dave_powell2

Hi Tim,

I'm not sure, but I think Kalart flash units fit quite a few different cameras. My dad purchased an old Kodak Pony camera with a Kalart unit named just as yours. I don't have the camera, but I have the sales slip and the boxed flash!

Sincerely,

Dave

Reinforcing the other: My 18mm rectilinear T-mount lens has a chip in the middle of the front element...and unless I'm focusing on a flower almost touching the glass, the flaw doesn't appear in photos.

Dave

Hi Andrew,

Another approach that I once took employed a Vivitar 18mm Rectilinear T-mount lens. The DOF was so great, that a flower almost touching the lens was in focus...as were the trees and sky behind it. I composed the image so that the flower was vertically centered in the frame and near one side (but not so near that it dramatically warped). Then, I scanned, and digitally cropped, the super-wide-angle 35mm frame to leave only the "panoramic strip" across its middle.

(I'd post it, but I lost some of my older images when my former PC had a disk crash. Should try again, though, now that you've reminded me!)

Sincerely,

Dave

Hi Again, Emily,

Sorry I didn't get back to this thread until now.

No, neither the 717 or 828 had hot spots that I could see. The only similar problem was that they used a couple of IR-emitting ports for auto focusing. And if those aren't covered with black tape, the resulting images often had white "V's" painted through them.

This was caused (I believe) when the emitted IR returned to the camera and bounced back and forth between the IR and ND filter surfaces. (A corollary was that after I covered the ports with tape, I used manual focus for IR.)

But that done, hand-holding was possible...or almost as convenient, monopoding.

(The Sony on which I saw severe hot spots was one of their pocketable point-and-shoots...either the T10 or T30. A shame too, they are nice cameras...but didn't seem ideal for IR!)

Sincerely,

Dave

Yes, I once tried third-party ink in my old Epson printer, during a period when I wasn't actually using the printer very frequently. In that case, any ink will dry and clog a bit. But the chapie stuff really clogged up...and I had to expend almost the whole cartridge just to clear out the head.

Dave

"Hey what gives? Where's your "beep-beep" that tells me that you're focused? What do you mean you ALREADY took the picture!"

(Sounds like me when I first tried the Olympus XA.)

Funny stuff, Gordon!

Dave

Hi Ry,

My wife is just like yours. The trick I've used is to make money with my existing equipment. (In my case, by doing photography for a few local realtors.) That's enabled me to buy a better digital camera and a new scanner...with the funds from my realty shoots.

Sincerely,

Dave

Hi, If you actually test different tools, you will soon discover that different tools work better for different images. In reality, it's impossible to say that Tool X is "always better" than Tool Y. It would be instructive to apply several different tools (even demo versions) to the types of images that you will be sharpening...and then see which ones look like a winners.

But even then, the actual content of each image may affect the results delivered by a sharpening tool. For example, a tool that nicely sharpens a cat's portrait may add unwanted mottling to an architectural photo containing areas of flat tone...or it may add unwanted haloing around the cast-iron railings in an architectural image, but nicely sharpen the foliage.

There's no substitute for doing your own tests!

Sincerely,

Dave

Yes, Andrew's is a great add! The buildings on the two sides may still bow out a bit. And this too can be somewhat corrected using plug-ins.

Good luck!

Sincerely,

Dave

Hi Martin,

I don't own a G7, so forgive some potentially dumb questions! First, does the G7 let you set or move its focus point? If so, was the focus point positioned over the portion of the subject that you wanted to be sharp? (Maybe camera focus is the problem?)

Also, softness can come from hand motion. Did you try to take similar photos with the camera on a tripod?

If you do the above, and still get soft (very soft?) images, then maybe the camera is at fault, and needs repairing or replacing.

Sincerely,

Dave

Yes, even Elements 2 can do batch size conversions and save a folder of images as a PDF os slide show!

Sincerely,

Dave

Hi Vikram,

Many super-wides from many manufacturers create this distortion when the lens is set to full-wide. You can eliminate it in two ways:

(1) Using Photoshop's distortion-removal filters or plug-ins.

(2) By shooting such images at slightly less than full-wide (such as at 20-25mm, which I know runs against the principle of the thing)!

Sincerely,

Dave

Hi Mario,

Just curious about which version of the Olympus XA you use? The original model lets you set both shutter speed and aperture, which would seem to be a decent amount of manual control!

The Olympus OM-1 is one of the smallest and easiest-to-set manual film SLRs. But the Pentax MG (I believe) is even a tad smaller (though a bit more finicky to set).

Sincerely,

Dave

Gene, to get color, you gotta "register" the lens by cocking the leeeetle switch first to "B&W," and then back to "COLOR" ;)

Dave

Hey thanks for the heads-up on the H9, Brad! I'll look at it too. Unfortunately, the last time I tested a Sony P&S with Nightshot mode, it had the strong hot-spot problem that Emily was asking about. Loved it though, so maybe the H9 will fare better!

And to answer your question, Emily, the S-414 had absolutely no hot spot whatever (and I forgot to mention that it is 4MP).

