benoit_deshaies

What aperture are you shooting at? Maybe try closing down a stop or two.

 

I would also make sure to use a high shutter speed. My D70 defaults to 1/60s when using flash in A or S mode. You can go up to 1/500s when in M.

Joseph, if I understand you correctly, my "distance to subject" should not be measured from the sensor plane, but from one of these nodes. But say you always measure from the center of the lens and that the camera-to-subject distance is rather large (> 2m), then wouldn't my method provide a reasonable estimate of the effective focal length?

 

When you say "20mm error in any attempt to measure focal length", I assume you mean a 20mm error in the distance, not in the computed focal length. 20mm at 2 meters is 1% error.

<p>Distance to subject was measured from the sensor plane: probably not correct. But here's what I got.</p>

 

<p>Subject Width = 710mm (CD Shelf)<br>

Sensor Width = 24mm<br>

18-70: distance = 2050mm (f=69.30mm)<br>

70-210: distance = 2540mm (f=<strong style="font-size: 1.2em">85.86mm</strong>) !!</p>

 

<p>If I measure the 70-210 from the front of the lens to subject, it's still f=77.75mm. That's an error of minimum 11%. But I'm not complaining: the longer the telephoto, the better.</p>

 

<p>This experiment was conducted at 2 meters, or about 6-7ft. Curious, I manually focused the 70-210 to infinity. Ah ha! Now distance drops to 2210 (f=74.70).</p>

 

<p>So, the huge difference in the TV pictures was caused by two things: 1) rather relaxed focal length measurement from Nikon and 2) the lens becoming "longer" at the beginning of its range.</p>

Cound anyone point me to the math to compute the focal length? I tried to remember high-school physics and after drawing a few triangles, I came up with the following:

 

focal length = (distance to subject / width of subject) * image width

 

Subject is what I'm photographing and image width is DX sensor width (24mm)

 

Is this correct?

Hi Chantal. First of all, I think you would get better answers if you asked in one of the B&W forums. But let me give you my thoughts. Color filters all decrease the amount of light available to the film. Because of this, I shoot without filter most of the time. For the photography you do (street/portraits), I don't think you need filters.

 

But if you insist on using them, you could try a green filter for portraits; it smoothes out skin at the cost of 2.5 stops in light. If your photo includes sky with clouds, try a red filter (3 stops) to get a "wow"-looking sky with a lot of contrast.

 

You can see a few samples here: http://www.tiffen.com/black_&_white.htm

 

Benoit, from across the river in Gatineau.

I was playing around with my lenses and I discovered that I was

getting different images with two zooms set to the same focal length.

I'm wondering why. In the attached image, the top is from the Nikon

70-210 at 70mm and the bottom is from the Nikon 18-70 also at 70mm.

The images were taken with a D70 about 6ft from the TV. The EXIF data

confirms these facts.

 

Can anybody tell me why the difference is that significant? Could the

close focus be responsible? The 70-210 focuses down to 5ft before

entering it's "macro" range. Should I retry with a subject at "infinity"?

 

P.S. I'm sorry to subject you to such boring and low quality images :)<div></div>

To upload a curve to your D70, follow the steps outlined in <a href="http://members.aol.com/bhaber/D70/curves.html">this tutorial</a>

. It will also teach you how to enable the curve once it's on the camera.

Black's photo used to sell processing-included 36exp. Sensia for around $10 about a year ago. It's now 10 rolls for $120+tx.

<p>It's also the <a href="http://www.sugaronline.com/iso/">International Sugar Organization</a></p>

<p>In the "Green Camera" menu, the first item is "Optimize image". In there, pick "Custom" and under "Tone comp.", pick "Custom". That'll use your custom tone curve when shooting JPEG, assuming you loaded the curve properly.</p>

 

<p>Try <a href="http://members.aol.com/bhaber/D70/curves.html">this custom curve installation tutorial</a>. It explains it better than me.</p>

<p>From the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory">Wikipedia article on Flash memory</a>:</p>

 

<blockquote><em>All types of flash memory and EEPROM wear out after a certain number of erase operations, due to wear on the insulating oxide layer around the charge storage mechanism used to store data.</em></blockquote>

<p><em>None of the Nikkors (pre digital or current) have any claims on if they suitable for digital or not.</em></p>

 

<p>What about DX lenses, such as the 18-70mm ? Nikon claims, and I quote: "DX Nikkor lenses offer better performance for D-series users[...]"</p>

I bought a 4-5.6 (non-D) not long ago for use with my D70. Overall I'm pleased with it. All aspects of build quality are excellent (metal, no "zoom creep"). It focuses from "macro" to infinity in about a second, which is plenty fast for me. It's a sharp lens.

