chris_patti1

Here's a vote for the "5" answer for optical enlargement. When I was doing a lot of darkroom work, I was never very happy with enlargements greater than 4-5x linear; to me, quality declined quite visibly after that. I also agree with another point in the original post in that I've found I can do quite a bit better than this digitally. With a quality drum scan and Lightjet printing I'm now satisfied with enlargements in the 8-10x range.

Oil is sharper.

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Digital has caused me to abandon both 35mm and large format film, leaving MF as my only film-based format. After buying a digital SLR, I find no use for 35mm film any longer. Digital is so much more flexible and functional for the kinds of photography I used to use 35mm for (kids' sports, family pictures, stuff I don't intend to enlarge much) that I got rid of all my 35mm film gear. People can argue about the marginal quality difference between a 6 megapixel SLR and film, but if I'm in search of better quality (ie., bigger prints), I move up to MF. On the other end, I've found that with drum scans and state of the art digital printing, along with my own image prep., I can make enlargements that meet my quality standards at a significantly bigger size (20x24 from a cropped 6x6 looks really good) than I could with "analog" technology. For me, that eliminates the need to deal with LF gear, so I've dumped it as well.

Don't know whether you are into digital, but I've had great success using a Mamiya 6 and correcting perspective with the "warp" function in Picture Window Pro. The Mamiya 6 is, of course, a good option for handheld MF.

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My grandmother colorized. 1920's.<div></div>

Second try: my Great-great-grandparents, Sicily, about 1920.<div></div>

My Great-great-grandparents, Sicily, about 1920.

Marsyandi and Manang village<div></div>

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=drum+scanning+services

In a word, no. I've been a religious user of spot, flash, and incident light meters for years. Since getting a DSLR with a histogram function, I've found no use for them. The histogram gives far more relevant information than a traditional light meter.

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I have a hard drive MP3 player that I've traveled with for about 18 months and it's held up fine. If it were me, I'd probably get a large capacity Photo Ipod and use it for both music and photo storage when traveling. (And don't forget a pair of in-ear canal phones like the Etymotic ER6's or Sure EC2's. They make airplane noise inaudible.)

Picture Window, a photo editing program produced by Digital Light & Color, has a very useful, easy to use "warp" function that I have found can do any perspective control that can be accomplished using camera movements (not, of course, plane of focus control, though). Picture Window was recently reviewed by Ctien in Photo Techniques, and is discussed on Norman Koren's site (although I don't think either focuses particularly on its persepctive control capabilities). I recommend downloading the trial version and testing it out. It's a great, full-featured photo editing program that costs less than many Photoshop plug-ins.

 

One thing to be aware of, is that when doing perspective control digitally using a rigid camera, you need to use a wider lens than you would expect, since you have to crop. This is analogous to the need to use a lens with lots of coverage when employing perspective control movements in LF. So keep that 45mm handy.

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Oops. Here.<div></div>

Non-Leica Tulips

Another advantage of the 45--if you want the angle of view of the 55 you can always crop. You can't do the reverse.

Looks as if Ian and I were in the same town recently.<div></div>