voets

<p>I think the answer to Hannah's question should be: Money & Time<br /> UW photography is expensive.... very expensive.... <br />A good housing to protect your camera will cost as much as the camera itself (in case of the 'plastic' ones) or even double the price ( in case of metal ones ).<br /> An UW strobe also will set you back another $1000 or more. No strobe = No color <br />If you go the SLR route you will need specific dome or flatports for each lens you want to use, so add another few hundred.<br /> And then you'll need a lot of time, diving itself takes time, getting to the divespot and kitting up. But preparing your UW photo kit also takes time, if you rush it, you can be sure you'll camera will drown.<br />You will also need a lot of time to practice.<br>

I'm using a Sony A350 at the moment, in an Ikelite housing with Ikelite DS-160 and DS-125 strobes.<br />This is a big setup that dominates your dive, but it gives great results (at least I think)</p>

<p><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/11097132-md.jpg" alt="" width="679" height="481" /><br>

or<br>

<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/9922991-md.jpg" alt="" width="679" height="481" /><br>

I use the 50mm f2.8 Minolta macro and 10mm f2.8 sigma lenses mostly.</p>

<p>I have the A900 for a year now. It replaced my A700. I have a lot of fine minolta/sony glass, so I am kind of hooked to sony now. The A900 is a superb camera, all the controls are placed in the right spots and very intuitive.<br>

I use the Sony 70-200 f2.8 a lot when I shoot pictures of my kids, image quality is excellent in that combination (starting from f2.8, razorsharp images with very nice colors)<br>

The carl zeiss 24-70 f2.8 G is also a great lens that I use quite often, same sharpness as its big brother.<br>

Battery life is very good, I never counted the shots on 1 battery, but I never have to recharge during a day of taking a lot of images (several hundreds)<br>

Other lenses I use: minolta 16mm f2.8 (yes you get the full wide angle on the A900)<br /> minolta 50mm f1.7, minolta 100mm macro f2.8 minolta 50mm f2.8 RS macro, minolta 300mm f2.8 HS G, minolta 400mm f4.5 G, minolta 85mm f1.4. All of these have great performance on the A900<br>

Strong points: full-frame, 24mpx at a very good price, Carl zeiss lenses<br>

Weak points: high ISO becomes noisy, I hardly shoot above ISO400, if you want to shoot in the dark, buy the nikon. AF is pretty fast, but I think for real fast action you''re better of with one of the high end canons (no personal experience with those)</p>

 

<p>I'll do a count of the number of negatives tomorrow, if there are not too many of them maybe some commercial scanning company will be an option. I don't like cutting them up, there my dad's shots of us kids before he got a 35mm camera. The other 5000 photo's he made are now all digitized 8-)</p>

<p>Does anyone know if there are filholders available for 126 film (instamatic), for a Minolta Scan Dual III scanner?<br>

I have a bunch of these negatives I like to digitize, but they won't fit in the 35mm holder</p>

<p>If you can find a 400 f4.5 and have the money.... buy it, you won't be disappointed.<br>

But .... it is a specialty lens, mine gets much less "airtime" than my 70-200mm f2.8<br /> These lenses are in the same high end class, the 400mm is just not a walk-around lens for every day shots. It serves me great in zoo's, and hopefully one day on a safari again. I've also used it at my sons soccer games where it is very good at getting close as well.<br>

Image quality is excellent, right from f4.5. AF is very good (I had a sigma 500mm f7.2 before that would overshoot, backtrack, overshoot again, totally different league).<br>

And on top of that, everyone thinks you must be a super-duper professional dragging this big white beast around...... a nice bonus for your arms getting tired after an hour, it is quite heavy.<br>

But they are hard to find and prices are around 2000 euro, $2500</p>

 

<p>Sigma now shows sony and pentax support as well for the 10mm f2.8 fisheye: http://www.sigmaphoto.com/lenses/lenses_all_details.asp?id=3337&navigator=6</p>

<p>haven't seen a store offering it yet, but hopefully this is not a typo and we do get the real superwide lens for APS-C</p>

For me digital wins bigtime over film. But I think "better" is a very personal definition.

