auke bonne van der weide

My equipment is a Nikon F80 and a Super Coolscan 4000ED. A friend of

mine asked me to photograph his wedding. What should I do? Buy a

Nikon D100 (or D70), or make perfect scans with the Super Coolscan

4000ED from Sensia or Provia slides?

 

The latter is more work, but currently cheaper for my wallet. But

anyone addicted to digital SLR and don't wanna return to good old

fashion pin-sharp slides?

around 20-24mm almost no distortion, it is distorted at 15-19mm, but what can you expect with this zoomrange. Disturbing is that it has flare, quit much, little magenta dots or bigger yellow ones with more diret sunlight. Keep away the sun, or center it, if shooting directly in to it. Yes no Cokin filters can be used, but only gelatine filters. Has anyone experience with that? Further it is very well built, what a zoomrange! and it is very sharp!!! Tip: keep it low by the ground for impressive perspectives.

If creating something that isn�t there is cheating, then being creative is cheating. The real world outthere is in full colour. You pick the kind of film that suits that just fine, like Velvia, Sensia or whatever. Or shoot on digital and check out what white balance suits your outdoor reality. I, myself can hardly remember the nuancedifferences between reality and the representation of it on a slide-image. In terms of purity, shooting directly on B&W isn�t more pure then changing a colourslide into greyscale. In terms of analog skills I guess it is (buy a leica and shoot colourslides!), but my opinion is that Photoshop has changed the photographic world more then shooting directly on a electronic-lightsensitive cell/chip with a million dollar camera or whatever. For my puristic training: I can�t afford a Leica, but love to go outdoors shooting with my analog F80 with good sunny weather with an occasional raindrop for even more saturation on my Velvia. Gettting my results after three days waiting I can hardly remember the pictures I made, but they shoot straight into my memory after a close look through my Wetzlar made EMO 5x magnifier (at last some German-optical top quality I could afford: I can only imagine the clearity of M-lenses). Now until this stage I wouldn�t say I have been cheating whatsoever. A great colourslide, vivid colours, good contrast, sharp, well balanced in the tones, etcetera: that�s my startingpoint. That�s the closest to reality, to not cheating as I can get. But with this slide as a endproduct (the purest I will get) I am mostly not satisfied due to creative possibilities of PS; spending lots of time to a proper 14 bit scan on my Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED and finetuning it afterwards to colour and b&w in different sizes. I get the ultimate original (the Velvia-slide), a 20 million-pixeled tiff either in colour or b/w, and subsequently a great photo-print at my photolab. And did I mention the satisfaction of cheating (as in being creative with the possibilities of PS) It is almost as good as going out in the field, just zoom in and out, use a channelmixer, adjust saturation, levels and contrast, patching some noise away while sitting in your comfortable chair behind some flatscreen iiyama-monitor, eating some chips, drinking a beer, watching tv . Ends to a mean, or means to an end? It is a hobby isn�t it? Or have I joined a world with strict definitions of purity. To click is one world, to finish a completely other, but not less creative. And that�s what matters!!!