macgregor_anderson

Thanks, I'm an idiot and missed it. Nothing in the index under remote. But I hadn't made it to the accessory page. I think I was more focused on finding a timer option.

Did a forum search for D200 blending instead of remote...or I would have seen that discussion too.

I guess there is just no work around on this with the timer. Understandable...Nikon needs more of my money.

I'll get another battery and a remote. Thanks for the help.

I just upgraded from a D100 to a D200 and I've got a question. For work

recently I started blending multiple exposures in photoshop bracketed a few

stops apart. I shot with my D100 from a tripod with exposure bracketing

turned on. And I used a good old fashioned screw in cable release.

It's a good thing that D100 had the retro style cable release, because I

couldn't figure out any other way to fire multiple shots without touching the

camera.

My D200 has no cable release hole. I've gone through the manual and found no

way to set multiple exposures that are bracketed by a few stops using the

timer. I didn't even find anything in the manual about wireless remote

operation. I'm assuming that's a possibility.

I can use my D100 for work. But I'm thinking about trying some blending for

landscape stuff and I'd sure like to bracket without bumping the camera.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Mac

I've got an FM2 and it's tough as nails. I like the feel of the thing. I like the look of the thing. Sometimes I just pick it up and fire a few shots off with no film in the thing. To hear the clunk and crank the lever.

I upgraded a few years ago to an F100. A few years later I got a D100.

I needed money.

I had no problem selling that F100 in great condition for less than half of what I paid just a couple years earlier. Great camera, faaaast autofocus, great viewfinder, great metering. But it was just a little too whiz bang computerized to have any real soul. I felt detached from the process with the thing, and that made it easy to detatch myself from the camera.

I'll never sell that FM2. I hardly use it these days. But it's just such a solid chunk of the past, feels like a mechanical rather than computerized device. And it takes great photos, reliably. You might miss a quick focus situation, but that camera makes you think about what you are doing in a way that an auto everything camera doesn't.

Maybe others just have trouble letting them go too. A bit sentimental and illogical. But it's what will keep at least one FM2 off the resale rack forever.

Mac

I'll answer quickly, but you'll get better answers from more experienced people I'm sure.

Diluted developers tend to produce sharper edges but also more grain.

Some diluted developers may also provide compensating action, improving the shadows and preventing your highlights from getting too dense.

Also, undiluted developers can often put you into very short development times. While that may seem to be an advantage, it can be hard to control the process. A five minute development can be too short to get consistent results.

Ok, there's your quick answer from a hack. Hopefully someone else can explain it better.

mac

I'm not a surf photographer, but I did grow up in California, so I'm semi-qualified.

If you find that after you've metered skin and set exposure comp to minus 1.5 that you have surfers looking a couple stops underexposed and that you need to selectively lighten them later, and that maybe you've still got some blown highlights too, you might try asking wedding photographers, and people who take pics of their kids at the beach, and people who take digital pics in high contrast situations in general. I think the problem is fairly common. Not limited to surfing scenes.

Bottom line, of course, is to protect the highlights you care even slightly about, hope your sensor has the latitude to pick up detail in what becomes "shadows", and post process carefully.

Time saving ideas might include using an in camera curve or batch processing the files with a curve. Maybe even just using that photoshop tool for backlit scenes. I forget what it's called.

Or you could switch to black and white film. I get a good solid 12 stops or more out of the stuff. Negative color film might also give a bit more latitude than that sensor. But it will require a lot of processing time. Yours, or a labs.

Good luck!

Mac

What was wrong with the images? Blown highlights?

Mac

I have a couple ideas on finding helpful people to speak with about this.

I've been out to Joseph three times, and fished the Grande Ronde and Imnaha. But I wasn't on a photo trip, and don't have the answers you are looking for.

Here's a site with a pacific NW nature focus. Maybe someone here can help? I'm not a member and I'm not sure if you can join for free or not. Maybe something in the archives?

http://pacificnw.naturephotographers.net/

Another idea. I'm a member on Westfly.com . It's a fly fishing site, and it's free to join up. You could post an OT question on the Oregon forum. Tell them "Mac AKA Inthetrees" suggested you post and you shouldn't get too much grief for going off topic. A lot of folks there are photographers, and quite a few of them know that area.

Otherwise, maybe a call to the Joseph chamber of commerce or tourist bureau (is there one?) could help. I know a fishing guide out there, Mac Huff, who would probably spend a few minutes on the phone with you if you told him I suggested you call.

Good luck. It's stunning country out there! I'm jealous.

Oh, and you gotta take the truck. Lots of great sideroads out there, but they aren't Saturn friendly.