I love shooting under water photo's. Using film that would mean you are limited to 36 shots in roughly one hour, in far from optimal conditions.

Digital gives me instant feedback if I aimed my strobe right, if the fish / critter /anemone actuallty is on my shot and best of all, I can click the shutter as many times I like, since I won't be filling up a 4 Gb card in a single dive.

 

All film UW shooters will tell you how they would always save the last 3 shots for that perfect once in a lifetime encounter with a very special marine creature, which obviously would only appear when they did finish the roll of film.... 8-)

 

So in my case digital is better

I asked Sigma today if they will be producing the 10mm f2.8 for Sony mount in the near future. For underwater photography it would give stunning results with its 180 degrees field of vision. I have the 16mm minolta, which is pretty wide, and very useful topside, but UW, the close you can get the better.

So I hope sigma will respond to our pleas.....

I certainly would buy it for 2700.

I'm missing the wide end on the current APS-C sensors

A full frame will finally do my minolta 16mm right

well hopefully it is the competitor for the 5D (or its replacement)

$3000 would suit me, $8000 divorce me 8-)

 

I don't need 8 fps , but would very much like to have full frame

3000 $US sounds good. but here in the netherlands that will become eur 3000 ofcourse thanks to our lovely customs with all their taxes

 

and even that sounds pretty. just checked, Nikon D3 has a price setting of euro 5200 (=$US 7500) overhere and that is probably the direct competitor of the A900

Will we be seeing an A900 full frame body anounced very soon?

Any ideas on the price it will start selling at?

for digital camera's there's http://www.digideep.com/ an extensive database of all housings for all (digital) cams.

 

Ikelite can build a custom housing for you (see http://www.ikelite.com/web_pages/slrnikon.html) if the FA won't fit in one of the existing housings.

I'm considering buying my first fixed 50mm lens for my Minoltas.

(Dynax 5D and 505si).

The f1.4 is probably slightly faster than the f1.7, but comes at 2 1/2

times the price. Anyone experience with these 2 lenses? Is there more

difference than full opening?

Happened to me too.

Looks like everybody has the same problem

Funny thing I just noticed

When you rate a photo that has '0 ratings', they will magically re-appear.

Probably some update on the database going bzerk

A few ratings by themselves don't mean much.

But I think it's still a good tool to filter out the best photo's on this site. Usually the really interesting shots are rated more often & higher than the "normal" stuff which makes it easy for a computer to find & show these photo's for you.

 

Next to helpful critique, looking at the top-shots is for me a good way to learn about photography.

It appears to me that the small version thumbnails have shrunken

lately.

I make a good habit of resizing my photo's to 500 x 750 pixels before

I upload them. This resulted in small thumbnails of 134 x 198 pixels

 

My last addition however is 89 x 133 px the 2 before that were also

89 x 134 and 200 x 134. (see for example this folder

http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=293286)

 

Did the upload software change recently? Looks like the height is

maximized to 134 pixels and the width adjusted accordingly. No

problem for landscape type of pictures, but gives rather small

thumbnails for portrait type ones.

He probably is.

I'm in kind of the same position for a Dutch basketball website. But even though it's chaos sometimes, user feedback is always welcome. Having a wish / to-do list is always nice for a webmaster

After using the photo.net site for a year now I've just given my

2600th rating. When I go to the overview

(http://www.photo.net/photodb/manage-ratings) that shows all the

ratings I've given, the list is ordered on the name of the

photographer.

 

I would find it a nice feature to be able to sort that list on the

other fields too, like the value for aesthetics, originality, date

rated or caption. In don't think that would be a huge change to the

underlying code.

 

For a statistics lover like myself it would be even more fun to see

how many ratings of each value I've handed out

A simple table like would be great .

