marc_rochkind

<p>Let's see if I can understand. You went out of your way to do someone a favor, got no response, and are wondering if this is bad internet behavior.</p>

<p>It is not. Actually, it's pretty decent. Bad internet behavior would be several hateful messages calling you a jerk and every other despicable thing, sending you a virus to screw up your computer, and posting (alleged) nude picture of you. Swatting, too. (Google it.)</p>

<p>So, if all you got was silence, I think you should just let it go. Of course, as others have mentioned, there's no need to feel any obligation towards these people in the future.</p>

<p>(I will check back in 10 min. to see if you've left a post thanking me for my contribution.)</p>

<p>A few of your cameras might be in of the sort that Christie's would deal with (the Leicas), but most of them are much too common. As Dave said, look at completed auctions. (Do not look at current listings or those that didn't sell.)</p>

<p>The standard printed reference is McKeown's Price Guide, but in this context it's only useful to determine if a particular cameras is truly special. The prices are mostly pre-internet and are meaningless.</p>

<p>The back of McKeown's has a quote that goes something like this: "The price of a camera depends entirely on the mood of the buyer and seller at the time of sale."</p>

<p>Are you an art photographer, dealing with very few images (a few dozen a year), or are you more prolific, with thousands or tens-of-thousands a year? Photoshop is for processing individual images. Lightroom is far more efficient when there are many. This is not only true of the processing itself, but for cataloging, grouping into collections, exporting (including uploading to web sites), printing, book making, slideshows, geotagging, and much, much more.</p>

<p>As I'v said here numerous times, compared to the investment in camera and computer equipment, the $10 a month is peanuts. No, actually, less. I think I spend more than that each month for peanuts.</p>

<p>I have often wished for some sort of commercial retrofit kit, and I'm not the only one, that would allow me to do this with one of my classic cameras. Ones with removable backs are the obvious choices. Alas, there's no market... sales would be in the hundreds, maybe high 4 figures.</p>

<p>Manufacturers have responded with retro-looking digital cameras, such as the recently announced Olympus Pen F.</p>

<p>Not the same thing!</p>

<p>Congratulations to this kid.</p>

<p>Are you asking for criticism? Under the assumption that you are:</p>

<p>1. Great treatment of how to get good shots when conditions are against you (weather, low water level).</p>

<p>2. Scrap the full-screen slides emphasizing the key points. Not necessary, and interferes with the flow.</p>

<p>3. The real joy is seeing the first shot of the wall when it appears that nothing will result. But, this payoff is too far in. I'd edit down the very slow and boring introduction to be much shorter.</p>

<p>4. The background music made me think at first that this was a video shoot primarily, not a still-photography shoot, and the video was dull, so I thought this was going to be lousy. Of course, that was the whole point, but I didn't know that until the first still showed up. Somehow make it clear that this is a still shoot and the video is just educational in nature. Maybe open with your best shot, just so the viewer knows that you actually know what you're doing.</p>

<p>5. As I said, edit it way down. Instead of 14 minutes, or whatever it is, make it 5 min.</p>

<p>Hope this helps!</p>

<p>Right, Michael. I queried Joe at the link above, and he said he couldn't do an EF. My guess is that few EFs were sold. Maybe about 1/10000 of the number of AE-1 cameras and their successors.</p>

<p>These days, about 40 years after these cameras were made, I choose a shooter based on how it looks and how I feel using it. (I have about 130 cameras, of which about 50 are completely functional.) The EF just appeals to me. I also like that it takes modern batteries.</p>

<p>This could be a good deal, because the AE-1 was hugely popular, so there are lots of them available on eBay. If someone wanted this (now) classic FD camera, he or she could get one on eBay and then send it off for a CLA.</p>

<p>I bought an AE-1 new when it came out, around 1976 or so. (Still have it.) But, today, of all the FD cameras, the EF is the best looking, so that's the one I'd get. No, wait, I do have an EF!</p>

<p>Lightroom has progressed significantly since Version 3. For $10 a month you get the latest LR, plus Photoshop. That's a tiny fraction of what your camera equipment and new Mac costs. And, you would most likely no longer have to hassle with getting your out-of-date software to work, and could spend much more time on your photography.</p>

<p>Ten bucks! A fraction of your mobile phone or cable bills. About what two beers cost!</p>

<p>As you can tell, I'm a big proponent of (1) keeping software up-to-date, and (2) paying software companies so they can continue to develop their software.</p>

 

<p>A few things that weren't clear to me, but are now:</p>

<p>1. It isn't an app. It's a website that allows you to build your own website.</p>

