doug_armstrong

<p>Leigh,</p> <p>I also think that this is something that she needs to be involved with. From what you said, and other people's suggestions based on that, it seems that she will have to choose what she wants to prioritize in her next photographic step:<br> * Always handy: That is small and light and just good enough for lots of different things. For me that would be a 28 to 90 full-frame equivalent (FFE), favoring light weight over large aperture. This is more or less what I heard you thinking about in your OP.<br> * Bike racing first: A longish zoom. FFE starting at 35, 50, or even longer and going up to some long/fast trade-off that is within budget<br> * Do both: continue to use one of your lenses for family and walking around. An even longer zoom or even a long prime for the racing.</p> <p>In any case, she should be making the detailed trade offs. Do I want a little more speed, a little less weight, or a little longer?? Learning that you can never have it perfect, that we always have to decided what is good enough, that's as important as learning to take the actual pictures. </p>

<p>If you suspect the scanner, get it out of the equation. Fortunately, that is easy to do. You need:<br> * a loupe, which you have. If you don't own something labeled a "loupe", use your 50 mm lens.<br> * skill at using it. You have negatives that are known to be scratched in a known location. Practice until you are sure you can easily find the scratches.</p> <p>Now run a roll of film through your normal process and look carefully at the negative before scanning it. If you found scratches, you have ruled out the scanner. If not, run it through the scanner without looking at the scanner's output. Look for the scratches again with your loop. If you find them, you know the scanner is the problem. If you don't find them, look at the scanner output to verify they didn't happen this time. If they did happen, practice some more with the loupe.</p> <p>If you have ruled out the scanner, look carefully at the scratches with the loupe before you try to narrow down the step in which they occur. Are they scratches into the surface of the film? If so, which surface? If not, they must not be scratches in the normal sense of the word, but rather caused by physically creating a latent image.</p> <p>When I was young (11th grade) and learning to process film, I would sometimes run a fingernail across the surface of the film while loading the film into a processing reel. It would develop as a dark line. That's not your problem here, because the scratches are too straight, but remember that if they are an actual dark line within the image itself, they happened before development.</p> <p>Moving from what I know to what I can guess, I'm 95% certain that this is happening in the camera or in the scanner. This is because the examples that you have shown us all show lines in either one of two places or else in a narrow band of the film. (I haven't measured them on my screen, so I'm only 50% sure that they always appear in one of two places on the film.) That regularity can only be caused by a very carefully controlled transport of the film across a surface capable of causing scratches (if it is damaged): the camera or the scanner.</p>

<p>Asad, What does "exactly the same every time" mean. It is a very ambiguous statement and, in any case, contradicts what you said on Friday morning about it not happening on indoor shots.<br /> * When it happens, is it always the same brightness? If, yes, "same" relative to what? Same relative to the scene brightness (it appears the same when the image looks correct)?<br /> * What effects do underexposure and overexposure have? If the brightness varies, what causes that? f/ stop? Total exposure? Ambient light level?<br /> * If the brightness does not vary, what makes it disappear? (Since it does not happen in lower light levels -- "indoors".) What is the threshold?<br /> * If it is always in the same place, "same" relative to what? The camera body? The outside world? I am supposing that it is always in the same left-to-right location. Is that true?<br /> * "Zooming does not affect it". Does that mean that it is still in the same location in the frame? Or that its position relative to the objects in the image does not change?</p> <p>Three things seem to narrow this down a lot, if true. First, it *only* happens when the lens is wide open. Given that fact I cannot think of any explanation other than it being caused by something in the camera which is illuminated only by light from the very edge of the lens's back element.</p> <p>Second, if what someone said about it not being visible in the viewfinder is true (I can't see the comments as I write this, so I don't know whether you actually said this), then what ever is reflecting the light must be far enough away from the rear element to cause the light to either hit the mirror in a way that does not go toward the ground glass or it must be located behind the mirror.<br /> <br />Third, the shape of the arcs makes me suspect that the source of the reflection is on the left side of the image, that is to the right of the sensor inside the camera.<br /> <br />Finally, I think that the fact that there are two arcs is probably also significant, but I'm having trouble imagining what that significance is. Someone who pays more attention to light in their images than I do can probably say something about the shape of whatever is causing the reflection.</p>

<p>Andrew,<br> <br />Would I be right in supposing that you misspoke about the blank areas? Your scans seem to indicate that they had black areas, not blank areas. Yes? </p>

