lauren_smith

<p>Thank you all for the responses. The battery is old, so it makes sense to replace it.<br>

However, what is strange is that after the initial problem occurs, subsequent shots have no problem metering. It seems like it is only the first shot that this problem occurs.<br>

I'll try replacing the batteries first, then see how it goes.</p>

<p>Sometimes when I take a shot with my FM3a, the shutter stays open indefinitely. When I notice this happens, I turn the shutter dial to force it closed.<br>

This problem has always occurred from about a year after I bought the camera, but it has been happening much more frequently lately.<br>

I noticed the other day that when this happens, the meter itself jumps up and then falls back down. This would explain why it thinks it needs to keep the shutter open for such a long time, but it's not clear why it isn't correctly metering in the first place.<br>

Has anyone else using the FM3a run into this problem?</p>

The counter tells you how many shots you've taken with the camera. This number is sometimes resettable, but it's definitely not going to be obvious. The manual will probably have something about it if it is supported.

 

Are you sure it is skipping from 329 to 375, though? That's cause for alarm.

If the disc is produced by a press, like commercial CDs and DVDs, then as long as the disc doesn't get too scratched or broken it should last forever.

 

But if you are burning them yourself, it is possible that the 'ink' used inside the disc will disintegrate over time. El cheapo CD-Rs that I keep in my car for music listening have a failure rate of about one every 3 months, but that's with variable temperatures and constant handling. With better care, you may be able to stretch the lifespan of a CD-R/DVD-R a few years, but they aren't going to last forever, and if they are your only backups you're going to be hurting when you can't read them anymore.

I don't do camera reviews, but Oh Oh! Check it out!<br><br>

 

<a href="http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~julian/">http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~julian/</a>

I suppose other questions logically follow.

 

Will rotation affect the quality of my print? Assuming that the only manipulation you've done to your photos is the rotation, then the quality of the print will not be affected.

 

Will opening a rotated image and editing it with Photoshop result in a quality loss? Not necessarily. Depending on the compression you've selected, the quality loss may be substantial or negligble. But changing the data in the photo does result in a change in the data in the photo, if that change washes out some colors or sharpens shadows until artifacts appear, then you will get appreciable quality loss. If you are adding word balloons or introducing external images into the base image, you may not see any loss in quality at all (except for those dang word balloons!).

 

The vertically-oriented image looks worse than when it was horizontal! Why? When a photo is displayed vertically, it must typically be shrunk a little (only visually, the data is still ok) to fit it onto your screen. A horizontal orientation typically has more room to stretch out sideways than a vertical orientation has up and down. The displayed image sizes are different, so any artifacts from the shrinking will show up on the screen. These artifacts will not carry over to your prints. (Artifacts may be seen in prints due to the same sort of image stretching by the printing machine software)

Robert, you're asking two questions and getting right and wrong answers.

 

First, do you lose quality when rotating images in XP?

No. The image viewer checks the EXIF data for something called an "orientation field". Depending on the value of this field, the image is displayed in a particular direction. By changing this single value, the image may be rotated through 360 degrees (90 degrees at a time) and/or flipped and rotated through any other 90 degree orientation with no loss of quality at all.

 

This is how XP rotates the image on your computer.

 

See page 23 of this document for the specific values that this field can take.

http://www.exif.org/Exif2-1.PDF

 

Second, if I auto-rotate images in batch mode, will they lose quality?

Depending on your program, maybe. Any reasonably usable program will do the orientation field change. If you are using something less reasonable, the program may go through each image and realign the pixels.

 

HTH.

Bad quality scan of print...<div></div>

My guess is that it would relatively easy to replace an LCD. I've not taken a D100 apart, so I don't know the specifics, but typically the LCD is a separate part connected to the main PCB by a flat cable (looks like negative film). If the rest of the camera works fine, just swapping in a working LCD should be a piece of cake for Nikon Repair.

 

But more seriously, I think God is sending you a message:

 

*booming voice*

"Get a D2X... Get one for everyone who replies to this post... At least get one for Lauren..."

The dalmaru website is hosting the image on their own servers, but supexsam and kahvekeyfim are hotlinking directly to the photo.net gallery. Blocking hotlinking from the gallery is one solution, but as you say, Bob, it's not really a complete one.

I'm not an internet guru by any means, but I have seen how some sites will block external loading of images. IOW, a different site can't link to an image, and when it tries, it gets either a blank image or a "WARNING!!! BANDWIDTH THIEF!!!" type of image.

 

Again, I wouldn't know the first thing about how to implement this, and I'm not sure it would really cut down on image piracy, but it is possible as I've seen that sort of warning image on other re-linking sites.

 

It seems like a nicer solution than just forcing someone to take their ball and go home. We all lose out when that happens.

I'm not convinced this is a digital sensor problem.

 

Try it again without the filter. The ED coating is trying to prevent ghosting and flare from occuring, but the filter is bouncing the reflected rays right back onto the lens.

 

My guess is an ND filter would cause the same trouble.

There's quite a bit of flare coming off of those street lights. You can see a whole set of green reflections right in the foreground.

 

And next to the green spots... OMIGOD! Disembodied legs!