Mac

Rene, if you have access to a car you have several options.

The coast is about an hour to an hour and a half drive from Portland.

The Columbia River gorge is even closer. A drive to the waterfalls along the river would take under an hour.

Mount Hood is about an hour. Lots of lakes and rivers around there.

If you drive South for half an hour or so, you are in wine country. A very fertile valley with some small towns and lots of flowers. I'm not an expert on seasons and flowers, but I'm sure you'd find some you are interested in. I think the Tulip festival is over, however.

I'd also like to suggest this site to you. The forum may have more info for you. http://pacificnw.naturephotographers.net/index.htm

I'm not a member or participant there, but it could be helpful. Everyone there seems very nice.

Hope this is of some help to you.

Mac

Almost everything I do or say is questionable. Just ask my girlfriend.

Mac

I really enjoy the activity itself. I prefer nature and landscape photography, and I love the entire process of searching out new areas, finding grand views and also spotting interesting subjects on a smaller scale. Some days I'll drive the forest service roads in the mountains in my truck, not knowing if I'm going to find a break in the trees with a view of the mountains I haven't seen before, or if I'm going to come across a small stream and carefully explore a small section of it looking for smaller subjects that stand out to me. Usually those spots get filed in the back of my head (I'm not great at note taking) and I wait for a time with better light or weather conditions, often returning dozens of times, and much of the time never getting a negative I even want to use.

After just two years of this I've come to know the wild areas around my house very well. Was the photography just an excuse for this? Is it just a side benefit? Not sure.

I also enjoy the process of making the photograph, from first exposure to final print. But perhaps a bit less so, and some days, it's more of an obsession than a fun pastime. I went months building a collection of negatives without putting much effort into my printing. One day a few months ago I got the urge to improve my printing skills, and while much of the process was frustrating, the results were very satisfying.

But I'd say I enjoy the exploration and especially the the concentration that comes with looking around for things to take pictures of. I don't think I'd look so closely if I were just out on a hike or a drive. That's the fun part. The often satisfying, but not always fun part is the technical process.

I'd say if I never printed a negative I'd still enjoy the looking.

As an aside, I also fly fish quite a bit. And sometimes I think it's just because I enjoy standing in the middle of a river. I like figuring out the hatch, catching wild trout on flies I tied myself, improving my casting and mending skills. But it's really about exploring and paying attention. And standing in the middle of a rushing river.

Thanks for the responses.

Mac

I got my girlfriend a D100 a little over a year ago. She finally got up the nerve to ask me if she could trade it in for a decent point and shoot. I said sure.

Didn't mean to suggest in my previous post that you weren't knowledgable about SLR photography. You didn't specify your experience and I didn't notice the link to your work. You undoubtedly know more about this stuff than I do!

I'm providing a link here that you may not want to open. You may already know a bunch of this stuff, but if you don't, and you get curious, there is a lot of info on sharpening here. Too much.

Hey, it't better than buying a pin register and punch and building your own unsharp masks in the darkroom...

And here's that link:

http://www.canonians.com/sharpening.htm

Mac

Before buying new lenses or sending the camera back, I'd look at your camera settings and workflow.

I almost always shoot in Raw mode (as opposed to one of the JPEG modes) because that provides the highest quality file. I turn off the in-camera sharpening. The image that I download to the computer usually looks quite soft, but that's ok for me. I find that sharpening in Photoshop works better than having the camera do the work. Understandable, the computing power in my PC far surpasses what's in the D100.

But that's an extra step you might not want to take just yet. To use the D100 as more of a point and shoot (but with higher image quality) you might shoot in the best JPeg mode with the sharpening turned on. See if those shots look acceptable to you.

I'm assuming you've got the autofocus turned on and understand the various autofocus targets in the viewfinder. That the camera is snapping into what looks like focus through the very small viewfinder.

Lenses do make a big difference. I've got a cheapo 70-300 and nothing looks really sharp with it. I've also got an 80-200 f 2.8 (around 800 bucks new) and it is extremely sharp. The 24-85 isn't too bad for around 450. The 12-24 dx at a grand is very sharp to my eye.

The least expensive high quality lenses are probably those 50 mm ones mentioned above. They will produce very sharp images, are also great in low light, and might be worth a look.

It is always possible that the camera is flawed and needs to go back. But check these other ideas out first.

I'll expect a post in a few days asking why the images are all so dark. That's the usual complaint for new Nikon DSLR users switching from point and shoot.

Good luck!

Mac

The problem is that highlight areas respond more to increased development time than shadow areas. So you really need to increase development time a lot to bring up the shadows. By then, your highlights will be so dense and your negs so contrasty that you'll have a whole new problem.

