paul_scott1

OK. Thanks for the advice. Maybe the packet was a bit large. But thanks anyway.

Kelly: maybe you have to live with it for a while to appreciate the improvements. I've rescanned negs with the 48xx that I originally scanned with the 2450 and the difference is amazing. Not all negs, but some. The colour interpretation is much better, the physical frames for holding the negs are much better amd the software controls are an immense improvement. As a previous contributor has pointed out though, you need to get off 'automatic' and explore the possibilities of professional mode for a while.

The Epson 4870 is a big improvement on the 2450, and the scanning software supplied gives you great control over how you process the image. A bit like having your own darkroom where you can adjust everything to suit a particular image. How can you do this if you send your images away for scanning? No two images can be processed exactly the same to get the best result for each. How can a bureau decide what is best for you? Technical specs are one thing, aesthetic control is another. It's also very cheap, has Digital Ice and lets you waste hours on photo.net waiting for it to finish.

Mechanically very sound in my experience (2 years of use).

Jaques: you had the balls to make a guess, that's more important than being right. You'll still have your balls tomorrow. 8^)

Yes, you are right, Eliot. Some of the light spills off the side because the ceiling was very low and I could not raise the light high enough vis a vis the model's face. Also I note that there is a cutout in the reflector, presumably for heat dissipation, which I did not pay attention to see whether it was correctly positioned (ie pointing away).

 

I don't really know how to describe the reflector other than to say that it is cup shaped, and that the bulbs are enclosed in a frosted glass dome, a bit like an upside down jam jar, with holes.

 

Thanks again to everybody who posted. You have to be a bit brave to make an educated guess. I just wonder where all the photo.net experts went?

Thanks again for the responses. It was lit by 1000w tungsten halogen bounced off the ceiling to the left and a window to the right, then corrected in photoshop for the colour cast. I was thinking of going out and buying daylight balanced lights instead, but I don't think I'll bother now.

Thanks very much for the responses. No filters were used.

I'm interested to know what sort of lighting you think was used in

the photo which I hope I will be able to post as part of this

question. It would also be instructive to have any comments about the

quality of the lighting. Thanks for your time and opinion.

Thanks for the link, RJ. The thread was right on. There seems to be a concensus that if you don't do dark room work, there is little point in using b&w film.

Thanks for the informative answers everybody. As a follow on question, could somebody point me to the work of a photographer whose black and white work makes the case for using black and white film, either on photo.net or elsewhere?

Does anybody have any opinions about the relative merits of using

black and white film against doing a grayscale conversion by

software? Or can anyone point me to a good discussion on the above

subject? Thanks.

Ah, insiders and outsiders. Interesting categories : 'people outside the art industry' : who are they? People are very close to their cultural artefacts and any person engaged in painting, drawing, photography is 'inside the art industry'. On what basis do you include or exclude a person? Do you include or exclude the four year old child who paints, or the monkey whose animal daubs are considered fine examples of modern art by blind critics?

 

Another ism for Thomas' boat : elitism. Blend it with obscuritanism and pedanticism and you've probably got postmodernism.

There are so many great images in this thread : Lex Perpendicular in his waders, Thomas pushing out his boat with two isms, Thomas floating lazily down the Mississipi (I think you have a thing about boats, Thomas), not to mention John in his post communist lecture theatre with his spotty friend.

 

But to state the case again for anybody who missed it: postmodernist theory about art is an over intellectualised response to the subject which does nothing constructive apart from serving to inflate the ego of the person doing it. We hope that the next thing is different and more concerned with the spirit of play, adventure, fascination, exploration, desire, hope, despair, expression etc which are the root things which give rise to the artistic response. In playing (or wading in s**t as some notable once wisely called it) we are trying to give expression to this idea and avoid falling into the trap of talking interminably about isms and vacuous abstractions with little artistic value.

An image of that would be nice too.

 

Maybe don't look for the answers in postmodernist terms and the answers are there.

Blend the isms and get the boat moving. I like your imagery. Will you post a photo of that? It would have to be a pictopostmodernist photograph, of course.

Well, I think we are concerned about that question, Thomas. We would just like what follows not to be another ism about which philosophers might spout with ever increasing vacuity. Apart from anything else, it's a perversion of philosophy - philo lover sophos wisdom - it all comes across much more like the work of a lover of perverting the normal course of language in the interests of sounding clever. Jeremiah at the top made a very good point by posting a lot of gibberish and then claiming he had meant the opposite of what he originally said. Nobody really thought that was odd in a thread about postmodernism.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying even then. Why can't you use simple everyday terms such as 'extrapolation of synthesis and complexity' like everyone else?

In which case, I think that what you suggest would be an improvement.

What's a tagger?

When you think of the way that the Greeks depicted the male nude in their best statues, you realise how simply aesthetically beautiful a male body can be, as a piece of divine machinery if you like. It does seem a pity that this gets lost in societal prejudices about sexuality, and that when some viewers rate a nude, they do so more from the point of view of whether they are turned on (or off) sexually by the image than its overall aesthetic value.

 

Male nudes are vastly under represented on this site, as far as I can see.

 

But if there are obviously strong societal prejudices with regard to which body is being depicted (male or female), there are probably even stronger ones about the type of body depicted (old or young, fat or thin), and the equation of aesthetics with prettiness is a dogma as deep rooted as the prejudice against homosexuality. It is also far less often questioned.

Jeremy - it sure sounds like you are living in a Becket anti-novel. Art is a healthy response to the environment: investigative, interesting, novel, confused, curious, joyous, emotional and at grass roots, it's still functioning very well. But it's important not to believe anything that anybody writes about it. It's nearly always wrong, and designed to pump up the person writing it (including this). Categories in art are really mainly devices for increasing prices. So again, it's important not to take them seriously, but see them for what they are. You use words very inventively though, if a little fast and loose.

Is that what's been happening in the world since 1917? I'm sure glad that I wasn't a part of it.

Have you tried old velvet curtains? Some are very large. People chuck them out and the older they are the better they look.

I agree with Martin. Just shoot if you are in a public place. Ask someone for a photo and the photo disappears. You get a different sort of photo, but not a street photo, it's a posed photo. So if you want to do street photography, there's no choice really.

 

Your example of people on their porch is slightly different though, because you are going into private property and you probably have to be a little more careful. What would you think if someone came pointing a camera into your front room? You're half way between, in the grey area. So mind the gap.