<i>What would you do in this situation if you were in my place?</i>

 

Talk to a lawyer.

 

The rule of thumb is that the photographer owns the copyrights to his images. However, in cases like you've mentioned, you may have turned over those rights to the company for which you worked.

 

Better still, if you can come to an agreement where you and your ex-partner can be happy and remain friendly, that may be better than seeing a lawyer. However, if you want to know how to get what's yours, see a lawyer.

I'm not going to say that I think that modern operating systems can't handle caching and buffering better than 3rd party hacks, but I do think that if PS is thrashing the disk with lots of writes, then it is absolutely possible that a RAM-based disk drive would speed up those writes.

 

How much memory do you have now? I know that my old laptop that I use for photo editing has only 128MB of RAM and it thrashes like a monster because it needs to hit the virtual memory. If I were to expand the memory, I would expect to see much less thrashing.

 

What is causing PS to hit the disk like that? Is it really trying to save some data each time, or is it merely out of memory and diving into the swapfile?

 

Of course, an extra 3 or 4GB of memory never hurt no one.

OK, totally off-topic, but if you are in LaConner, stop by the Snow Goose market (I think that's the name) and have an ice cream cone. Best in Washington state. I always stop by there to pick up some picnic fixins when going for a drive up to Deception Pass.

 

Island Grill, about 2 minutes past Deception Pass has great seafood linguine, btw. Goes great with the cheap but delicious Hogue Chenin Blanc. And nearby that there is the Seabolt smokehouse with some of the best smoked salmon you can get.

 

I think I've figured out why my pictures are so bad. I'm constantly eating instead of shooting.

I just noticed that my lab has been printing only crops of my

negatives. This actually seems to be the norm as I have used several

labs over the past couple years and all my prints seem to be crops of

the center-portion of the frame.

 

The labs all use either Frontier or Noritsu machines, so I wonder if

it is just some default setting on the printer. Is there limitation

to these big printing machines that allows them to print only crops of

each frame?

If you're in Chiba and have access to the Sobu line, there is a Yodobashi on the south side of Kinshicho station. Depending on where you are, it may be closer than either Yurakucho or Shinjuku.

I'm no expert and only have a couple lenses to my name, so I'm not up on specifics, but here are a couple things that I would think about (and am thinking about, in my own case) if I were buying a lens for a new baby.

 

First off, how fast does a newborn move? Honest question. If we were talking toddlers, it's a whole different story, but a newborn kind of just lies there, right? No need for extra-super fast lenses in that case.

 

And it's probably a hassle to change the lens every time you want a new perspective, so a zoom would be nice. Something that can cover the gamut of focal lengths without having to take a break to switch lenses.

 

For me, with my film Nikon, this equates to something along the lines of the 28-105 f3.5-5.6. It's not fast, and it's not the sharpest Nikkor, but it covers a whole lot adequately. Yes, it's pretty slow and low light photography is right out unless I'm lugging a tripod. It's also not suitable for shots of fast-moving toddlers who end up as blurred blobs of color.

 

For digital, with the crop factor, something a little wider than the 28-105 is probably more appropriate. However, the convenience of the zoom lens always ready at whatever focal length I need outweighs a lot of other benefits provided by prime lenses. The only thing lacking is speed, but with care that drawback can be minimized, and if you've got that 50 f1.8 then you can always swap that guy back on and stick your zoom in the bag.

I'm not really qualified to critique, but I can give you my opinion. All the shots have a good range of tones through them. Except for maybe a couple like the last lobster/hand shot where the highlights are pretty far gone.

 

7.jpg (women) really does it for me. There really isn't anything special about the shot technically, I don't feel, nor is the subject matter especially interesting, but the large WOMEN sign above what is ostensibly a group of men cracks me up. It's dying for more depth of field, though.

 

Shot fl1.jpg (signing portrait) is especially nice. Probably the favorite of the bunch. I don't have to know anything special about the circumstances because they clues are all available. Other shots that are nice like the boy/lobster one is nice, but it doesn't convey any sense of the circumstances. The little placard in front of the signer is kind of in the way, as is the water bottle, but these are other clues as to what the guy is doing sitting at the desk.

 

Now I'm hungry for some lobster.

Hope you don't mind me tossing in an altered version of your picture. This one is a much closer crop. I added quite a bit of brightness too, but I think it could stand to use a little more even. Picasa isn't a very precise tool, so adding more brightness would have blown out all the highlights, but a more capable photo-editing software package could do a selective highlighting job that would look very nice.<div></div>

A tight crop and some overall lightening show this to be a pretty dynamic shot.

 

I tried a couple edits in Picasa (free software) and it looks nice. But can you afford the reduction in resolution?

That bug's been going around lately. I whip out my surgical mask if anyone so much as hiccups on the train.

Maybe it's my monitor, but I can barely make out anything in many of these pictures.

Not sure about availability, but it looks like it will retail for 60,000 yen.<br><br>

 

<a href="http://www.nikon-image.com/jpn/products/camera/digital/slr/d2x/">http://www.nikon-image.com/jpn/products/camera/digital/slr/d2x/</a>