jmf

I have the 85 1.8, the 50 1.8 and the 17-40. I don't think the 50 is even listed as a USM, and it's audible, the other two are just barely. They seem to make a little noise when they hit the focus point (braking of some kind?)

 

I guess I wouldn't get too wrapped up about it unless it seems to be getting louder (impending failure mode). It's not like the 20D is all that stealthy to begin with.

There was a lab here in my town that had a very interesting policy. If you gave them a wedding shoot, they would only process a few rolls at a time. The explanation was that if they had a lab failure, it wouldn't take out the entire wedding.

 

Given the potential for "silent" flash card corruption, I'd also suggest more smaller vs fewer larger. I also have a "data tank" I carry which reads the cards onto a 2.5" laptop harddrive.

Just sensor dust. You may be able to blow it off but don't use canned air. You could send it off to canon to be cleaned or go to http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com/ for instructions. Dust tends to show up more at smaller apertures.

Actually, back in the day, many commericial photogs had retouching artists that worked for them. Even after you cleaned up a neg, there would always be print spotting to do. They actually sold ink and pencil sets specificly for that work.

 

I've done some, and I have to say it was the most tedious, time consuming, boring thing you can imagine.

 

Obviously there are various degrees of image manipulation. dodge+burn, levels+curves+gamma, sharpening, cropping and white balance, are all things I would consider "normal" image processing. From there, "cut and paste" or "healing brush" or clone tool, is a bit more invasive, but it depends. Ansel Adams was known to retouch out man-made objects in his landscape photos. Does that make them "bad"? Man Ray manipulated many of his images (really photo montages) from the 20's onward.

 

Only the dilettanti and idelogical purists care how you created the image, everyone else just judges it's content.

After looking at your plan, I'd say walkout basement? If I'm right, I'd guess 8 ft ceilings, certainly no more than 10'. Thats going to come back to haunt you for standing shots. Most studios I've seen tend to be deeper than wide, but since you're nearly square anyways, you don't gain that much. You probably want to be able to put around 6ft between the subject and background, plus whatever distance you need to be from your subjects.

 

Here's the deal: Lets say you have a 6' subject and you want to add a hair light via a small softbox or striplight. There's another 24" or so plus you need to get the light out of the frame, so there's another 2ft or so. On a good day, thats 10 ft. and you may need more.

 

You also need to paint a neutral color

Haven't quite made the jump from film, have we? ;'{)}. You do that by taking your multiple images and pulling them into a image processing program like photoshop/paint pro/gimp, and then stacking them as layers (at least thats one way)

well, I'm not shocked by the replacement price. Thats in line with the part costs Norman quoted me for some of the caps in a p800. For whatever reasons, Norman and Speedotron tend to have a worse rep for blowing up caps. They also tend to be used in high volume, day in day out situations, so it could just be they're used "to death"

 

BTW, there's NO water in these caps. If there were, they'd be sensitive to orientation (must be upright to function), and of course there would be a puddle of wet electrolyte (mixture of water, salts and glycol).

 

Your caps use a "dry" electrolyte which may be actually more goo like that is embeded in the paper layer that is between the anode and cathode foils.

 

If you think your experience was exciting, I worked at a company that made cardiac defib units back in the 70's. The caps were about 3"x4"x8" and were running about a 3kv potential. Every now and then one would come from the factory with an internal short. Those first few hours of burn in could be pretty fun. A bang like a snub nose .357 and greasy foil and paper confetti everywhere.

 

I probably don't want to know the odds of PCB's being in those things. They were common in big caps and transformers of the time.

well the Minolta III F, IV F and V F, can be had for short money on fleabay.

Depends on how "used" it was to begin with, or for that matter, what closet it sat in and for how long. Thats the brown line model which is their more "value" line. I tend to see those used coming from the school shooters (so my expectation is very high mileage). I assume you got the umbrella heads?

 

BTW, nobody's going to be able to tell you (accurately) if you got a lemon by posting in a forum. Send it to Speedotron or Flashclinic (in NYC), have them open it up and tell you what the state of the caps and charging ciruit are. It could be some internal voltage is out of spec or a charging circuit gone bad or just plain cooked caps.

 

What sort of warranty did the seller give?