<p>Craig, I have not seen any response here that is going to help you much. One from me would not be any better. Part of the problem is that given the requirements as you have stated them, they are impossible to meet. For my own standards, I couldn't do a performance recording that I would call high quality without $500+ in gear. That's just the microphone(s), recorder, cable(s), and stand(s). And that's probably being pretty optimistic.</p> <p>Given that an "audition submission" is involved, you are going to get a lot more useful information about what sort of gear is "good enough" if you ask the person or institution to whom the audio & video are to be submitted.</p>

<p>Think carefully whether it is primarily the grain that you like or whether it's the grain in this particular image that gives a foggy look that you like. Along the Maine (US) coast in the summer, it's just a matter of waiting for the right morning to get this amount and kind of fog. It's a fog that you can see into for a couple hundred yards or less, with occasional tendrils of thicker stuff. I expect other places in the world have similar fog.</p>

<p>Here's my experience in similar situations where I'm taking pictures of people I know, or at least am acquainted with, doing things and interacting with me. The focal lengths I mention are all FF equivalents. I like to take pictures of what I'm seeing -- that is comprehending -- with my eyes. I find that usually I see in two different ways. The first is taking in a whole scene. This is covered well by 35mm. The other is looking at details. This seems to be 90mm or a little over (but I can crop a little without too much pain). My digital camera has a kit zoom on it, but most of my images are at or near one of those two focal lengths. Sometimes I wish I had something closer to the 135 that I had for my Nikormat, but these are very different images. They are images from "outside", rather than images of people or things that I am interacting with.</p> <p>Near the tail end of the film era I spent two weeks in Cuba. This was a visit to a sister church, not a tourist trip. The only camera I had was a Yashica T4, a P&S film camera with a 35mm lens. I sometimes wished that I had more camera, but I never felt that I missed anything really important. My best pictures followed a standard, boring format: A single person it one part of the frame -- close enough to be part of my "detail" seeing -- and the people and/or things that we are interacting with in the remainder of the frame -- the "whole scene" view. My interest in images is closer to the journalistic than the artistic, so this artistically boring approach keeps me quite happy.</p> <p>My suggestion to you, Gene, is that when you need to travel light, you need to think hard about what you are trying to do and what has worked (most of the time) in the past. Take what is necessary to meet those needs and let go of the need to capture the occasional image that would require that you had brought twice as much gear. I <em>am</em> assuming that this is not a professional trip, where you have to capture certain images no matter what. </p>

<p>Peter summarized it pretty well. Given your report of well developed edge marking, you have an exposure problem. Given that it is a Nikon F, it's not an auto exposure problem. To Peter's analysis I would add that it seems unlikely that its a camera problem, since only five frames are affected and they are consecutive frames. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they are all taken at about the same time in the same lighting.</p> <p>So that only leaves the question of what you and/or your light meter did to get you so many stops off. What you describe is more than I would expect from setting the wrong ASA speed. I would expect you to remember that, in any case. For what it's worth, you can check my hypothesis. In my experience developing film, I've had negatives come out like this a handful of times. On closer examination, the black blogs always turned out to be very bright parts of the subject -- bare light bulbs and the like. In my experience, if you hold the negative up toward a bright light, but just off center so that there is actually a dark shadow behind it, you will see a faint positive image of whatever your subject was. (A single bright bulb in an otherwise fairly dark room works well.)</p> <p>.... I just pulled out a 49 year old set of negatives in which I was trying to photograph a TV screen. My memory of how to do this is right.</p> <p>... One last thought: Any chance that these five negatives were at a slow shutter speed (e.g. 1/2 sec) and the others at 1/100 or faster? With a mechanical shutter, speeds slower than the X synch speed use an escapement train to time the delay between the opening of the first shutter and the closing of the second. They can gum up over the decades.</p>

<p>Peter summarized it pretty well. Given your report of well developed edge marking, you have an exposure problem. Given that it is a Nikon F, it's not an auto exposure problem. To Peter's analysis I would add that it seems unlikely that its a camera problem, since only five frames are affected and they are consecutive frames. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they are all taken at about the same time in the same lighting.</p> <p>So that only leaves the question of what you and/or your light meter did to get you so many stops off. What you describe is more than I would expect from setting the wrong ASA speed. I would expect you to remember that, in any case. For what it's worth, you can check my hypothesis. In my experience developing film, I've had negatives come out like this a handful of times. On closer examination, the black blogs always turned out to be very bright parts of the subject -- bare light bulbs and the like. In my experience, if you hold the negative up toward a bright light, but just off center so that there is actually a dark shadow behind it, you will see a faint positive image of whatever your subject was. (A single bright bulb in an otherwise fairly dark room works well.)</p> <p>.... I just pulled out a 49 year old set of negatives in which I was trying to photograph a TV screen. My memory of how to do this is right.</p>

