mike_lepp1

As long as you like it, what difference does it make?

I have this ballhead and am not sure what screw you're asking about? The bottom of my ballhead is a female, not a male end. My monopod and tripods have 3/8-16 inch or 1/4-20 male thread sizes to connect to the head. The 273 is 3/8 and came with a 1/4 reducer bushing. The neo 7 has 1/4-10 male thread size.

My sekonic and my 10d agree to within a 1/3 stop.

You can also find these little plastic things (I wish I knew what they were called) that have double stick tape on the back. They're designed to be able to slide a piece of paper in them and they'll hold the paper. You can find them at staples/office depot.

 

Otherwise, I find masking tape the easiest to use and least damaging to the gels.

 

Mike

What I find amusing about many of these comments is how did I survive back in the manual focus film days when TOMORROW's dslr hasn't been out? I'm suprised I got any decent images from my eos3 and 30. More often than not I grabbed the sloooow eos30.

 

It does seem that lots of people shot with mf or lf ultrafast AF camera's prior to going digital by some of the comments I read of people needing more and more. I wish I could find one of these used at ebay! I'd go back to film.

 

Well, at least I know in a few months when canon upgrades it's entire dslr's, I'll get a smokin' deal on an 18mo old used one.... To bad it won't be fast enough for the fleeting moments and have enough resolution to compensate for my compositional skills....

I have to go with Giampi, if the price is right. I'm still using my 1d and getting images published with it. Sure, you have to be realistic about cropping. But I came from a film background where you rarely cropped - a couple of panaramas from my p 645n. I learned to compose in the VF. I don't need a boat anchor/machine gun that often to justify upgrading it! I'm sure the af on the d30 is fine for most subjects. I also gather a lot of portrait people like the smooth skin tones from the d30.

 

However, if you already have minolta gear, unless you have a specific need for it, why? You'll probably need to buy lenses that'll cost more than the camera body. I also believe sony will continue the minolta compatability making a good option for you in the future. The alpha is a fine offering already.

Hi Joshua,

 

I'll put my 6Mp 10d dslr against any current P&S out there. It's a different beast all together in many many ways.

 

While I'm not against the pixel race, I still would rather have a 6Mp P&S with low noise at iso 400 and a wider DR than the current crop of 7-10Mp P&S's. The images I'm seeing at iso 400 are only OK at a small print size. You can get a better enlargement on a cleaner lower MP camera than a noisier higher Mp.

BTW, I would rather have them work on making very good ISO to at least 400 and a wider DR than either more MP and IS/VR.

This is a tough question. From a marketing pov; YES! My girlfriend wants a P&S and has been sold more pixels is better. I'm trying to convince her a 6Mp is more than adequate for anything she'll need.

 

Realisticaly, I loved carrying around my old 3MP a70 at parties and on vacations. It's a freakin' point and shoot! With 4 AAA's I replace the batteries only when I though about it. I didn't want to edit/crop etc, just email or print. It was capable of a fine 4x6 that you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and my dslr. If I had a good image it made very decent 8x10's. Being my ex took it I'm looking at a a540 to replace it.

I'm a fan of Silkypix. I like the work flow and the ease of which I get an image the way I want directly out of it. However, like others point out, there is a learning curve. And with work, I can get similar results out of most converters. Again, I just find that the work flow is best for me using SP. They have a free trial period and then the software goes into a free mode which has less features.

 

BTW, I think extracting maximum detail is only one criteria in converting. RML is probably the best I've tried; at the cost of a painfull workflow. Pixel peepers will dissagree. However, I don't even feel it's the most important aspect. I'll take smooth tones and great color with a slight loss of detail. I also find that if I extract for max detail some of it will ultimately get lost after some PS to get the image where I want it to be.

 

YMMV

Go to dpreview:

 

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1026

 

and you'll find all the answers you need by people who own this camera AND the 5D, 1dsII, etc.

Hi Garry,

 

I noticed on a couple of other sites I visit the same thing recently happened. I wouldn't be suprised if it's the same person.

 

Sometimes I wonder if infoming people what it is and that's it's not sponsored by the site is a better approach than deleting it? Along with this imply to the regular users that if they enjoy a clean, uncluttored site, not to purchase items, or support in any other way, from these types of posts. IOW, if the original poster, and future posters with the same ideas, sees a negative backlash to these types of posts, they'll think twice about trying it agian.

