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david_henderson

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Everything posted by david_henderson

  1. I've had the original 70-200F4L since I started with digital photography in 2008. , along with other L zooms. It is without a doubt the best lens I own & has caused no problems since I bought it. It is notably superior to the 24-105 L I bought at the same time
  2. The shells don't look overexposed to me, at least not by much. The shells are covered in a chalky deposit that settles into the textures, gives a smooth impression. and reduces detail. I do agree with those who say a) that an odd number of shells (& possibly a less formal layout) would improve the composition and b) the blue green ( or whatever) paintwork is bright to the point that it dominates the picture to it's detriment. I think I'd prefer a colour version with the blue green much subdued to a b&w conversion.
  3. Mark. Given that you're editing to some extent anyway, did you consider a Losing the contrails b. Removing the yellow lines from the road. For me the strident yellow lines verge on making this a photo of a road. Without them, more of a landscape containing a road.
  4. Since changing to digital c 15 years ago I've found much less use for filters than I did when using slide film. Increasingly, as post processing software improves, I've found it better to carry out certain tasks in post than to use filters. So the use of polarisers to darken blue skies or intensify colour is for me unnecessary nowadays. The use of grads to reduce the brightness range of an image has pretty much gone now too. I still carry polarisers for the limited occasions on which I want to alter reflections, and neutral density filters (10x and 6x) for when I want to slow down water or people. I probably go months at a time without using them but when I do need them they're indispensable, & I wouldn't think about making a trip without them I 'm not tempted by variable ND filters - expensive, risks having to mess with images to get rid of a colour cast unnecessarily, and saves a very minor amount of weight.
  5. I have used Blurb for well over 20 books, like you pretty much all for my own purposes. They include a few books of b&w photographs, and quite frequently a book comprising mainly colour work also includes some b&w. The b&w photographs include some film photos where I've scanned prints, and some digital work. They all look pretty much as I intend. As it happens I have from the start & still do assemble my Blurb books in Blurb's original software, Booksmart. I don't think that'll make much difference, its just what I'm used to. Speaking entirely as I find my experience is that I can get photographs as contrasty as I want them and without colour cast unless I've put them there on purpose to emulate toning decisions made on the original prints. Likewise the colour photographs look pretty much like they appear on my colour-corrected screen- but that's a Dell Ultrasharp rather than anything fancy. I calibrate my screen with a I1 Display Pro. IMO if you are getting colour casts and your pictures appear much less contrasty then the likeliest scenario is that your colour management is askew . If that's so you may well find that changing book printer doesn't help much if at all. Unlike the situation many years back , many labs (for prints) and book publishers are capable of turning out decently accurate colours and contrasts so long as the input material is OK. But they assume its OK as you send it , so if you send them b&w that's neutral on your machine but not neutral on theirs they will assume that what they see is what you want. There is one small exception. There is a tendency for printed photographs on paper to be a little duller, a little less bright & contrasty, than they appear on a backlit screen. I do compensate for this by boosting contrast and saturation/brightness a little on book submissions. In other words the material I transmit to Blurb is contrastier/brighter than the way I like to see that work on screen. But we're talking a little here; fine-tuning if you like. If your pages look green my betting would be that you are not managing colour accurately. The other thing you might want to consider is if your preparing your images under artificial light, what are those lights doing to the way your images look on screen? The lighting in my office is not even remotely similar to the way the rest of the house is lit. It's much more "daylight" so I can edit in daylight or at night believing that when I look at the night time edits the following noon I'm not going to want to do them all over again.
  6. I don't think that a decision to close DPR with all of 14 people I think- would make any financial difference to a business the size of Amazon. Quite frankly DPR would be incapable of either making or losing more than a very small amount of money. I think the root of the issue is whether DPR was remotely strategically interesting to Amazon. It was never ever going to be really big, or make an interesting amount of money, so why bother? Companies behave differently regarding non-strategic side-businesses in expansion mode or contraction mode. Nobody fancied being asked "what are we p*****g around with this for? All that said, I think DPR was a useful public service and I'll miss it.