<TABLE>

<TR><TD>Value </td><td> #Aesth. </td><td> #Origin</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>7 </td><td> 20 </td><td> 10</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>6 </td><td> 100 </td><td> 105</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>5 </td><td> 1230 </td><td> 1601</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>4 </td><td> 1001 </td><td> 405</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>3 </td><td> 212 </td><td> 304</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>2 </td><td> 54 </td><td> 32</TD></TR>

<TR><TD>1 </td><td> 12 </td><td> 6</TD></TR>

</TABLE>

I own the F707. Bought the Sony 0.7x converter for it

High grade, high price and always fiddling with the adapter rings.

But it will get you a wider angle.

 

I recently purchased a 58mm Opteka 0.5x lens. No good for my F707

it's certainly not 0.5x on my setup

maybe if you pick a 52mm and use an adapter ring, my feeling is that part of the image is lost since the back of the 0.5x lens is 58mm, whilst the front of the sony lens is probably 52mm

 

I got the Phoenix 0.25 fisheye too. That's fun to play around with, but image quality is not super. At it's widest it will give you a circular image with a huge angle of view. If you zoom in you can get a very wide rectangular image.

 

I've also bought a Raynox teleconverter, they too build wide angle adapters, haven't tried them, but they could be OK

 

Hope this helps

I bought the 0.5x opteka from 47st.

No good on my Sony F707

It has a 58mm thread, so no adapter rings necessary, but it looks to me as it the angle of view is not twice as large

I also have the 0.7x wide angle converter from Sony , that has the same angle of view as it appears to me.

 

The 0.25x fish eye is fun to play with though

and with some zooming you'll get a very wide shot without the circulare frame of the lens.

Image quality is not super, especially at the edges, but it is still a nice-to-have thingie

Has anyone used this lens?

See http://www.phoenixcorp.com/Lenses/Manual_Focus_Lenses/SY_650-

1300mm/sy_650-1300mm.html

 

For $300 it's just in the limit of a nice toy, but if anyone says

it's throwing away your money upfront than I'd pass on this one.

Compared to the $6000 and more you'll have to pay for 500mm or more

from one of the big guys (althoug you get f4 for that instead of f8-

f16) it could be a nice experiment. But hard to find any user reviews.

 

Hard to imagine you will get any decent quality, but on the other

hand why would they build this if it really stinks? It's not a

typical zoom range for people starting out with photography. I read

on photozone.de that Phoenix / Samyang is one of the brands Cosina

produces for.

Curious too,if anyone has used the 650-1300. I found it at http://www.phoenixcorp.com/Lenses/Manual_Focus_Lenses/SY_650-1300mm/sy_650-1300mm.html for $300 it's just in the limit of a nice toy, but if anyone says it's throwing away your money upfront than I'd pass on this one.

Compared to the $6000 and more you'll have to pay for 500mm or more from one of the big guys (althoug you get f4 for that instead of f8-f16) it could be a nice experiment. But hard to find any user reviews.

Nice thread with as many ideas as posts.

I like the rating system. I usually spend 10-15 minutes a day in the critique request area to rate and every now & then comment on photo's. I think I leave a comment on every 10 photo's I rate. Why?

Well mainly because I don't feel like commenting on all of them. It's usually the really bad or very good ones, a lot of photo's are in the 4/5 range. They are good, but somehow lack just a little thing to make it a 6 or even 7.

But what that missing thing is? The gut-feeling that tells me that photo is excellent. Hard to exactly describe it.

 

The fun for me is to see whether my rating corresponds to what other people think, in 95% of the cases I'm pretty close to the average. Abuse & friends? Well if somebody rates or comments on one of my photos I'll most certainly visit his/hers portfolio and rate or comment on one of their photos. But never for revenge or to return high ratings.

 

My vote goes for keeping the current system 8-)

I just tried some searches with Google.

Looks like it does a good job ON THE FORUMS!

But.... I'd like to be able to search on user workspaces too. You won't get hits on photo's in the database, nor if you try to find other users with the same camera equipment (I for example am curious to see other users results with a Sony Cybershot F707).

 

That kind of search functionality is something that I find missing on photo.net. Would be great to have the photo caption / comments indexed, and to have the technical stuff searchable too.