<p>I believe that the two reasons that John gives are correct and that Andrew is mistaken. I do think that the factors that Andrew mentions are part of what made color photography practical for the average person.<br> <br />It is not true, however, that there is no lack of process diversity and no lack of opportunity for creative input in the physics and chemistry of color photography. Just look a little further back into its history. Before some engineers wrapped color photography up in a single, complex roll of film and its carefully matched development process, color photography involved making the required three photographs as separate operations using three sheets of "black and white" film and three different filters. This is still possible. This method allows people without access to a multi-million-dollar film production facility to get access to the different parts of the process. Tweak to your heart's delight. </p>

<p>Why has no one mentioned Strobist.com, and in particular the "<a href="http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-diy-10-macro-photo-studio.html">DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio</a>"? This small light box, or a commercial version of it, is almost the perfect place for your sister to start. It would probably be too small for anything larger than one or two pieces of candy, but it is flexible enough that she could figure out what she needed (one light? two? White, reflective surface on the far side? Black?) and then spend the real money scaling it up enough for the larger subjects -- once she has a little experience.</p> <p>She wouldn't even need a flash to start with, assuming the camera is on a tripod. One of those utility lights with an aluminum reflector and a black-market 100 watt bulb would work fine for the small subjects. As long as the camera had a largish sensor, manual control, and a hot shoe (for synching that off-camera strobe that she may want later), your sister wouldn't need to buy more than a camera and a tripod to start with. I expect that she already has the kitchen table and maybe even a table lamp (to save the price of a utility lamp).</p> <p>If she wants to go all-in, she should start reading "Lighting 101" on the Strobist site and buy the simple lighting kit suggested there. That would include the umbrella that someone suggested up-thread. But myself, I would wait; that box makes small things really easy.</p>

<p>J, You will need to describe your problem more clearly if you want help with a solution. None of us can identify a problem in what you have said -- other than a possible lack of understanding of how studio flashes work and of studio lighting in general. You should start by saying exactly what you want to be able to do. For example,</p> <blockquote> <p>I'm want to be able to photograph cat-and-dog fights in my living room. I don't want too much blur. I don't currently own any artificial lights beyond two household end-table lamps with one 60 watt bulb in each.</p> </blockquote>

<p>The answer to your headline question is "Yes". (In any particular situation one of those two suppliers probably has a product that better meets the requirements than does the other supplier.)</p> <p>In most cases, however, "best" is a slippery and un-helpful concept. In most cases the question to ask is "In this particular situation, what would be good enough?" Given the huge product lines that both companies have, and again in most cases, both will have more than one solution that is "good enough" to meet any reasonable need.</p> <p>In those cases where it is not clear what would be good enough, it is still pointless to ask "What would be best for my situation?" I have <strong>never</strong> seen anyone ask that question with enough detail that it can be usefully answered. Whether formally or informally you have to put in the work to write your own requirements specification. When you have done that you will probably know what is "best" for you. If not, you will know enough to ask useful questions, such as "Does anyone have images showing the bokah of lens X at various f/ stops when focused at about 8 feet with a 'full-frame' sensor?"</p>

<p>Craig is right. The formulas are identical. Both are:<br> 2 g Metol (Kodak calls it "Kodak Elon")<br> 100 g Sodium Sulfite, anhydrous (Ilford spells it "Sulphite")<br> 5 g Hydroquinone<br> 2 g Borax (Kodak adds "granular")<br> Water to make 1 liter</p> <p>The Kodak reference is "Processing Chemicals and Formulas", 6th edition (1963; Kodak Professional Data Book J-1). The Ilford reference is _The Ilford Manual of Photography_, Alan Horder ed., 5th edition © 1958</p>

<blockquote> <p>... the battery shows as fully charged on the LCD screen but then zero's as soon as I press the shutter button ....</p> </blockquote> <p>This is classic dead-battery behavior. The "charge" meter is really a voltmeter. The battery can still take a teeny-tiny charge so it reads full voltage after being charged, but the charge (number of mA-hrs) is so small that trying to draw any current from it causes it to go flat (low voltage).<br> It is true that this is also classic short-circuit behavior, but with the compact electronics in a camera a short circuit would cause so much heat that all the magic blue smoke would come out and be lost forever. If, after trying your test, the battery does not come out of the camera noticeably warmer than when you put it in, then a battery that can't hold a charge is your most likely problem.</p>