  7. There's a few bridges you need to cross before you jump into ownership. This is not an exhaustive list. I would like to reassure you that the quality of the scanner is basically very good. I've had hundreds of scans made on this machine commercially and I and my stock agencies were pretty happy with them. But 1. Are you technical? And do you enjoy technical issues? Its likely that as well as buying the scanner you'll have to use hardware & software that's pretty old . For someone entering this arena for the first time there's a lot you'll need to learn and not a vast number of people you can learn it from. Would be helpful if you could open a dialogue with someone who'd been though this process successfully . There might be such a person on Photo.net but you might need to look outside. 2. Are you clear about what you want to scan to what size , whether the Imacon will do that and whether there's anything - like ancillaries - that you need to get it to scan what you want it to. 3. Is the seller prepared to underwrite that the scanner is in proper working order eg by giving some form of warranty? 4. How many scans do you think you want to make ? p.a or in total. This is because if you want to make a few hundred its might be as cheap to buy those in than to enter a process that has the potential to be both complex and expensive. If you have thousands of film shots & you're thinking of scanning the lot then you should question whether you actually need to do that. Most people don't find scanning fun and have other, perhaps more exciting, calls on their time. My own policy is to scan only when I know exactly what use I'm going to make of the scan after- like make a print, sell usage rights or whatever. I don't ever scan simply because I might want to make a print later. And if my purpose is to put the image onto the web, or make a self-published book, then I'll use a scanner appropriate to those tasks & it isn't going to be an Imacon. 5. Personally I would not buy anything on this scale without first having identified a convenient route to getting service and/or repair.
  8. In the 13 years to 2009 I shot virtually exclusively 120/220 via various Bronica SQAi cameras and umpteen prime lenses. I used about 500 rolls a year . The film and processing, plus camera servicing a couple of times a year and getting into London to take film to my lab for processing was costing me about £3500 pa then. Now I'd imagine more than double that as both film manufacturers and processors would want me to pay the costs of diseconomies of (lack of) scale as well as inflation. While I was doing that I was happy to do it, but in 2009 I switched to a Dslr FF system. But it now occurs that a) I don't miss it nearly as much as i thought I would; b) I don't think my photography is worse because I moved to FF Dslrs c) With the money I save I could completely replace my camera & lenses every year if I wanted to (I don't). The only thing I can't do is make really big prints. That used to be far more important to me than it is now and indeed its quite a few years since I needed to print bigger than I can from FF. My bag's lighter. I don't have to worry about buying & transporting film. My servicing/repair costs have reduced by 75% because modern Dslr's are more reliable & don't need regular servicing. Processing the shots for online use is much easier than scanning film and processing the scans. I don't think I could begin to justify a move back to MF in either financial or photographic terms
  9. Lying behind this question lies the issue of "why buy anything new at all?" I've been using the same equipment in essence for at least several years- Canon 5D mk3 with Mk 2 retained as back-up. I have yet to conclude that I could make the photographs I want to make markedly better with new equipment; I've yet to conclude that my older stuff is causing a lot of reliability issues. I like the idea of saving a bit of weight and space but whilst the mirrorless bodies are lighter the same isn't really true of the lenses so I dumped that idea. So for me there hasn't been a lot of sense in buying a (slightly) better mousetrap. I have enjoyed testing out the capabilities of relatively new software , and to be frank I think I can do more to improve my photography that way than buying a new dslr or mirrorless camera that way. I've always made good use of ND grads , even with dslrs and I need to replace my scratched and scruffy set of 6. But hold on- do I? There are processes inside later versions of LR and PS that allow me to quickly select only the sky and set whatever exposure I want in post in about the same time as it would take to select and fit a grad. I've recently made my first trip for 30 years without using grads at all. Not once. So that's probably $1000 I get to keep. I could see me buying new equipment to facilitate different sorts or photography that I can't do now. Better macro for example or even a drone though I think I've missed the boat on drone photography which may well end up in the same box as panoramics of two decades ago, when we all bought X-Pans or similar. And as I get older swapping the entire system for something half the size & weight so I can still travel with gear. But a better mousetrap? Probably not for me.
