antoine_morin

<p>After testing, I note that on FX, both the HB-15 and HN-23 vignette below 40mm. Propensity to flare is much reduced, but at a wide end cost. For DX, these two hoods are clearly an improvement and do not have the same penalty.</p>

My copy of the Sigma 20/1.8 EX DG is certainly sharp at infinity, but I do not use it for landscapes, preferring the 18-200 VR zoom on DX digital cameras (surprisingly good at 18mm f/8), or the Nikon 24/2.8 Ai on film or the D3. Why these lens rather than the Sigma for landscapes? It is enormous (as big as the 18-200 zoom), uses 82mm filters, and is rather prone to flare.Don't get me wrong, I love the Sigma 20/1.8, although a bit soft wide open it has lovely bokeh and a very short minimum focusing distance. But it is not the best tool for landscapes for me.

The copy of the Sigma EX DG I had was soft wide open but with very nice bokeh. Autofocus was sluggish on D70, S2, and D200 but would probably be fine on F5.

 

I replaced the Sigma by a Nikon AFS 24-85/3.5-4.5. Full frame, sharper, much smaller and faster AF. A real sleeper you can find for about $200 used. You may find the distortion at the wide end too much for a film body though (not really an issue on digital where it can easily be corrected). At the long end and stopped down a stop, my copy is as good as the 85mm primes I have.

You can't eliminate entirely the scaling. However, you can minimize it. I do not have the 2400, but the 3800 lets you do it. In the Windows printer driver dialog, Paper tab, Borderless, Expansion.

I currently have over 70,000 images in a single Imatch database. No slowdowns. I would suggest you keep all images in a single database and use categories to tag them.

When you get ready to use flash for indoor sports, and before you spent a lot, I strongly suggest you read some of the suggestions and see the examples at strobist.com. In particular:

 

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/03/q-speedlighting-gym.html

 

A good entry point for general off camera flash is:

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html

 

There is a lot to discover there. Have fun.

A hard disk crash finally pushes me to leave win2kPro for WinXP. I had a

number of profiles made for my R800 printer under win2k.

 

Are the printer drivers of WinXP similar enough to those of Win2kPro for me to

simply reuse the same profile files or shall I have a new set of profiles done?

because of the shallow depth, and also because I need to cover about 2x3 feet of stream bottom in the frame (i.e. I shoot with a 24mm lens on a D70, so about 35mm eq from about 90 cm above the stream bottom).

I need to photograph stream bottoms for a study of fish and bugs living in

streams.

 

Streams are 5cm to 40 cm deep (about 2-16 inches) and water is clear but

running.

 

Clearly, because of surface waves, I need to shoot through plexiglass or glass.

For this, I built a box with a plexiglass bottom of the size I need to shoot

(about 60x90 cm, 2x3 feet).

 

The problem I still have to resolve is the reflections (sky, trees, camera) off

the plexiglass (I discovered empirically that polarizers that do work at

reducing reflections off water do not do squat for reflections off plexiglass.

When I have time, I'll try to understand why. But I have more pressing matters).

 

I tried building a "tent" to sit over the plexiglass bottom box to reduce

reflections. If I use a pale/translucent fabric, there are still too much

reflections. If I use an opaque dark fabric, then the light is coming from the

sides under and around the box and the middle of the frame is way too dark

compared to the edges. I therefore reason that I need to shade the sky above

the box to hide the camera but still let diffuse light reach the plexiglass and

gravel under

 

My next move is to use a "roof" a couple of feet above the box and camera made

of opaque dark material. This would hide the clear sky and only allow indirect

diffuse soft light to reach the gravel under the plexiglass.

 

Has anyone done something like this? Any suggestions, alternative strategies

you can suggest?

Thanks Ben for the suggestion. I will be experimenting shortly with a pipe and 3 superclamps to hold the pipe on a pair of tripods and the camera. I think that rotating the camera clamp 180 degrees (to the other side of the clamp) will give me just the offset I need.

I have a technical photo project that is far from my usual portrait

photography. Maybe some one here can steer me in the right direction.

 

We need to create microtopographical maps of stream gravel beds for a study on

the structure of stream animal communities. We are attemting to apply

photogrammetry techniques to build micro digital elevation models (DEM) of our

gravel beds. Basically, we need series of overlapping photos of the gravel,

taken from above looking straight down.

 

My problem is how to hold the camera still so that:

 

1- it is perfectly level and exactly at the same height for each photo in a

serie

2- photos are taken at exactly regular intervals (say repeated photos at each

12 cm) to create a "row" of overlapping photos

3- a second "row" of photos can be taken at a fixed distance (say 12cm) above

or below the first row.

 

A coarse solution is to use a piece of plywood that I level above the gravel at

the desired height (it will be fun on gravel bars, but I guess a pair of sturdy

tripods can do it). Pierce two rows of holes, each hole wide enough to let the

lens through (presuming I can hold the camera square while shooting through a

hole). Take one picture from each hole position.

 

Any suggestion?

I own the Sigma 24/1.8 EX AF (non DG). Quite large, not very fast AF. Excellent bokeh. Quite prone to flare. Can focus quite close and this adds interesting options. A specialized lens.

 

Sharpness wide open is decent (better than Nikon 35/2 or 35/1.4) and excellent one or two stop down.

What you describe is not normal. My S2 once behaved like this. There was a dust bunny on the AF sensor. I removed it and autofocus resumed its normal functioning. Maybe the solution to your problem is as simple as that.

I have made extensive comparisons between slides scanned with a Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED and photographed with either a D70 or a Fuji S2 with 105/2.8 micro+extension.

