ben_rubinstein___mancheste1664880652

Capturing the moment. It's what I advertise as.

Downsampling makes pictures look sharper so I don't see how it was sabotage eventhough I have little to no respect left for MR after some of the fudging he has done in the past to avoid admitting that he was wrong.

Another plug for the betterscanning holder! I've never used one but trying to get a truly flat scan at the correct focus height is impossible otherwise (bad experience!) and a wet scan will beat the pants off a dry one with consumer scanners.

Of course you can get a Caltar IIN 90mm f6.8 (Rodenstock I think) for very cheap even in great condition, I have one and it's an excellent lens, plenty movements on 4X5 which means you're in the sweetest part of the lens circle for 6X9.

Of course you can use a view camera with digitar lenses and stitch 3 MFDB files together to create a 120 megapixel 2:3 ratio photo! That must be fun...

 

There was a test shoot on Luminous Landscape shooting the same scene with a whole bunch of formats including a 39 megapixel back and 4X5 film. Although there are many who can nitpick the technicalities of the test, in the real world nothing is perfect either and it could give you a very good idea before you start thinking about the stage where you invite a representative of one of those companies to come round for a day worth of demonstration in your studio where you can make your own detailed tests based on your method of shooting, your workflow, etc. 39 megapixel backs are far too expensive to even bother discussing on forums to be honest, they need serious test driving to see whether they are as good or better - for you.

 

Some like Ellis will say that a digital file needs far less 'megapixels' to achive comparible quality due to the cleanliness of the files. Some may say that the look of the film is a necessity that cannot be ignored. You might make a comparison based on the best drum scan in the world but if you don't do all your work that way then it's immaterial. You may decide that you can achieve sufficient (a subjective word if there ever was one!) resolution and tonality for prints 'X' size from a digital back even if it were to have less resolution than a certain film size. It may be immaterial if the economics of a MFDB won't work in your favour anyway.

 

The only one who can really answer your question is you, it's just too subjective. Go out there, make the tests and then screw what anyone else says or thinks afterwards whatever your choice, what the heck do they know about your specific circumstances or what YOUR eye sees?

I was talking about 70lpmm which equates to about 70 megapixels worth of detail from the 6X12 imaging area of the adaptor I was referring to, it would be double that for 4X5 of course. Lens is a 135mm Sironar S, widely assumed to be one of the sharpest lenses in LF.

I tried working out the rangefinder difference between the included and my lens (135mm Sironar S) but the distance between the rangefinder correct focus and GG (correct) focus was 18mm at infinity, 19mm in between and almost nothing at all at 1-2 meter distance. In other words more trouble than it's worth.

 

As far as the infinity stops are concerned, I rotated the metal strips with the notches so that the 2nd set of infinity stops were reversed giving infinty for something like a 110mm lens. Although this isn't much use, I've taped a mm measure over it anyway, it does mean that the front standard clicks into the notch before infinity (and thereby allowing infinity!) which it didn't for my 135mm lens previously as the infinity notches were set for 150mm. If you have the camera you will know what I mean, bit hard to describe!

 

I'm using the lenses stopped down, f22 at the least, I don't think there would be enough difference between any 135mm lens that the rangefinder would have been calibrated for with that amount of DOF.

 

I have a friend whose looking at the drawings and diagrams on the MPP user club website for making your own cam. We'll see what comes up!

If I try and hang a picture I usually hit my thumb more than the nail Colin...

 

I have thought of getting it done by a friend who does this kind of thing, just wondered if there was any floating around rather than lose my camera and lens for a while!

It's specifically designed for studio/copy work, it's when I tried to take it out into the field that my need for wider lenses became a problem. Email me at pomsbz @ yahoo . com (delete spaces) and we can talk!

Hi,

 

I'm looking for a rangefinder cam for a 135mm lens on a MPP mk7. I know that the

cams were originally designed with a specific lens in mind but it's for stop down

photography were slight differences won't matter. I have been in touch with the

MPP Users group but they insist on joining by post and I won't be back in the UK

for a couple of months. Does anyone know where I can get one?

I have the Camera Fusion stitching adaptor which is a multi level stitching adaptor and far more capable than the Ebay ones. It's not useable at infinity for lenses wider than 150mm though. It does give you between 100-200 megapixels of file (FF/crop) technically, I personally don't believe that the lenses have more than 70 megapixels of resolution in them at a maximum, they are not designed for that much resolution.

 

I'm selling mine if you're interested, it didn't suit the project I bought it for.

I'm afraid you're probably right William!

Last time I gave a lower price was for a family for whom this would be the third wedding after 2 barmitzva's. I offered the reduction as a thank you for staying loyal, they didn't ask for it. I work on a very tight budget for my packages. I think that like most people were I to offer enough extras to make up a package it would be considerably more expensive, ergo the package is already discounted by definition. The reason we offer a package at these prices is that we are assured upfront of the business rather than waiting and hoping, etc. In general my reply to a equest for a cheaper price is that my prices are extremely good for the service and I'm happy to supply them the phone numbers of other photographers should my prices remain out of their reach. It's polite and as I know that they want me for my style I've never lost a client yet.