  10. Maybe carbon is best for daytime photos at 1/30? I think the best tripod for daytime photographs at 1/30 with a decent digital camera is none. Not that I think my pictures will be sharper than using a tripod- but that they will be sharp enough, given lens or in body stabilisation. And even if you convince yourself that you'd like things a little sharper you can increase ISO or for many shots trade off a little aperture size/depth of field to get a faster shutter speed. Fifteen years ago I was photographing on medium format film with a tripod on maybe 95% of my exposures and it was pretty much essential. Today its rare for me to use a tripod unless I want to use a long exposure for creative effect or because it's very dark. I always take a tripod on trips but its use is very limited nowadays and I will not walk for miles with a tripod "just in case". I carry it when I know that the combination of light levels and opportunity for long exposure work is likely to mean I'll need a tripod to get the shot. Mostly that means the tripod stays in the car, and once in a blue moon I need to go back for it or revisit a location with the tripod. Pretty rare though and in general I'm delighted not to carry it. My real questions to you are How many times on your week long hikes do you actually need to use a tripod? This is not the same as asking how many times you actually use a tripod. To what extent can you overcome the need for a tripod by altering camera settings? Is carbon better? I think it resists certain types of motion better. But for me the biggest cause of camera motion is wind playing on the rig especially if on an uneven surface such as grass . I don't find that CF is any less susceptible to that - in fact what a tripod needs to resist that (to a degree) is actually weight. The benefit of CF seems to me to be more weight reduction for carrying than anything else. It's less cold on icy mornings too.
  11. A lot of this IMO depends on what kind of "seeing" you got used to before you got cataracts. For me I had good distance vision in the left eye and was extremely short sighted in the right. So despite being right eye dominant, I grew up a left eyed photographer. The right eye was great for reading and very close work but contributed little or nothing of detail over a metre . I struggled with batting at cricket and long catching because the main eye changed from left to right as the ball approached. I needed a left eye cataract op first. Little debate about what sort of lens to use because that eye had always produced my only good distance vision so we went like for like and my vision was pretty much as it was pre-cataract.. However when the right eye developed a cataract ten years later, there was a different debate and I was concerned ( as was my consultant) that a long vision lens in that eye too would prove difficult because it would be just so different from the way I was used to seeing things. We settle for a short to mid range lens in the right eye . That combination has caused me no issues but my right eye vision is now far more useful . I can still see great close up with the right but instead of being useless , I could now watch tv and interact over medium distances with that eye too. Makes me confident that if ever anything happened to my left eye I could cope. Meanwhile I don't usually wear spectacles apart from tiny stuff extremely close. Main message is don't change too far from the way you saw before. And one more thing. You might see things a little more "blue" than you used to. In general I've had to change nothing about the way I photograph after one or two cataract ops.
  12. Couple of things puzzle me First , what sort of organisation notes the amount of traffic on Photo.net right now and assesses that a total change in the platform/what it does is justified? Second, assuming that its pretty obvious to everyone that Photo.net isn't what it was, has already tried a major change in software to cure the malaise which didn't work, what makes anyone think that doing a similar thing over is going to work differently? Third, given the audience Photo.net now has, does the thought that lots of people might be prepared to pay for what it might offer to do actually hold water. Would be nice if it were true. Meanwhile I'd like to thank those people who have worked without help and without budget to keep a once-great site afloat these last few years.
  13. I agree with Robin. I think the finder will enable you to dump obvious errors and some not so obvious, against a background that any doubt can be resolved better at home. Batteries? Well I get about a day on average which includes quite a bit of time assessing whether I need another go, or a slightly different treatment. I travel with at least 6 batteries and two chargers so I can afford a failure- not all of this stuff in the camera bag bag but always accessible once I'm at my room or car.