 

There's only one aspect I'm not happy with: the appearance of out-of-focus points of light between f8 and f16. Mind you, it doesn't occur often and now that I know, I'll shoot wide open when I see some in the frame.

 

The image attached was shot through 2 panes of glass in a museum, which is why you see a copy above and below. But it gives an example of the bad shape of the OOF.<div></div>

I own two manual-focus Vivitar lens: a 28/2.8 and a 75-300/4-5.6.

 

The 75-300 takes nice pictures (!), but the handling is terrible. The push-pull zoom is way too loose and focusing near infinity is very difficult: there's only ~ 10 degree turn between 20ft and infinity. By comparison, my 135mm has ~ 45. So at 300mm, you either have to be very patient or very lucky to get he right thing in focus. The end result is that you miss a lot of shots or end up with a lot of blurry shots. But shooting newspaper in your backyard, you have all the time you need...

 

So to me, handling is the main difference between Nikon and Vivitar, not image quality. And yes, it's worth the buck.

 

(The image attached is a 1/4-frame corner taken with the Vivitar at 300mm on Fuji Superia 200. As you can see, she is married.)<div></div>

<div></div>

<div></div>

I don't have an SB800 but I assume the camera works the same whether you use it or the built-in flash. I usually set the camera to "M" mode, adjust shutter speed to 250-500 and play with aperture to get the right amount of ambient light/depth of field. Note that using a small aperture will require more power from the flash and with the built-in flash you'll soon run out of power.

Dan, I'm sorry to hear that you shot those rolls at a wedding. However, before calling them trash and burning them, I think there are a few things you ought to try. For example, bring the negs to a lab with a Fuji Frontier and have them print a few pictures. The Frontier is very good at removing grain. I'm guessing that the pictures printed that way will be totally acceptable.

 

Try using NeatImage to remove the grain. You could download a free demo off of their website last time I checked. It can do great things with a little effort.

 

And finally, though this won't help, here's a piece of advice from my Nikon manual:

 

"Before taking pictures on important occasions (for example, at weddings or before taking the camera with you on a trip), take test shots."

I'm going to mirror the other comments here. It seems to me that the shadows were underexposed. Look at the baby's face: no grain. I myself expose XP2 at 200iso and I think it's a joy to scan on my Minolta Scan Dual IV. Very little grain.

 

Try rating the film at 200iso. Try a noise-removal software such as NeatImage. Or try with a scanner with Digital ICE noise removal.<div></div>

Dynamic range/exposure latitude. I feel the exposure latitude of DSLR is about the same as slides. In high-contrast scenes, it's hard to keep detail in both highlights and shadows. I wish DSLR had the same range as print film. I think Fuji is working on the problem, but I'm not sure how successful they have been so far.

And here's the crop<div></div>

I've owned a SD IV for several months now and I'm very pleased with it. In the beginning, I scanned a lot of Fuji negative film and the amount of grain and noise was a bit of an annoyance. However, with a little work, I was able to get 8x10" prints I'm happy with. Scanning my first slide was a revelation. This scanner does much better with slide film. Images have virtually no noise/grain and the resolution is amazing. Very good for such a "cheap" scanner.

 

The sample included is a scan of Fuji Sensia 100, scanned at 1600 dpi (the scanner supports up to 3200). I applied a USM in Photoshop, that's it.<div></div>

Thank you for the replies and images. You have confirmed my choice: I now want a 35RC. It has the perfect size for what I do and will have a true focus system, which is my main irritation with the Trip 35.

Hi, I recently bought an Olympus Trip 35 on ebay ($5). It's a cute

little camera, but I find that the out-of-focus areas look very harsh.

I suspect that's due in part to the 2-blade aperture control in the

shape of a diamond. Combined with the crude focus system (only 4

steps: 1m, 1.5m, 3m, infinity), a lot of pictures look very harsh/hard.

 

I'm considering getting a 35 RC to replace it. I believe it's the

exact same size, but in a rangefinder version instead. Having better

focus should get rid of the harshness in the subject, but I'm

wondering what kind of bokeh I should expect? Thanks.

Memory cards are slow. The best cards out there can theoretically write at 9mb/sec. A RAW file from a D70 is around 5.5mb, while the JPG are between 2 and 3mb. I would expect that shooting RAW files would be nearly twice as slow.

 

But what about the time it takes to do interpolation and JPG compression? Well, processors are very fast. Custom DSP and processors process bits at incredible rates. On a good camera, the processing time should be negligible compared to the time it takes to write the information out.