craig_shearman1

<p>I'm not a lawyer. But from other conversations on this topic over the year, in some jurisdictions a "deposit" can't legally be non-refundable. As WW says, it depends on where you are located.<br /><br />In this context, the deposit should really be called a "reservation fee." I think if you call it that and describe it the way you have in your contract (minus the word deposit) you are in a better position of being clear that this is a fee to reserve the date. In that case, the fee is for the service of reserving the date, and once you've agreed to not book other work that date (whether you get any or not) the service has been performed. As opposed to being a deposit on a service (shooting the pictures) that was never performed.<br /><br />In this case, I would not refund the money. I would point out to her that the contract clearly describes this as a fee for reserving the date, not as a deposit on the photography itself. Your easy out, if she has given you the date she wants to change to, it to tell her you are not available that day.</p>

<p>"Part two is the infrastructure. I can rent almost any piece of Canon (or Nikon) gear on a few minutes notice"<br /><br />Jeff pretty much nailed it with his discussion of infrastructure and other reasons.<br /><br />I've been a newspaper photographer, then a reporter/editor and then done PR, so I've either been a photographer or worked side by side with photographers for 40 years. In that time, at least in the news business, I have never, ever seen a news photographer shooting with anything other than Nikon, Canon or Leica. Up through maybe the 80s I rarely saw Canon. And I haven't seen anyone shoot with Leica since the world went digital.<br /><br />Jeff mentioned equipment rental and quick service from Nikon and Canon. Back in the day, newspapers also provided pool equipment for more exotic gear, and it has always been Nikon or Canon. Since most photographers shoot Nikon or Canon, it's easy to borrow gear from colleagues if you stick to those two brands. Also, anybody who's shot for any length of time has a considerable investment in lenses and accessories and that commits you to what you've got pretty much no matter what else comes along. <br /><br />I agree that Sony made a mistake in dropping the Minolta name. But Minolta, Pentax, Olympus, etc., have always been also-rans at best. They simply aren't players in the professional world, and therefore can't provide the range of products, service, etc., that you need when shooting for a living. Do they have some products that might be better? Maybe, but it doesn't matter.<br /><br />I used to have a Nikon-Canon website. The way I explained it was that baseball has the American League and the National League, politics has Democrats and Republicans, computers have PC and Mac. And photography (at least for SLR/DSLR) has Nikon and Canon. It's a fact of life.</p>

<p >"I am looking at using the RB on selected days only. Maybe head to my room and take out for a few hours only."<br /><br />Keep in mind that it's still a big thing to lug along. And if you're also taking your DSLR, you're carrying two sets of gear rather than one. <br /><br />Personally, I take whatever gear I need when I'm going out to shoot a job, including when traveling. But for family vacations these days I take a Canon Powershot G15, and sometimes even just my iPhone.<br /><br />It doesn't sound like you have the RB yet, so remember one of the fundamental rules of photograhy -- never go on a trip with a camera you're not familiar with. <br /></p>

<p>How bad are your negatives? Higher end scanning services can clean your negatives, but that generally means blowing off dust and maybe removing smudges. Re-washing negatives after they are developed is not a routine practice and something that should only be done in special circumstances, such as if they were not adequately fixed during processing.</p>

I backup to as many external hard drives as needed AND burn DVDs. No need to compress since memory is cheap these days.

How many shots were on the negatives? And why would the lab be sending you a picture of the negatives? Negs come back from the lab along with your prints or scans. If not you're using the wrong lab.

<p>A spot meter is basically a light meter with a telephoto lens built in so you can meter small portions of a scene from a distance. You can accomplish the same thing with an SLR/DSLR by putting on a telephoto or zoom lens, metering the areas you want, and then returning to a normal or wide lens to shoot. Slow, of course, but spot metering is slow -- you are taking multiple readings, then deciding how to set the exposure based on what areas are most important or deciding where to place each area on the Zone System scale. Spot metering works easily with landscapes that aren't going anywhere but is probably too slow for most street photography.<br /><br /></p>

Five years is no big deal. Develop normally.