  14. Nearly all my photography is carried out on trips 1-4 weeks away from home. I don't want to edit photographs whilst away for lots of reasons, apart from getting rid of obvious rubbish or some of the duplication to free up space on cards. My cameras have two card slots so I make two copies of every photograph and delete nothing until I get home & load onto my computer. I have two stores for used cards- one in my camera bag & one elsewhere so I can afford one piece of carelessness or bad luck while still having my pictures. If I want to look at pictures I've taken I'll put that card in the camera. So- a low cost, low weight solution. I've been through the netbook thing and got no benefit other than something else to carry & I have quite enough anyway. If I didn't do what I do, I'd buy an external HDD with a screen. I do carry an older low capacity iPad too for all the usual reasons, but with a decent trip producing c 80GB of images my photos won't fit on there and buying a current high capacity iPad seems to be close to the most expensive way to buy storage capacity known to man.
  15. Before I switched to Canon 5D and successors in 2008 I had a decade or more shooting Medium format Bronicas and Mamiya 7ii. With most medium format you were supposed to have the equipment serviced every few months and I still had a whole series of electrical issues. Frankly they were not made in sufficient volume to bring the reliability you expect from true mass production. It was imperative to carry a spare body. I had an aborted trip due to camera malfunction. Servicing and repair was a budget line in my business. Meanwhile my Canon gear has never been serviced, and I've had just one malfunction with body or lens with probably 15 000 actuations a year. Frankly in my experience it was the old stuff that was, by comparison, shoddily made by comparison with more recent cameras. Even my EOS 10's from the 1980's couldn't hold a candle to my last decade's experience. Just goes to show how much mass production techniques have improved. Frankly these days I suspect margins are so slim that businesses just can't afford to pay for a high incidence of warranty claims.
  16. Mark. Just to respond briefly on your comments on personal sites. I've had a website for 20 years. it has about 40+ "albums" or collections and not far off 2000 photographs. It costs me £60 a year to keep the site available. I have no idea how many visitors the site gets on aggregate as I measure for each collection (35-50 photographs ) rather than the aggregate as I want to know which collections people seem to want to view. I bring in new photographs/copy, adjust images and delete old stuff myself so its as flexible as I can be bothered to be. OK, if I want to completely change the way the site looks or behaves ( done this 3 times in 20 years) I pay for that work which usually runs a small no. of £hundreds. Many people do this themselves using templates or similar. A collection will generate a minimum of 500 views pa, up to a few thousand. That's for me with very little effort to promote the site . Thing is though I get no feedback and certainly no compliments. I have sold a few ( and I mean a few) prints from it. It has over the years brought me to the attention of some useful people running stock agencies . But now that's no way to get rich either. Its a useful way to respond to people who ask "what do you do"; "do you have photographs of---". " got any new stuff I can see." Depends why you want people to see what you do. I spend maybe a few days every couple of years bringing the content up to date. I regard that as a labour of love. So for me it's different from what Photo.net was, and to some extent still is. But its not difficult or expensive for those who want to do it.
  17. The conclusion I reached many years ago is that there is no purpose making or buying scans that don't get used to do something worthwhile. So for me I wouldn't scan or pay anyone else to make scans unless I absolutely know what I want to achieve from that/those scans and understood what sort of scan I need to fulfil that purpose. I achieve my aims through owning a 10yo but not intensively used flatbed which works as well as I need for over 95% of a very limited scanning need. Anything beyond that I put out, but I need to stress that there isn't much of that primarily because I don't any longer have much need for big prints either for myself or for sale. If I do its much more likely that it'll be of a digital image I've made in the last 12 years or so . I wonder what the prize is for scanning an entire film collection? I think that all it would provide for me is a certain neatness, and I'm unconvinced that neatness has any important value. And that if I dedicated myself to that I would conclude afterwards that I'd wasted time doing something that didn't really need doing and so failing to to do things that would have been more enjoyable and/or more valuable. And so for me there's no point debating how to get the "scan the collection" job done when there may well not be sufficient reason to do it at all. If you'd settle for scanning those you'd like to put on a website, or to print, or to make a book ( Andrew's "hero" images from above) , then there is an interesting debate about making or buying those scans and on what equipment those scans should be made.