<p>2. Adobe hosts your site. It's not just some HTML (etc.) that you have to host somewhere.</p>

<p>3. Since I have a CC account (for Lightroom and Photoshop; $10 a month) it's free for me.</p>

<p>For those who don't know it, MagCloud provides a way of printing one-off magazines, with a photo quality not as good as a real book (using, say, Blurb), but much better than a laser printer. And, it's incredibly cheap, at about 16 or 20 cents a page (more for giant page sizes). For example, you can print one copy of a 36-page 8.5x11 book for about $7.50, compared to $26 for a Blurb book. A very small (say, 8 page) MagCloud book costs $1.60, whereas the minimum page count for Blurb is 20, at $22.</p>

<p>I use MagCloud for printing up memory books of vacation snapshots, old family photos, and the like, for myself and to give away to friends and family. (I'd never use it for my serious photography.) My books are really small, generally 8 - 16 pages.</p>

<p>There are two ways to prepare the PDF to upload to MagCloud from Lightroom: As a Book, or as a Print job. MagCloud has a good document about using the Lightroom book module: <a href="http://blog.magcloud.com/2012/07/25/how-to-create-a-magcloud-ready-pdf-in-lightroom-4/">http://blog.magcloud.com/2012/07/25/how-to-create-a-magcloud-ready-pdf-in-lightroom-4/</a>. The chief difficulty is that the book (Blurb) print sizes don't match the MagCloud sizes, even though MagCloud is now owned by Blurb, but the document suggests you let MagCloud scale the pages up, and near as I can tell that works OK.</p>

<p>I found the Book Module fine for photos without captions, but it does a terrible job of positioning captions automatically, and going photo-by-photo for a book of dozens or hundreds of photos is way too much work.</p>

<p>For lots of photos with captions, using Lightroom's Print module is easier. (I just made a 36-page book with 136 photos that way.) You can size the print page to exactly match MagCloud's specifications. (On Windows, the CutePDF driver gives you more flexibility in this regard than Windows 10's built-in PDF facility. On the Mac it's no problem.) I found two issues:</p>

<p>1. There's a long-standing bug in Lightroom where it doesn't show multi-line captions until you jigger the page by, for example, checking and unchecking the Keep Square checkbox. You have to do this on each page with a multiline caption.</p>

<p>2. Unlike the Book module, the Print module provides no way to supply front and back covers. I prepared them separately in Photoshop, and then assembled the three PDFs (front cover, body from the Print module, and back cover) into a single PDF. On a Mac, the Preview app can do this directly. On Windows, if you don't have a suitable app, you can do it in Photoshop with some trouble (create a PDF Presentation) or get the free PDFSAM (PDF Split and Merge) which works perfectly, near as I can tell.</p>

<p>The Print Module does do two nice things: It produces a very compact PDF, and it automatically scales photos up if they don't fit the cell you've specified.</p>

<p>If you haven't tried MagCloud, it's fun and cheap to give it a try.</p>

<p>[i'm not connected with MagCloud, Blurb, or Adobe. I have a standalone Mac app that works like the Lightroom Print module (without the bug, and with the ability to add covers), but under Photo.net rules I'm not allowed to tell you its name.]</p>

<p> </p>

<div></div>

<p>Agree, John. My little NUC has a 500GB SSD in addition to its 1TB hard drive.</p>

<p>Macs aren't a good choice for photo editing. See this post:</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00dfUC</p>

<p>My newest computer is a very small Intel NUC. But it's big enough to contain a 500GB SSD for the C drive, where all apps, the Lightroom catalog, and temporary files are, and a 1TB hard drive, for the photos themselves. A second, external USB3 1TB drive is permanently mounted to serve as backup (Windows File History). Everything is also backed up to the cloud with CrashPlan. (That little NUC has a Core i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM.)</p>

<p>You're lucky that you have a monitor that's a keeper and your computation in another box. So, you can replace the box. Mac Minis are a bad deal--way overpriced. See my blog articles:</p>

<p>http://basepath.com/wp/?p=523</p>

<p>and</p>

<p>http://basepath.com/wp/?p=540</p>

<p>You don't need the highest level of graphics for photography. Those processors are for gamers.</p>

<p>Thanks for the plug, Andrew!</p>

<p>When things look really flakey, and defy all logic, think about the possibility of memory failure. Memory on most consumer computers lacks any error detection, and, when memory starts to fail, the results are truly bizarre.</p>

<p>You can find memory checkers on the web. They take a LONG time to run, but they're worth a try.</p>