Have you been to http://www.sekonic.com/IncidentVsReflect.html? Usually you set your iso, your shutter speed (somewhere between 1/60 and 1/250 for example), either plug the flash cord into the meter or set it to cordless mode, trip the flash, and the meter yields the aperture. Usually your start with the main or key light, and then dial in the others.

 

Thats the easy part. The hard part is getting the light and shadow to fall as you want. When you first enter the forum, go to the right and hit the "administration" link. There are a number of archived articles you can read on lighting.

a 6x7 what?

Just as a last check, do you have a voltmeter and could you check the batteries to make sure you're getting over 7 volts dc on a fully charged one?

 

If you are, that pretty well ties it up, and it's time to send it for service.

And just for completeness, the flash readers show up as SCSI class disks under linux and *bsd. You mount them under linux as "-t vfat" and "-t msdos" on bsd.

At the risk of triggering a cliche, "How cold WAS it?" Does the battery drain that fast at room temp? What lens were you using? My experience is that other than running the LCD for extended periods, the 20D seems pretty frugal with power use.

Might of been Rob's site, but I saw a test that showed that the 20D could only write between 5-6 mb/sec, and thus anything above a 40'x card really didn't make any difference in write times. That being said, the UltraII's and any of the 80x cards will let not slow down your camera. Check out Newegg and the Ridata cards. 80x, lifetime warranty, about $54

Here's the telling question. Did you use a much smaller f/stop when you used the studio flash? It's common for sensor dust to not be very visible till you have the aperture cranked down bringing the dust into focus. Given that they don't move between images, I'm about 95% sure it's dust on the sensor (ok, not actually ON the sensor, but on the filter in front of the sensor).

 

I tried to read the EXIF data out of the jpeg, but Adobe got there first and wiped out anything useful.

Let me qualify a few things written here.

 

Old houses tend to have fewer branches, so while it is true that the rather brief spike (and depending on the flash, it can be much more than a few milliseconds) shouldn't be a problem, it's very unlikely that the flash is the only thing on the branch. Even the extra load of a 250w modeling light (about the same as 4 table lamps) can be a problem when you have 3 or 4 of them lit at the same time.

 

A circuit rated 15 amps is actually rated for 12 amp continous. This comes up periodicly in the forum. Most older breakers are thermal and are supposed to protect correctly rated and installed wiring in good condition. Breakers that are run near max for long periods actually become less "sensitive" and can end up allowing more current than they should.

 

Newer ones also trigger on things like arcs, GFI and current surges, but unless you're renovating, nobody replace breakers.

 

I'm on 100 amp service for the whole house with 20amp branches (for wall outlets). I had a 2000ws and a 2400ws pack plugged into seperate branches. When I fired (at about 1/4 pwr for both), the line voltage dropped enough to trigger my computer UPS for about 3/4 of a second. I was also using 3 heads with modeling lights (1 at 250w and 2 at about 200w). As long as I was not firing very often, I doubt I was heating anything up. Not sure what would of happened if I had been shooting fashion style.

 

My suggestion, (and I'm not trying to scare you) is that if you'll be using the strobes regularly, you have an electrician in to check the current breaker loads, identify branches, and maybe have a general look at the state of the wiring.

everyone knows it's 03:14:07, January 19, 2038

Leon, I haven't seen a wedding shot on film for at least 4 years. There maybe a few "boutique" shooters in the big markets, but not the working joe's and joan's. The move from formals to PJ style wedding coverage pretty much took film off life support (for wedding use). Why do you think all that medfmt gear flooded the secondary market about that time?

 

His problems will be due to inexperience, not digital vs film. In fact, one could easily argue that the fast feedback loop of being able to see your shots as soon as you take them probably outweighs any benefits of a wider exposure range.

Maybe a little. I've got it on the 20D, and now and then it seems to hunt a little in low light. The great value of the lens is that you get a pretty sharp prime for what amounts to pocket change. I'd assume the 1.4 USM would be better, but at nearly 4x the price. I'm not shooting sports, so it doesn't bug me.

The two G lock bars should be pulled back. The film back just sets on the rotating adapter and then you slide the g locks so that they lock it to the plate. There are interlocks activated by the dark slide that keep you from sliding the g locks back until the slide is in place. You can manually push them in to reset the slide.