No. Retouching is a lab service you pay for same as having a photo printed.

Trying to use these lenses on canon with adapters will be an exercise in frustration. If you want to use them buy a cheap Pentax body or Minolta.

Ektapro is just the professional model of the standard 35mm Kodak Carousel. I have two of them.

Standard cardboard or plastic slide mounts will work just fine. The Airequipt stuff is a completely different system and 50 years old. Was non standard even when slides were popular. Throw it out.

Red filter will subdue freckles. Rest is exposure and lighting. Pale complexion is not a problem.

As for empty boxes ask on the large format forum here and somebody will probably give you some for the cost of shipping.

<p>Unless maybe it's a commercial client that specifically asks for something else (most likely tif) the only thing that should ever go to a client is a jpg. You can work on the files in whatever file type you want but jpg is the standard for delivery to a client whether it's a portrait for an individual or a news photo for a publication. <br /><br />As others have said, there is no such thing as the file size being too big. Any lab can downsize a large file as needed.<br /><br />For the canvas print in question, what the lab was probably saying was not that the file size was too big. Rather, they were probably saying that there were heads so close to edges of the image that they would wrap around the sides on a wrapped canvas print. If the image already exists, adding borders would fix this, but the lab should have been able to have done that. You can do it yourself, but unless you know very precisely how much image gets lost in the wrap, you could end up with the borders showing on the front. In a wrapped canvas print, the image is supposed to extend around the sides. That's part of the look. You have to allow "bleed" as it's called in the printing business, when a photo is going to run "full bleed" on the page meaning it goes all the way to the edges. There has to be a bit extra since alignment is seldom perfect.<br /><br />The real answer is that you shouldn't shoot so tight that people will end up cropped out of the ends of pictures. Keep in mind that the standard proportions of a DSLR are 1:1.5, which works out easily to 4x6 or 8x12 prints but has to be cropped for 8x10, 11x14 etc even if it's a normal print rather than canvas. You are actually better to shoot a little loose to give some flexibility, then crop in tighter when making the print. Yes, this runs counter to the old advice to compose in the camera and fill the frame. That's nice camera club theory but not necessarilywhat works in the real world whether it's clients wanting to make different size prints or a publication that need to crop a picture to fit a space in a layout.</p>

Did they give you a Nikon heart valve? That might impair your ability to use Canon gear. :)

Did they give you a Nikon heart valve? That might impair your ability to use Canon gear. :)

<p>I agree on not storing your film in rolls for all the reasons others have stated. The standard is to cut into six frame strips and put them into PrintFile archival plastic pages. Non-commerical scanners generally need cut strips anyhow.<br /><br />There are no good scanners in the price range you specify. You can scan film on flatbed scanners with a film adaptor but expect to pay probably $300 or more new. And even then the quality is not the same as an actual film scanner. For a 5x7 it's OK, But if you've gone as far as learning to develop film at home, you would be much better off to take the next step and make tradtional darkroom prints. Enlargers are being just about given away these days, and the process is very simple. You can do a temporary darkroom setup in just about any bathroom.</p>

<p>"is it worth saving several months to get a 7200 or just get a 7100?"<br /><br />What if the 7300 comes out while you're waiting? :)<br /><br />If money wasn't a consideration I would say buy the 7200. But it sounds like the consensus is that there are minimal differences between 7200 and 7100, and the 7100 is going to be light years ahead of your D90. I'm still shootnig paying jobs with a D200 and D7000 and have no immediate urge to buy another body. Just because you camera isn't the very latest doesn't mean you can't make good pictures with it.</p>