<p>Edward, when you say: "Actually, software compatibility is less an issue than that of hardware, for which Windows 10 is notably deficient", are you talking about Lightroom/Photoshop or something else? Compatibility with what? Devices? The Mac version? Cameras?</p>

<p>I've been using Macs for photo work for the last 10 years or so, which I do mostly with Lightroom, along with occasional use of Photoshop and Topaz plugins. Now it's time to replace my 6-year-old iMac, but none of the current Macs seems like a good choice. (I'm considering a computer only for photography, not games, writing, accounting, or any other use. And integration with my iPhone is of no interest to me.)</p>

<p>There are four types of Macs: notebooks, all-in-ones, minis, and Mac Pros. Notebooks don't have a large enough screen, and Mac Pros are overkill for what I need. Mac Minis are twice as expensive as equivalent Windows computers. (Look not at base prices, but ones with an Intel Core i7 and 16GB of RAM.) That leaves iMacs, but the problem with them is that I'm tired of replacing the whole computer when only the processor needs upgrading. I suppose I could get a MacBook Pro with a separate monitor, but that's a very expensive way to go, and the combination takes up too much space on my desk.</p>

<p>For photography, the choice of OS doesn't matter to me, because I spend nearly all my time in Lightroom and Photoshop, and they run identically on both platforms. (I'm a software developer, and use Windows, OS X, and Linux for that, so all of those OSes are familiar. I have about seven computers that I use for different purposes.)</p>

<p>Any other photographers steering away from Macs because none seems suitable and appropriately priced?</p>

<p><strong>Appendix: Intel NUC vs. Mac Mini</strong></p>

<p>Here's why I say a Mac Mini costs twice as much as a Windows computer. The following costs me $657 at Amazon:</p>

<ul>

<li>Intel NUC5i7RYH with 5th Generation Core i7-5557U (WiFi included)</li>

<li>16GB RAM (Crucial DDR3-1600 MT/s)</li>

<li>1TB hard drive (HGST Travelstar 7K1000 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III 32MB Cache)</li>

<li>Windows 10 Home</li>

</ul>

<p>A Mac Mini with an i7, 16GB, and a 1TB drive is $1400. Both the NUC and the Mac Mini have dual-core i7 processors (not quad-core).</p>

<p>I'm with Q.G.:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>There's only so much you can do using the name of a file, so the better solution is to keep that simple and unique (the name a camera assigns to it usually works well enough, but when more cameras are used it helps adding some additional midentiefier) and use a database of sorts to add metadata to the file.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>My files are in folder by year and date (use year, month, date if you want). Lightroom does all the indexing.</p>

<p>You didn't say so, but, this being photo.net, perhaps you're going to be editing photos?</p>

<p>If so, you'll need a hardware device to get the monitor calibrated.</p>

<p>I'm with Steve and Fred and some others. $10 a month gives me Photoshop and Lightroom, and I can use my brain cells keeping track of other things. I never could afford Photoshop, and was spending $75 or so a year keeping LR updated, so $120 a year is fine by me.</p>

<p>The ability to process raw files using the latest technology and techniques is extremely important to me.</p>

<p>Most of what you read will be about equipment and its operation.</p>

<p>But the most important thing to learn is composition. When it's right, the photo is good, and when it's wrong (or boring) the photo is bad, and this is true regardless of focus, exposure, or any other physical properties.</p>

<p>So, I second the choice of Light Gesture & Color. Or, Photographic Seeing, by Andreas Feininger, which you can get used from Amazon for about $1 plus shipping. He also has a book called PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION IN PHOTOGRAPHY which I'm not familiar with, but it's probably terrific.</p>

<p>Another point: What distinguishes a pro or advanced amateur from a dabbler is post processing. Get a copy of Lightroom (save your money by not buying anything less complete) and learn to use it well.</p>

<p>You would have to wait a long time after purchasing a book for its value to rise significantly, such a rise is unpredictable, and the value of any one book is small, so you'd need a lot of books to make any real money. Therefore, you need a large initial investment with very risky returns that won't materialize for many years, and all that time your investment is illiquid.</p>

<p>This pretty much defines a horrible investment choice.</p>

<p>Spent just a minute or so on your site, but I like what I saw, and the site itself is very clean. I appreciate that the photo display is large. Best of luck!</p>

<p>I think Adobe's efforts here have mostly to do with branding and getting a foot in the door. It's hard to imagine how for "serious hobbyists & Pros" it would be productive. When productivity is a concern, I would think that carrying a lightweight laptop would make a lot more sense. Which is what "serious hobbyists & Pros" actually do.</p>