 

If you're still having troubles, email me and I'll send you some pic's

Let me add that you could use one of the existing One_Touch units for off site storage. Remember, you're playing an odds game. All computer hardware fails, environments are destroyed by fire/flood/wind/vandal's. Your goal is just to make sure that the primary data store and the backup doesn't fail at the same time.

 

BTW, you may want to make sure you're encrypting backups of financial data, and never toss a drive w/o either destroying the drive or doing a serious overwrite. Formating don't do jack to the data.

>Jim, as for my new back-up, I bought 2 new Maxtor One-Touch II 500GB HDs. Ontrack loaded all the recovered files on one, and I then installed both on my computer with USB cables.

 

A little late now, but I would of recommended the One-touch III Turbo configured in RAID1 for your main storage (or a similiar setup). That gets you around a drive as a single point of failure. A second unit configured as RAID0 could hold your backups. I'll address backup strategy later. I also believe that FireWire400 is actually more efficient for bulk data transfers than USB2 @ 480. FW 800 may not actually be that much faster since drive R/W speed will limit any improvement there.

 

>Do you know if I should just backup or mirror to start using the software?

 

Mirroring is faster to restore, but doesn't let you grab that file you deleted 2 weeks ago. I prefer backup.

 

>In your opinion, what?s best, incremental backup or differential?

 

Depends on what s/w you're using. My home server is based on FreeBSD. I use "dump" which has the concept of dump levels. If used ceatively, you get a hybrid of incremental and differental. I do monthly full, weekly incremental, and a mix of daily dump levels (called "towers of Hanoi). My worst case restore is one monthly, 1 weekly, and 3 dailies.

 

There's also the concept of a differental mirror. This is really a database that maintains your base image, plus changes that can be pulled by the date they occured.

 

>I don?t think I can backup system files until I reduce the data files and create more space.

 

Seems to be the windows paradigm. It does mean that a bare metal restore includes rebuilding the OS and all your apps first, and then restoring data. Assuming you protect/archive your install kits...

 

>...Doesn?t that require that both drives be left on all the time, as well as the computer?

 

Yes. Things that kill drives (prematurely) are G force, heat, power cycling. Letting your drives spin (other than for the household power consumption) is the best. I have systems that have literally gone years between power cycles. Another possible mistake you may have made is that you bought the same model h/w from the same vendor at the same time. If they had a design issue, it'll affect both boxes and increase the odds of dueling h/w fails. They've all had these problems at one time or another.

 

Sorry for the long winded response

Bill, 16 bit support IS a major factor, not only in scanning negs, but in working from raw->tiff. When GIMP truncates that, you lose 50% of your image data (12->8). If you need to fix curves or gamma or even something as basic as contrast, it can mean the difference between a smooth histogram and no posterization to a histogram that looks like a cheap comb and an image with terriable gradation. You can fix a lot of that before GIMP gets to it in ufraw. cinepaint (film gimp) can handle 16 bit tiff, but not large files. It routinely core dumped on my medfmt scans, and only lets me have a few tweaks on a tiff from ufraw before it dies. In all fairness to them, movie frames are actually fairly small files, and that is their focus. My concern is that the GIMP devos seem to be waiting on a total arch. re-write before they'll touch 16 bit support. Certainly their perogitive, but I can't wait.

just a thought...A lot of new mother boards and low cost disk controllers support raid 1 (mirroring) on both SATA and PATA drives. Doesn't get you back a deleted file or a puked on filesystem, but does take you through a failed drive. Use those usb/firewire/NAS (network attached storage) drives for nightly backups. There are some pretty decent backup packages out there that will do both full and incrementals automatically. Periodicly burn cd/dvd's and store offsite (like anytime you upload/update a major project).

 

Contact an independent insurance outfit that specializes in writing small and medium sized business policies. You can get riders insuring your data, but you generally need to show that you took reasonable care to protect your assets, like a contract with an offsite data storage outfit. I've never heard of any homeowners policy that would cover this.

 

Having said that, you probably can't afford it. Or more specificly, if you can afford the insurance, you can more than afford a sophisticted backup solution that negates the need for the insurance (for all practical purposes).

 

You were lucky. You got nearly all your data. It (only) cost you 5-8 times what a good backup solution would of cost you.

 

Pop quiz: Have you changed how you handle your data yet?