I'd say develop as you normally would, and try to fix things in the printing stage. Your "zone III" will still have some useable detail, even if a straight print shows black in those shadows. A little dodging (or a lot) can help fix this.

And you may need to accept a little loss in shadow detail. Not ideal, but maybe not such a big deal. Depends on the shots.

I've done some film testing myself with those films. I shoot them at 100 and 320. That's where my zone I was slightly lighter than my pure black. By visual inspection. Lately I've felt maybe I should shoot a little slower on these, like 80 and 250. But it's just so the prints take less work in the darkroom.

It's fine tuning for the most part.

Somebody with more experience can probably offer advice on using a compensating developer (I think that's it) or some other approach that helps your shadows without making the highlights too dense. Listen to them before listening to me. I'm a total amateur here.

But I wouldn't just increase development time in HC-110.

Good luck.

Mac

Good luck Laurie!

I can just see myself in that situation. Ok, done with the digital SLR stuff, now maybe just try one or two with the 4x5.

"Everybody, EVERYBODY, HEY, everybody. STAND STILL. DON'T MOVE. Hey you, lady, grab that 3 y/o of yours and tell her to quit twirling, I'm trying to make art here."

A Champagne fountain would be too much. Where's my eight stop ND when I need it. I gotta get the blur just so. And keep these guests standing still for 18 seconds.

Did I set the spot meter for 320? Did I load HP5 or was it FP 4? Did I close the lens, take out the darkslide? I wonder if there are any shrimp left at the buffet.

Just the thought of it gives me chills :)

Have fun.

Mac

check out www.lfphoto.info

He's a fixture there. Very helpful on a camera problem I had. Not afraid to speak his mind there or anywhere. Nothing wrong with that!

mac

Ray, how are you processing these films? I only ask because I've had trouble getting consistent results with TMX in the past. Some of my favorite shots have come from this film, but also a lot of very flat looking images. I did a little bit of low grade testing with TMX a while back and found that I could not repeat results when developing in trays. My temperature control was probably nowhere near good enough. Might have been aggitation as well. Or small differences in metering.

I've improved a little recently by placing my detailed shadows in zone 4 instead of 3 (or by halving the film speed, same thing I guess). But I still seem to get unexpected swings in highlight densities. This film may just be too sensitive for a casual amateur like myself. A jobo processor or at least a tank with a constant 68 water bath might help.

I picked up some TMY recently but haven't used it yet. A few people seem to love it, and also say it's a little more predictable. That's just opinions on forums, so who knows if it's true. I will like having a bit more speed. I've been using a lot more HP5 lately, instead of FP 4 because of that extra speed. I'm hoping the reciprocity on the TMY will be less of an issue than the HP5. Seems I'm always shooting in that dangerous 2-10 second range.

Sorry, no experience with Arista.

I will mention one thing I read recently that I alluded to above. If you are having shadow trouble, you might consider placing them in zone IV instead of zone III when you want detail. This suggestion was in Bruce Barbaum's book The Art of Photography. His reasoning is that even a spot reading of a shadow area is something of an average, that the micro detail will range around that average, and that you are right up on the edge of compression if you place on zone III. So you won't get good contrast in those shadow areas if you are too stingy with the light when exposing. Hope I paraphrased that accurately. It's a very interesting book and I'd recommend it.

Well, I didn't answer your question completely and I did get a little wordy. But it's my best attempt at helping. Hope you get more info from some more knowledgable people here. You might also find that the APUG.ORG forums could help, or LFPhoto.Info .

Mac

Here is a link to a site that may have some good info for you.

http://pacificnw.naturephotographers.net/

Check out the forum.

I live near Sisters. If you have any specific questions feel free to email me and I'll try to help you out.

Mac

Joe, I had the pleasure yesterday of trying (and eventually succeeding) to jam that exact step wedge into my fidelity holder with a sheet of HP 5 already inserted. Those holders are still only a year old and fit pretty tight. I got it down finally and managed not to destroy the step wedge.

Took about an hour yesterday morning exposing at zone X on five sheets. Decided that I needed a sixth sheet of film in the mix, this one unexposed, to aid in finding my contact printing time. Of course a few minutes after I added it to the bag of exposed film I realised that I had no idea which was the unexposed sheet and which were the identically exposed step wedge sheets. Makes it kinda hard to stagger development. I briefly considered developing one at a time for a minute or two to find the blank sheet, hopefully saving a few shots. Instead, I swore and scared the cat, threw the sheets down in the bathroom (toilet cover up, so a couple had to be fished out of there later). And started over.