 

Now I don't know who they are and they can "legitamately" post elsewhere. Then I may inadvertantly support them!

Hi John,

 

I havent' had a problem like that with any of my security software. However, I tried out RML and I was always getting warnings...

I use it and love it. It's by far my favorite. I don't know what kind of photography you do, but it greatly sped up my work flow making the cost not that big of a deal.

 

What I like the most about it is with little effort I can have a great print ready conversion done. With other converters I found it was faster to get close and then fine tune in PS. You can try the full version for free for some period (I don't know the time). Then it goes to a lesser version but still works. I'm not saying other converters can't do this, they just require more fiddling and futzing. If you're into 1-off's and lots of fiddling it may not be for you.

 

SP's weaknesses are it's japanese translations, and figuring out how to make it work best for you. I'm not saying you won't get great results out of the box, just the typical learning curve. Some fine tuning takes a little to figure out what can be done. For insance, you may not be crazy about SP's default settings and you can't change them. Thus, you open SP and the defaults are what they are. However, you can save your presets and open then (I have portrait, landscape, high sat etc). You can also assign your own keystrokes (PS needs this feature - besides it's nice, I'm a south paw and some key stroke combo's I often use are pain in the arse). I set f10 to open the folder with my presets. Now I open an image, hit f10, select a preset, fine tune some settings, and convert.

 

I must say it does bother me they resorted to "cold calling" as you put it. But hey, I get a ton of Adobe crap...

Are you seriously worried about this? I've use my sigma 70-200/2.8 ex hs pretty heavily since I bought it new back in '98. It still works and function great AND I don't expect to have any problems with it in the future. This is just one sample, but I've never had a decent quality lens (L or otherwise) self destruct on me (not including what I did to them by accident).

Some more points:

 

With WL's (I used the x-series -current models, and use speedotron's now), or any monolights, you still have 1 chord per head that needs to be ran from an outlet or pack. When I used WL's I always had at least 1 extension chord running somewhere in the setup. The cables that come with speedo heads are 25ft long.

 

I found the consistany of the light temperature remains practically constant over power with the ST's. This was not true with the WL's. Especially at lower power.

 

The power output of the WL's also varies from shot to shot. Again, especially at the lower power. The St's are solid. Even at the lowest power settings.

 

Once setup, I can ajust the power to every head with the ST's using one knob. You don't need to remeasure every head again. Which is tough when they are far apart:-/ Add to this the shot to shot consistancy of temp and power.

 

St's have step adjust instead of the infinite adjust of th wl's. While it may sound worse, what you get with steps is constant color temp and a fixed power step change with each click. The sliders on the wl's aren't as smooth changing the output as you would like..

 

I was never satisfied with the wysiwig abilities when I had WL's. The 250w bulb could hardly fill a large modifier. You'll never see a 1/10 stop change when you adjust them. Plus, the brighter bulbs on ST's help placement. With either you still need to envision the output (capture) ahead of time.

 

There are monolights that theoretically have greater control over color temp and power over range than the wl's, but at at price. Similarly, you can get digitaly adjustable 100% asynchronous packs with tons of power and allows very small incremental changes.

 

Ultimately, they're slightly different ways of working. As has been pointed out.

I use this lens on an slr/c. I find the results are very good. In fact, in the ~16-24 range better than when I used a 17-35/2.8L lens with film.

 

At 12 the conrers are a tad soft. But, IMO, this focal lenght is special effect so it doesn't matter to me too much.

The crux of the matter of this thread is photographers are overly concerned with others opinions of their work. There are more photo contests than there are contests with any other form of art. I personally find this a strange phenomena.

 

I was once part of a local club and all they were concerned about was the "contest." That's what every meeting was about. If you win a contest you're obviousely better than everyone else. People went as far as to keep entering a photo that did well. Or to try and figure out what the judge likes and enter a photo in that genre. To me this just means you're trying to please the judges. You should be trying to please yourself.

 

Moreover, I think if this is your concern you need to post your images on sites that have people with similar interests. If people on this site don't like a certain types of images it doesn't mean it's bad or wrong.