  18. I have an Epson flatbed V700 which suits my requirements just fine (10" x 10" max prints from 6x6cm slides). But it won't make a print 11"x14" from a 35mm original that I'd expect to like.. It would make a decent image for on screen or a 6x4. Otherwise the OP is asking for something that has never existed affordably and is unlikely to make an appearance in future. Scanning is a horrible, dull, boring job especially in the context that you're likely to have to make adjustments in Photoshop of similar to use them well. If I were a patient man I'd read Ed Ingold's post and try that route. 120 "scans" in an hour seems pretty good to me even if I'd personally expect to be bored in ten minutes, pouring a glass of red by 15 mins and hating every moment I spent doing it ( the scanning, not the red) I do wonder whether you have a real need for all those scans. If you have 100 that you might print from get someone with an Imacon to do them for you and find something to do with your retirement that is not, frankly drudgery. I speak as a photographer who has maybe 20 000 MF transparencies/b&w negs of which maybe 1000 of the best are scanned by or for stock agencies and some even by me. I have absolutely no intention to scan the rest , or indeed any at all unless a clear and present need for the scan emerges.
  19. I have a Perfection V700. I have used it & Epson Scan for years to make scans from MF transparencies to use in Blurb books and online. For those applications it's fine, noting that the images in Blurb books tend to be 10" square or smaller. Epson can provide foc a software update for Win10 or Win 11. I loaded the latter today. Seems to be OK. Didn't ask about Mac but the point is that the scanner is still being supported after a fashion. I should add also that I scan in the expectation of tinkering with colour, contrast etc in Photoshop rather than expecting to be able to produce a scan that's ready to use every time from the scanner. I might get better results from other scanning software but I won't spend $400 to find out as I'm happy with what I do for my limited applications. Back in the days when I needed to print bigger I had scans made on an Imacon or a drum scanner. I mention this purely because you don't say what your hopes or expectations from the V700 are.
  20. Joseph did you read the bits about 250GB of digital pictures so far in total? The bit about no video? The bit about Micro 4 thirds? May I suggest that you are looking at someone here whose photography habit is very, very different from yours. And who has a budget. What's right for you is not likely to be right for him.
  21. I think your 500GB SSD plus 2TB HDD perspective is right. I've been a keen photographer for quite a long time and my 15 years of digital work, including all the Tiffs, jpegs & versions for website and Blurb etc altogether runs to about 3.6TB, which I have on 2 HDD. So its going to take you a while to fill 2TB I think, so if & when you get close to that you can then have another HDD installed. I presume you will back everything up on external drives. I'm buying a new machine tomorrow with 1TB SSD and a total of 6TB in HDD space (also XPS- see my thread below which included some great advice). but as of now I'm working with a 500GB SSD boot drive that has 160GB of unused space. Equally I'm going to stick at 16GB RAM - I've coped comfortably so far with 12GB on my current XPS and of course RAM is also expandable.
  22. I have made over 20 books with Blurb . I'm happy with what I get. I use their oldest software, Booksmart; which allows a lot of freedom in setting up pages and creating your own templates and indeed every page can be different if you want. I tend to stick to c 100 pages of 12" sq but that's a creative choice not an imposed limitation- I started off with more pages but found that around 100 is a sweet spot for viewing and handling. I find I get best results by producing the jpegs for inclusion with a tiny bit more contrast & saturation than you'd use on screen. I don't have a problem getting my books to look quite close to the (calibrated) screen version of my photographs , though I'd add that book #20 is better than book #1 from that perspective. The downside of focusing on Blurb is that I know little about alternatives. Should mention also that they aren't cheap- though the best way to deal with them is to get the pictures ready and even make the book on their software, but don't upload or order it till they have a good discount offer active. Discounts of 35%-40% are not unusual though they tend to be short -lived, so better to be ready to go when the right price comes along.