Oh, and following onto Brad's statement, the un-modded Sony F-series cameras are truly extraordinarily sensitive to IR in Nightshot mode. That's because Sony never bothered to implement the ability to set Nightshot apertures, as was once rumored for the 828. So the cameras shoot Nightshot with the aperture open to the max, at about 1/60 sec. On the cameras with an f/2 lens, this means that you must stack some ND filters with the IR filter, to avoid blowing out the sensor!

I once borrowed a friend's F-717, and was able to shoot wonderful IRs hand-held. The only problem was that I didn't know to cover the IR focusing windows with black tape...so I had to clone out a V-shaped flares in every image that I used!

Sincerely,

Dave

Also study the user manual and take a lot of photos! One of the beauties of digital is that you can see what you get, and erase what you hate. But before erasing an image, try to figure out what you should do differently next time!

Sincerely,

Dave

As Ellis says, some of camera settings do still affect RAW files...particularly the aperture (which physically controls how much light reaches the sensors) and the shutter speed (which controls how long the light hits the sensors). Changing these will change the RAW file.

But the file is "RAW" because the camera doesn't apply most of the automatic adjustments that it normally uses for JPEGs...things like brightness/contrast adjustments and sharpening.

Sincerely,

Dave

Agreed...this isn't a problem at all. But be sure to save your "master" file in Photoshop's native PSD format. If you (like many photographers) save it as a layered TIFF, you'll lose the ability to edit the text!

Dave

I agree with John. Though I'm a technical writer, I also ship software and manuals to company customers all over the world. And no package has ever been lost. In one case, a customer in a hurry called to find out when his stuff was arriving. I clicked the tracking number, and saw that the truck was parked at his door. So I told him that the incoming call (which I could hear signaling on his phone) was probably it. And it was!

In another case, our salesmann (who is as far from detail-oriented as anyone I've known) gave me the wrong street address...in the wrong city...for a new-customer shipment. I dutifully sent the package, and received an "exception email" from FedEx the next day...saying that they couldn't deliver it as addressed.

So when the salesman returned the day after that, I asked him to give me the right address. He called the customer, got the address, and I called FedEx. Turns out they used their own resources to determine the same address that I was about to give them...and the package arrived that same day.

It's pretty hard to go wrong with FedEx!

Sincerely,

Dave

Nice suggestions!

Emily, when you said "P&S," were you looking for a smaller, more pocketable, camera? If so, be aware that the Sony F-series cameras are large and definitely un-pocketable!

That said, I shot many wonderful IR images (tripod mounted, though a blocking filter) using the Minolta Dimage S-414 point-and-shoot. I think a used S-414 would be a superb IR shooter if modded. (I haven't yet found instructions on the web for doing this, though.)

Good luck with the quest...and let us know what you do!

Sincerely,

Dave

Stephen and Pico are probably dead-on. I've also seen this problem when I've upscaled an image farther than it will support. Some images can be enlarged considerably before this happens, and some can't.

For example, my best-selling digital-IR print was taken with an old (highly IR-sensitive) 0.8 MP digital camera. If CAREFULLY upscaled, it can actually reach 11x14 inches before this checker-boarding appears. But another IR shot (taken on the same day with the same camera) won't enlarge past 5x7. It's very image-dependent!

Sincerely,

Dave

Hi Gene,

Beautiful. And before you finish the book, I was wondering if you've every considered staging a "Found Film" exhibition? I believe you're in Western Mass, and I'm in Winchester (near Woburn, just north of Boston). If interested, you might want to consider approaching the lovely Arthur Griffin Museum of Photography (in Winchester) about it.

Here's their web site:

http://www.griffinmuseum.org/

If interested, call their exec director, Blake Fitch, to pitch the idea.

I could see this happening...and might even don a tie for your opening reception!

Sincerely,

Dave

North of Boston, anyway, the grocery stores and CVS drug stores still sell 110, and CVS also sends it out for processing.

And adding to what Gene said, on my first trip to Rome quite a few years ago, my "overkill kit" was a belly bag containing four cameras: a very nice Konica Mini 35mm, the Kodak Pocket Instamatic 60, Ektramax (for night), and the Canon ED-20. And though the Big Mini has a spendid rep (and has been a great P&S for me), the Pocket Instamatic 60 and ED-20 seemed to produce better overall exposures in extreme lighting conditions.

Obviously, this wasn't even close to a true scientific test, since the cameras were using different emulsions. But a large number of these 110 prints joined the 35mm's in our trip album.

Dave

OK, this isn't a wet-darkroom trick, but the weirdest "digital printing" trick I've seen was a local photographer who (half-way through outputing a B/W image on his printer) shoves the whole unit into a hot oven. This delivers a variety of effects, including solarization and (in one case) totally inverting the grayscale tones in the "hot" half of the image. (It also achieves "artistic justifications" for buying new printers.)

Weird.

Dave

Adding to Michael, I also have three Yashica RFs with 1.4 shutters, and only one says "Lynx" on the body. One of 'em looks just like the Lynx, but is labeled "Yashica E 1.4" (or something like that). And I don't remember the name on the other. Of them, only the "Lynx" model still seems to work.

Sincerely,

Dave