 

The repair shop told me the lens was beyond repair...

Usually, your best chance for recovery is right from the CF card.

If you haven't re-used the card (just deleted files, or moved them), and your deleted files were the ones on the card, there are many products that can recover deleted files from a card, if it wasn't used again in between.

 

I only know about tools for win pcs, one of them being "PC inspector smart recovery". Maybe there are tools for the mac as well, or you could ask a win user to help out.

It's dust. It comes out more visible when the color is lighter because: The selected aperture is be smaller. Dust is most visible with small apertures (high f-stop numbers).

Try this with longer exposure and very small aperture against the sky, and you will rush to your cleaning kit.

Select the sky as a color range, deselect any unwanted pixels in the field and invert the selection. If you do the color selection right, it should be ok.

I got some good results with big enlargements that would have been unlikely with optical enlargement.

 

I scanned the negative with Minolta DSE 5400 full res and did some color adjustments, scratch removal and grain reduction. As long as you get the grain to be visible in the scan, the resolution should be good enough to match the optical print.

 

IMO, going the digital route, you can get by with inferior printing labs as the expertise required for printing a properly processed digital file is less than making really good enlargements of a negative (how to get the colours to match what I want, etc.)

 

I know that you can mess up the colours in the digital printing step too, but I haven't experienced much of a problem with the labs I tried.

Image size or megapixels is not a direct measuring factor for image quality. It's just the amount of data captured.

 

For the film scanning case, not all the captured information gives you more quality. The possible amount of real image information is (at best) limited by the information contained in the film. The film grain plays a big role in measuring the possible resulting real data from a film scan.

 

With digital camera catures, there are other limitations, like lens resolution etc. That's one of the reasons you shouldn't decide on a camera by looking at the megapixels alone.

 

Bit depth is also relevant for digital capture. It defines the steps between each of the possible brightness levels for each of the colors.

During processing, higher bit depth avoids losing information in between those brightness levels.