  23. Robin, there's much in what you say. I have a Dell XPS now and its done ok for me for 11 years apart from a major C drive crash a couple of years back which was inconvenient rather than catastrophic. and my guy put a SSD in to replace it. I just checked out their video cards today in the context of advice above and indeed they are close to the top of the "recommended" lists. I have three internal drives installed and with one for C and the other two for photographs I still have space for another few years work. So I don't really need anything bigger- just newer which I hope will mean more reliability in future- and faster which I'm going to get with a 2022 machine rather than a 2011 one. I may well vote for similar again. Images? They're all mine-private work. I do purge them on the way in for the simple reason that getting rid of the rubbish and repetitive stuff makes the retained pictures seem so much better. I purge in-camera too. Perhaps 25% of what I take doesn't last till I get home even. But the real good point is your last one. I know I could get the number down but it would take so much time and it would be soooo-- boring. And its not like in today's world it's costing me a fortune in drive space for images and back up. I reckoned once that I could spend a couple of months halving my # photographs and effectively pay myself no more than about £400 for that work. Maybe an internal drive and an external. And indeed if I'm in the wrong place on the computer replacement cycle I don't save much at all. I've got 2TB unused space on my current setup. Go back 10+ years and offer me back half the money I spent on MF film and processing/mounting if only I'd have been a bit more selective, and that really would have been worthwhile. Add to that the savings I'd have made if I'd been more selective in having hundreds of prints made for myself some of them in the early days of hybrid workflows with people like West Coast Imaging scanning, proofing and printing for me and paying for Fedex packages bouncing between UK and California and wow.
  24. Again my thanks to all who have responded. I've got a mass of stuff to digest across 100 responses, but I'm aware from my years as a consultant that most problems need to get more complicated before they can get simpler. I hope to act fairly quickly but I have no firm deadlines so I can wait till I have a clear plan laid out before I have boxes arriving.
  25. I don't understand why some of you guys think that if I'm a decent photographer ( which I hope I am) then its odd that I'm asking questions about changing my computer. Taking photographs and computing are not in the same skill-set or interest-set for me at all. I can be ok at one and not up to speed on the other. They're not related. Its a bit like travelling and cars. I like travel and much of it involves driving in my car or more usually in someone else's. I know nothing about how cars work, but I can drive one. I can use a computer to carry out the tasks I deem important to store and edit my photographs. But I don't keep up to date with hardware or software development and so when I need to change I'd appreciate some input from people whose interest and experience is different from mine, including I may say the variety and differences in opinions that clearly exists. As you're firing back at me I have some 50 000 surviving digital images. They have all been taken since 2008. There is another pile of medium format transparency images from 10+ years with mainly 6x6 cameras before that. Since starting digital photography I have bought exactly one computer in 2011, a few pieces of Adobe software where I updated as far as CS5 and Lightroom 5. And Nik . Didn't think there was much point poring over new software capabilities since I had a Windows 7 computer and no clue ( and not much interest ) about how to change that until now when I'd imagine necessity is looming. So I have very little experience in buying computers and getting them up to speed with new software and all those pictures. The sorts of things that daunt me are how to transfer 50 000 digital images and a few thousand scans from hardware which uses USB onto a new machine without watching computers whirring for a month? Do I need to do anything to ensure my ageing scanner, printer, calibration software/hardware; & external drives will work on the new machine? What sort of drives to put in the new box to maximise reliability? What would I gain from a i7 or even i9 processor as against the i5 I've been using? What sort of graphics card do I need? How much memory (struggling to accept I must have 64GB as one person suggested when 16GB seems to work well enough now)? And a biggie- what order do I need to do all this in and what if anything can I do to prepare myself to make this changeover as painless as it can be. I'm not looking for a tutorial on how to process images; I will update my Adobe software - and had always assumed that I would I am not remotely embarrassed that having made few changes these last 10 years I'm not an expert in changing computers in a photographic environment. It's likely that my knowledge will of necessity grow in the next few weeks and months as I consult others and read. But I'm not technology savvy and I I'm doing this because I need to, not because I find it fun. Photography--well that's different.
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