<p>IMHO and for the way I do things, worrying about nitrogen or splitting chemicals up into small bottles to try to make them last isn't worth the effort. A gallon of developer and a gallon of fixer (depending on the brands and types you use) are less than $10 each and will develop 16 rolls of 35mm even undiluted in a standard stainless steel tank and reel. That works out to $1.25 a roll. That's about as cheap as film developing gets. Given how little film I shoot and develop in these digital ages, I'm more interested in using up the chemicals before they go bad than trying to stretch them out.<br /><br />If you try to stretch the chemicals, by the time you consider the cost of nitrogen, extra bottles -- and to say nothing of your time - have you really saved anything? And there's the risk that if chemicals have gone bad because you didn't get it right that you ruin a role of valuable images. <br /><br />The one thing I do that I think is both helpful and simple is that I use tanks with floating lids. These are two-gallon darkroom tanks about a foot in diameter and a foot and a half high with a built in spigot at the bottom. They sit on a shelf over my darkroom sink. The are big enough that they are convenient to mix the chemicals right in them. The floating lid inside ensures that there is no surface exposure to air, so oxygenization is minimal. I find B&W chemicals can last six months like this with no problem. These might cost $15-20 new but I got mine used for maybe $5 each. They last forever and are well worth the investment.</p>

Loved those instructions. Have them on my darkroom wall also. Agee that internet has made them obsolete but they would still be convenient especially for beginners. One of those sheets covers a whole week of how do I expose/how do I develop questions here on photo.net.

<p>In a day when film photography is struggling to stay alive, I would regard Lomography-brand film as a no-name crapshoot that diverts badly needed sales away from Kodak and Fuji. IMHO, if you want to shoot film, stick with the established name brands that are pretty much guaranteed to give good results. Lomography has built its oddball reputation around bad results that somehow look "cool" to some people in a way that contradicts most of the tradtional standards of good photography.</p>

<p>"I'd say this camera is an American design produced by N & S under licence, possibly as part of a government contract, during World War II. It looks very much like the kind of camera issued to military newsreel photographers."<br /><br />I'm in the U.S. and this doesn't look like any movie camera I've ever seen here. The standard U.S. combat camera for movies in WWII was the 35mm Bell and Howell Eyemo, with the 16mm B&H Filmo also used sometimes. This doesn't look anything like either one of them. Those had rounded tops and bottoms, while this is very boxy. They also usually had a three lens turret and were not reflex. This is a spinning-mirror reflex camera as can be seen by the part that comes out at a 45-degree angle to enclose the mirror-shutter.</p>

<p>If this was something you wanted to do because you like the look that this paper gives, I might say go for it. But I don't think it's going to save you any time and it's definitely not "more forgiving than film."<br /><br />To start, it sounds like you haven't used this before. That means you're going to need to experiment a little and see how it works. There's a learning curve to everything. I'm a little dubious of the claim of a photographic paper having an ISO of 120 but I've never tried this. Putting paper into the camera rather than film is definitely not standard practice.<br /><br />Reversal/direct positive systems generally have less exposure/developing tolerance than negative systems, not more. That's why it's necessary to expose slide film right on the money whereas you can be a couple of stops off with negative film and still get usable results when you print it.<br /><br />With a direct positive system, the sheet of paper you expose in the camera is the finished product. If it comes out overexposed or underexposed, you don't have the ability to make a second or third print off the negative to correct it. Worse yet, you don't know that it's wrong until you develop it. By that time your portrait session is over with and if anything is wrong you have to reshoot. Granted, you don't know if film has "come out" until you develop it, but since your'e making prints from film you can be off by a bit and still have something usable.<br /><br />Why the concern about "looking to churn out portraits and amass a nice quantity of images"? I would thing a few high quality portraits would be more important than a large quantity.<br /><br />If this is for a digital portfolio and you're concerned about time and convenience, why not just shoot digital in the first place? Portraits are generally more about lighting, posing, expression, etc. than what camera you used.<br /><br />As far as chemical quantities etc, if you're working in large format that's just part of the price of admission. If you want to scrimp, don't shoot large format.<br /><br /></p>

You should be fine develop normally.