I notice that Jeff Ascough after a spirited defence of jpg and saying that he can't notice any difference during the Q&A session here and other threads - is now shooting RAW eventhough his 1Ds mkIII's have huge file sizes. Another one who has seen the light!

Your screen resolution is very low for that huge screen you have, it's fine for my 17" CRT's but you have to design for anything above a certain resolution (1024x768 is now considered a minimum generally) not just for one resolution which very few laptops and almost no flat screens still use. To be honest on my 1024x768 I have to scroll to see your main screen. On my laptop at 1280x800 I still need to scroll.

 

Technically your design is one that should look good at all resolutions, it should center nicely on bigger screens, you just need to get that initial design right.

You won't, that is the point. Metering a grey card is similar to using an incident meter reading, it measures how much light is hitting the subject and it's value. When you shoot at that value then white will be white, black will be black etc. Far too over simplified but good enough for the moment.

 

The reason why you need to compensate for black/white is because the camera thinks that they should be 18% grey and when they are not gets confused (tries to make them 18% by over/under exposing), if the subject, your grey card, actually is 18% grey then the camera will see what it's expecting and expose correctly.

 

If you use your histogram to measure expose so that the brightest point of the image that you wish to preserve (i.e. dress not clouds or a shiny car hood) is as bright as possible without being overexposed (blinkies). At that point you have captured all the detail in the important whites and everything else will more or less fall into place. It's called exposing for the highlights.

 

Can I humbly suggest a basic photography course? This really is photography 101.

Or two 5D's!

A bit of Burn in PS, fiddle with the curve in your raw converter, if using ACR then tone the picture down to suit the mother and bring the child up a bit with the fill slider. This happens sometimes, you can't get it perfect always in camera or even out of the raw converter with some circumstances (shiny faces in a group is another), sometimes you just need some dodge and burn like in the olden days! ;-)

But probably true. I just hope to hell that when they apply the same editing capabilities to ACR that they don't just wait for CS4, I'd give my left leg for dodge and burn and at least a couple of toes for within crop vignetting.

It makes sense to have backup of the same system so you can share lenses, flashes, etc. Mixing systems, especially with one that isn't that superior in IQ, wouldn't be my choice.

There is a rumour that the 22nd will bring the announcement of the 5D mkII, to be honest it might be worth waiting a week to be sure.

 

Keep in mind that mixing types of bodies, your main and backup (which I assume will be your 30D) is not a great idea, your lenses won't work the same, ergonomics different, etc, etc. A couple of gently used 5D's gives you two excellent cameras, both the same for the price of one of the much higher spec'd cameras.

 

If you have the money and don't mind considering it then the D3 is a very viable option, all the advantages Marc mentions plus full frame which makes lenses like the 24-70 and 17-35 so much more sensible. It's everything the 5D should be but without the crop sensor or much higher and questionable extra megapixels of the canon 1Ds series cameras. I can't afford to replace my two 5D's with D3's mainly due to an investment in peripherals/lenses but I often wish I could! If you look at the new firmware update for the D3 you can see how much more photographer orientated Nikon seems to be, Canon have never upgraded a feature via firmware ever!

My contract says 6 months to order included albums. This is more so they get a move on with it but also because I order albums in bulk and they cost a significant amount of money to be tied up in storage for a year at a time. I haven't yet denied a client because of it, it would be very bad for business, however I hope that it does get their attention...

Still stupidly slow on my dual 2.2ghz with 3 gig RAM, so is the newer bridge though not that bad, I still use the CS2 bridge for sorting, it can make thumbnails of 1000 files within 20 seconds, the new Bridge takes about 10 minutes with 'low quality', lightroom takes about 10 seconds to show a 100% preview of a 5D file, ACR does it in 2 seconds....

Around the time hell freezes over I'm afraid. I spend hours on the RAW files making sure that the interpretation of my intention is perfect. I know that I have a lot of skill with RAW processing, more than any other photographer I know personally and the thought of some amatuer not pulling back the highlights or not opening the shadows, of them not correcting the vignetting or using a wrong WB fills me with horror. The wedding has to be your vision from the moment you pull the trigger to the final print (or finished jpg as the case may be, it's hard to print a corrected file in any way but correctly in modern minilabs). Handing over your vision for playing with may work with commercial work where you are all part of a team directed by a team leader whose vision the project really is, for a wedding I would be horrified to give all my files, the bad and the good, for someone else to interpret.

Nope, weddings are my work and I've never had any sentimentality for work tools, I save all my emotions for the moments I capture with it. Now if you ask me about photography as my hobby - well I was up to 6am this morning working with my Gandolfi 4X5 camera, I do miss my Mamiya 645 Super and the only camera I ever loved - Canon AE-1. One day I'm going to add a Rolleiflex 2.8 to my collection as well, shooting for fun with beautiful machines is good for the soul.