I got four sheets exposed (wanted five) and figured out a way to stagger development in my brand new combi tank. Without throwing off the normal aggitation method, or adding in any pouring time errors, etc. I had been using trays and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't control aggitation. Just shuffled too fast in the dark. Very contrasty negs from that. Well, the Combi tank worked great for me, and I've got four HP5 step wedges developed for five, eight, 11, and 14 minutes. Not gonna find N+2 with that, but I rarely want it, and besides, I'll probably fine tune later.

It was a frustrating day, but also time well spent. I tested HP5 before, but not using the Combi. And I forgot where I put the notes.

Omiya, don't let it scare you off testing. You would have to try very hard to screw this up as badly as I have. And even I got valuable info in the end.

Joe, thank you so much for taking the time to explain that. Sounds very familiar now that I think about it. I remember testing for threshold at just above pure black, or zone I as you said, not zone III. I got confused because I expose for zone III frequently. Hopefully I didn't confuse anyone with that mistake.

Omiya, hope I didn't divert your thread from your main focus. Seems that Joe has done a great job explaining how it all works.

One day I plan to do proper zone system testing with a densitometer. Since it's always a trade off between shooting more and learning in the field and testing time, I frequently don't get as far as I'd like with testing.

I will say, however, that I definitely benefitted from doing my own (rather casual) testing. Finding film speeds that saved shadows was a breeze. And the shifts apparent to the naked eye help a great deal in understanding development times. Since my first testing I've almost never been stuck with a negative that was so badly exposed I couldn't work it out in the darkroom. Protecting that shadow detail and not developing for waaaay too long has improved my exposures a great deal. Which lets me worry about my real issues...finding stuff I want to photograph and figuring out how I want it to be represented. I'd say even simple film speed testing and playing with development times in a controlled environment is well worth the trouble.

I'm sure you are aware of the nude content on the site. Not a thing wrong with it in my opinion. But I'd consider the issue before directing students under the age of 18 to the site. May be fine where you live, but I can think of places where it might land you in a heap of trouble.

It is an excellent place to learn. The photo of the week discussions in particular could be a great tool.

Mac

I have had a very bad experience with Acer customer service. A $2000 laptop stopped working after the power cable connector broke off the motherboard. This happened under normal use with no drops, tugs, etc. We were told by the local repair shop that this was a problem with this model. However, Acer refused to replace it without our paying $500 for a new motherboard. Insisted it was abuse. We went back and forth and finally decided not to have it repaired. Many months later we got a phone call saying they had decided to fix these for free after all. Can't tell you how irritating their customer service department was. Might have been the complaint we filed with the BBB and the California AG. Or maybe they just finally recognized their mistake.

This is the same company that was involved with a class action lawsuit a few years early for putting used parts in "new" computers. I think that was the charge.

One bad experience obviously doesn't mean they are a bad company. But I'd do some serious research before sinking a lot of money in.

mac

Joe, question for you. Does that 1/3 stop adjustment aim to keep middle values like zone V where they belong, or does zone III actually move that much? Since I don't have a densitometer and my test conditions aren't as constant as I'd like, I'm not sure I'd see a 1/3 stop move in the shadows with visual testing.

Like I said in the post above, I don't know a whole lot about this stuff myself.

Mac

I'm not all that experienced myself with this stuff, but I have done some testing using visual guidelines as opposed to the more technical and accurate densitometer testing.

There is one concept that is important to understand and it may help you understand question number one.

The basic idea is that your shadow areas finish developing within a few minutes and that areas of the film that got lots of exposure continue to develop and get denser on the negative the longer you leave them in the developer.

Your film speed you select determines where you will have detail in the darkest areas of the scene. Zone III represents this threshold. No amount of developing can add detail here if you don't expose the film enough.

As you adjust your development times, that zone III stays almost constant. Progressively up the scale you get more and more development over time.

So in theory, the EI stays the same. However, small adjustments may be needed since there is some slight additional development over time in the shadow areas. And if you are looking to maintain zone V (middle grey) you will definitely need to adjust EI.

But if you expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights as they say, your shadows should stay pretty constant over a wide range of development times, and require very little if any adjustment to EI.

I'd suggest buying a step wedge and shooting say five sheets exposed to zone X with the wedge sandwiched above the film in the holder. Develop for a wide range of times, say 5,7,10,14,20 minutes. Contact print those wedges and see the change in various zones for yourself. It helped me understand a lot better how a scene might look with various development times at a constant EI.

Mac

I was in the same position recently but with large format. Here is a thread with a few answers that might help you out.

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Az02

I would think that with 6x6 and some careful notes you could bracket and find the best approach with just a little bit of testing.

Good luck.

Mac