 

Differences in quality were small, but favoured the scanner. Postprocessing has a much bigger impact on final image quality than the method used to digitize the slide. D70 is orders of magnitude faster than scanner. Given a fixed amount of time, I get more done, and of higher quality (postprocessing helps) with the D70 than with the scanner.

I have used both MyPublisher and lulu for photobooks.

 

For MyPublisher you must use the free software to layout your book using one of several templates. It is relatively easy, but also somewhat frustrating because of the constraints. Paper is heavy and glossy. They claim it is archival.

 

With lulu, you are on your own for the layout and simply submit a pdf. Paper is a bit thinner and less glossy (satin). They say not archival.

 

Print quality is disappointing if you are used to printing your own. Neither provide color profile and both say simply to use sRGB. MyPublisher matches more closely sRGB on a monitor. But I found that using U.S. Web Coated (SWOP v2) profile allowed me to softproof lulu output and after adjusting contrast, luminosity, and saturation to compensate for the CYMK conversion I achieve better results from lulu.

 

Cost wise, lulu is much cheaper.

 

I will not use MyPublisher anymore.

The lens will fit. Your challenge will be focusing it. The S1 viewfinder is small and dark. And unless your aperture is larger than about 5.6, you will not be able to use the focus confirmation indicator.

 

PS. AF-S lenses become manual focus on the S1. It will autofocus only with the regular AF and AF-D lenses.

Looking at all the above suggestions and the various resulting images illustrates a point I am slowly getting to accept:

 

It is very difficult not to go overboard when adjusting an image.

 

Its corollary is that:

 

In general, I tone down any adjustment by 50% before saving a temporary copy. And then, I look at it the next day and often reduce again the amount of correction.

 

My take, but without the 24h delay:<br>

<img src="http://simulium.bio.uottawa.ca/images/photonet17.jpg">

<p>

 

 

 

Curves to lighten the shadows.<br>

Shirt desaturated.<br>

Noise median, 3 pixels, masked the eyes, lips, hairs, jewellery<br>

Saturation and hue to bring back the yellow <br>

Sadly, within 18 months, oil reappeared on the blades.

 

I'll use the lens only wide open until the Sigma 30 f/1.4 is out. Then I'll decide whether I get the lens fixed by Nikon Canada or simply replace it by the Sigma.

I have the exact same problem. Contacted Epson about it. The cure: use the thick paper settings. Problem solved for me. I have not noticed any side effect.

They will allow you to reduce minimum focus distance (while loosing the ability to focus to infinity) and retain metering, AF and, more importantly for macro, VR. Can be used instead of the PN-13 on the 50mm and will retain metering there too.

After a suggestion I got on the dpreview forum, I played with the screening options in Photoshop, and now can replicate and improve on the results I was getting out of Fototime.

 

My 600dpi laser seems to do well at 150 lpi, 105degree, diamond shape, and lightening the transfer using a single correction point (50 down to 30, or 50 down to 40).

 

 

The result is suprisingly good. When I compare the output of my Laserjet on plain paper to a print on Enhanced matte out of my calibrated R800, I see a bit more blocking in the deep shadows out of the laserjet proof, and of course the plain paper is not quite as bright, but otherwise, from a normal viewing distance, I can hardly tell them apart. This ought to be the cheapest bw proof.

Been doing it on for years. Thousands have been doing it. Only problem is when too much methanol is used, it can leave streaks on the sensor. These can be removed by an another cleaning with less methanol.

 

All the details you need at: http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/ccd_cleaning

I realize that a laser printer can't yield prints that approach what

can be obtained with a inkjet printer.

 

But how can I maximize the quality I can get out of, say a LaserJet

IV, on plain paper?

 

All my attempts with Photoshop have been rather disappointing, and I

thought that my printer could simply not deliver anything reasonably

good. Sharpness was ok, but banding was bad. It seemed that I never

hit a combination of settings that would yield nice tone gradations.

And contrast typically sucked.

 

Then, I printed almost by mistake through FotoAlbum using its default

settings (FotoAlbum is the software that one can use to manage and

uopload photos to the fototime.com service). The quality of the

monochrome laser prints I got was MUCH better than what I was ever

able to get through PhotoShop. Obviously, the default settings of

that software (or the special drivers it uses, I do not know) work

quite well with my monochrome laser printer. It is not as good as an

inkjet print, but for a couple of cents per letter size print, it is

useful to me. So, after all, my printer can yield better BW photos

than I thought.

 

Now, I'd like to get that level of quality (or better?) through

Photoshop. Say I start with a color Jpg from a D70 in PhotoShop. What

do you think are the best settings to use to get a bw print from a

laser printer? Is there a way to softproof the output of a monochrome

laser printer? (I do that using ICC profiles for my color inkjet).

One workaround I use with subjects who react to preflashes (and indeed there are some people who do), is to use the menu (15 under the pencil tab) to program the AE-L/AF-L button to trigger the preflashes. Doing this allows the camera to calculate the flash exposure, the subject blinks, and then I take the picture.

I own the Nikkor 20/2.8 and 35/2, and the Sigma 24/1.8.

 

My copy of the Sigma, even wide opened, is the sharpest of the three (on S1, S2, and D70). (I must say that my copy of the 20/2.8 is the worst of my Nikkor primes). The Sigma 24/1.8 is twice as big as the two others, so I think twice before putting it in the bag. It is considerably more prone to flare than the two Nikkors, has very nice bokeh and short minimum focus distance that allows for some interesting compositions. AF on the Sigma is relatively slow (of no real consequence to me) but sometimes hunt for a long time on Fuji bodies (that bugs me a lot).