 

Also, comments may just trying to explain, or teach, the person how to achieve the effect in the camera. Which, IMO, is usually faster and easier than editing it in PS. Yet, another strange phenomena is how many people are spending more time learning PS than their camera. Which, btw, is fine and their prerogative. Nothing is wrong with enjoying creating in PS over taking pictures with the camera.

 

IMO, you should be creating what you like and what your vision is and quit worrying what others think. If you study art history you'll see people have always been creating art that the mainstream never understood or liked.

One thing which bothers me is some people's posts seem to imply that if you can edit your photo in PS to something interesting you're a good photographer. To this I disagree.

 

If someone paints over a photo and makes an interesting piece, are they a good photographer? If someone makes a realistic painting are they a good photographer? If someone cuts up photos they took and makes a cool collage are they a good photographer? If I can sculpt great well does that mean I'm a good photographer or painter? If I am a good photographer does that mean I'm a good painter? While in some cases they may be, in general don't think so.

 

For me this doesn't take anything aways from the art they created. Just like you may not like the artists I do. But again, these are divisions, and while divisions aren't always clear, they are there nonetheless.

 

I personally tend to not like most heavily manipulated photos. Unfortunately I tend to be good enough at PS that I see them as silly tricks (maybe a poor choice of words?). I want to see something manipulated to something truelly unique. IOW, true mastery of the medium! The rest just look amateurish and like the person who took the photo is trying to cover up his bad (or lazy) photographic skills.

A light placed behind a diffusion panel will have a hot spot. The size of the hot spot and apparent size of the light on the subject will be determined by the distance the light is placed behind the diffusion panel. The further the light is behind the diffusion panel, the softer/larger overall light source will be.

 

To make the light source even softer/larger, you can add a modifier such as a brolly, umbrella, softbox, wide angle reflector, etc, to the light.

 

As far as rules, I think it boils down to what your desired intended outcome is. For instance, I've intentionally used the hot spot to my advantage.

 

I hope this helps.

While it's not black and white, it's pretty much a large gray area, at some point I see a photo as not a photo anymore and becomeing graphic art. Minor edits don't bother me, but at some point the image isn't about the capture anymore and becomes about what was done to it post processing. I'm NOT saying I don't like what it became! It's more of a classification. Like oil vs h2o color paintings. Is the artist a good photographer or a good editor?Neither is better or worse in both cases.

 

BTW, this is one of the reasons I take with a grain of salt many of the images I see on line. It's much easier to edit images for web view than for print. Therefore, I really don't know what I'm looking at.

When I look at old family portraits, if you look closely at the eyes you can see that the second catchlight, usually the fill, was penned out. You can find these pens at places like calumet under retouching pens.

 

Some people inked out one of the catch lights on the negative too. You can also find pens designed for this at calumet.

 

Personally, I tend not to worry about it. Which seems to be today's trend.

You can use something like this as a relatively inexpensive sollution:

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=245292&is=REG&addedTroughType=search

 

From there you can look at wireless. These costs a little more.

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=search&Q=&b=320&shs=&ci=8007&ac=&Submit.x=16&Submit.y=9

 

You can probably find one that suits your needs. Some offer channels which can be good if other people are near by firing their units with similar devices. Others are RF and are good for longer distances. There are many other features available for a price.

 

I use a relatively inexpensive model, the wein ssr-jr. It works great for studio use. I've never had an issue with the flashes not firing. At least that I didn't cause:-) Including putting the reciever behind the backdrop, around corners, etc.

As a circuit designer I'm amazed when I read these. There is no difference between them to the consumer.

 

The most significant difference in design is you can buy an off the shelf ccd and do with it what you want. The cmos you need to do the design work at the sensor level to give it the feature you want. I don't think the consumer should care.

 

Beyond that, just about everything mentioned that pertains to consumer cameras can be worked around with specific engineering. CMOS can have excelent electronic shuttering, excellent image quality, and low noise (nobody mentioned that CMOS is inherantly noisier, this is because the circuitry is next to the cell causeing substrate noise). CCD can do long exposures, have blooming immunity, and have low power amplifiers (you can build low noise, low power amplifiers). With both you can only expose to when the cap (see below) is full. The smart way to do real long exposures is by doing a series of shorter ones.

 

The physics of the capture is identical. There's a photo cell and a mos cap in both of them.

I like CF cards just because I like the larger size. I can handle them with gloved on for instance.