rodeo_joe1

Wow! That does sound like an absolute bargain. Congrats on that find. If I didn't have far too many tripods and heads already (and an aversion to QR fittings) I could be well-tempted by that.

P. S. I think a better approach might be to start with a modern light-sensing module and find room for a small battery. This tiny thing (the veroboard's there to make it big enough to handle) works off between 2.3 and 5.5 volts, outputs between 5 and 50 uA over a near 5 decade illumination range, and has a near human-eye spectral response curve. It's an Osram SFH-5711 and costs peanuts. There are other similar devices out there too. One of those fitted in a Weston V case would make an excellent meter and be a real novelty. Afterthought: The 3.7ish volts of a rechargeable lithium cell would be a suitable power source, and the meter could then be plugged into a USB cable for recharging.

I did manage to get a 1" square silicon garden solar cell into a Weston Master V case. I was fiddling with it trying to find a suitable piece of blue filter gel to get the sensitivity right and combat the overly red response... when the delicate moving-coil mechanism got stuck. Probably picked up some magnetic dust or swarf. Gave up and binned the whole lot after that. There are limits to how much time and effort you can put into reviving old stuff. Like, who's going to pay the £179 asking price to have a Weston Master fully serviced? When there are much better and more modern meters that can be got used for less money. So, they need a new battery now and then - big deal!

But those 'other purposes' are the aim point of nearly all editing. In order to transfer that edited image to another person, or to another piece of software, or to create a hard (printed) copy, or just to archive the edit. Nobody edits just to view the result in one specific piece of software... do they? Editing is altering pixels, even if they're only temporarily altered while being viewed on a monitor.

No. YOU said it's magic by making the ridiculous claim that it 'creates pixels'. Flinging the complete panoply of fallacious arguments back at me doesn't alter that. Then how is the appearance of the image altered at all? What happens after an Export or 'Save As' then? As it does with any editing method as long as one isn't stupid enough to overwrite the original file(s) that came out of the camera. It's a matter of choice, and I'm sure I'm not the only person that's been using PhotoShop since version 2.5 on Windows 3.11. Because the most efficient workflow is one that's familiar through use and practise. What the software does internally is largely irrelevant.

It can't be the same model Dustin. Mine took SmartMedia cards - anyone remember them? I don't see any newbie retrophiles bothering to source a long obsolete medium for their digital nostalgia fix. But then there was an early Sony camera that used floppy disks for its storage. "Hold that pose a minute love... your feet have been saved, just changing the disk and waiting for the rest of you to upload now." On another vintage note: I was slightly bemused to see in an auction catalogue, what was obviously a collection of fairly common 33.333 RPM 12" vinyl LPs described variously as '78s', '10" records' and 'rare'. Are the youngsters of today so ignorant of such things? Especially when it's supposed to be their job to know about what they're offering for sale.

Wrong! There are 'dead' Selenium cells to be found everywhere. The cell properties depend on the crystal structure of the Selenium. Llike carbon, it can exist in different forms, but unlike carbon those Selenium allotropes aren't stable and can change over time or with temperature, or as Dustin has said, through atmospheric contamination or oxidation.

It's a Selenium cell. The Sekonic ones seem to be a bit more robust and long-lived than Weston's later cells, but in my experience the calibration of Sekonic's L398 'Studio' meters is a bit lax. I have 2 of them, and both are a lot more optimistic of light levels than any other meter I own. Make that 3 samples, if you include a Lux meter built in the same body shell. The Luxmeter has a linearity issue and can't be calibrated accurately at high and low readings on the same scale simultaneously. That doesn't inspire me with confidence in Sekonic's ability to make an accurate moving-coil meter at all. Which reminds me of an easy check for a dying cell in a Weston meter: Simply find a light level that puts the needle at 10* on the High scale. Then, without moving the aim of the meter, open the baffle and see if you get close to the full-scale 10* reading on the Low scale. If the cell is failing it won't read 10, and may not be able to reach a full scale deflection at all unless exposed to ridiculously bright light. *That's 50 on earlier Westons.

You don't even need a tin of paint these days. A black permanent felt-tip marker does the job and dries near instantly.

Third or fourth item returned from a Google search for 'Minolta Modiii enlarger' - Link. It's a direct PDF download.

Indeed. One of the LED chips had burned out in the bulb above; there was clearly a black burn hole to be seen in it. However the chips are soldered to be in close thermal contact with an aluminium heatsink plate. This makes it near impossible to get enough heat into the chip to remove it, or solder a wire bridge across it. Reliably shorting it with a bit of kitchen foil doesn't seem feasible, and besides any such 'repair' would be short-lived because it would put extra power into the remaining LED chips - making them more likely to fail. You might get a few more hours out of a 'repaired' bulb, but IMO it's not worth the effort if the LEDs themselves have started to fail. A fault in the separate little regulator circuit might be easily, cheaply and reliably repaired, but it seems much more common for the LED chips to self-destruct.

I think most of us know by now that those "last-a-lifetime" domestic LED bulbs are no such thing, and tend to flicker and die after a year or so of use. I've had several do that now, and here's one such dead bulb- Not liking waste, I decided to see if it could be repaired - thinking maybe just a loose wire or small component in the regulator. It wasn't repairable...but I found it easily came apart like this - Wow, a gift of a nice little domed diffuser, just about the right size to fit on a 49 or 52mm diameter lens thread. There's gotta be a use for that. An experiment using it as an incident-metering converter for a camera TTL meter showed it needed a considerable correction factor. However, as a diffuser for taking a custom white-balance it proved absolutely perfect. Here's a Kodak greyscale, taken using a custom WB set using that LED diffuser dome over the lens. No bulky and delicate grey or white card needed - A poke along the greyscale with PhotoShop's eyedropper tool shows an absolutely neutral WB throughout the scale. The dome would easily lend itself to being glued to a 49 or 52mm filter-thread adapter, but I just held it in place over the lens to take the WB above. And, yes I know that there have been devices like the 'Expodisk' marketed previously, but they ain't essentially free and for nothing, and making good use of something that would otherwise be landfill.

I can't fix the crop, but removing the overall green cast and setting a grey point from the paving slabs was an improvement. subt The skin tones still aren't great, but a subtle hue rotation of the red and yellow channels got them closer to acceptable IMO. Still too orange though. I think probably the wrong film profile was chosen during scanning, but bad skin tones are also symptomatic of stale or badly-stored film.

The most obvious effect of including blank film in a scan is to throw the black-level off. So if an auto-colour or auto-levels adjustment is used, the black level is set to the mask density and you (generally) get over-light shadows with a strong colour cast. That doesn't appear to have happened here. The skin tones are too orange and the shadows have a slight blue-cyan bias, but are OK density-wise. It's just basically bad colour and with weak saturation.

There are SCSI (Small Computer System Interface, and pronounced 'scuzzy') to USB adapters available at a fairly high price, but from all reports their compatibility is variable. Then there's the issue of finding drivers and software for your Mac. The most reliable and economical route would be to source an old computer with a SCSI card that's about the same era as the scanner. Maybe your friend's uncle also has one for sale? What size film are you hoping to scan? Because a Flextight really doesn't make economic sense today for anything smaller than 6x7. It would be massive overkill for 35mm film. Read the posts above, and other threads, about digital camera copying as a very viable alternative to scanning.

I have no nostalgic feelings toward it, but I have an old Kodak digital 'bridge' camera that delivers SOOC colours that I would love to get from a more sophisticated camera. I think it's fitted with a Kodak OEM CCD sensor. The Schneider-made lens is pretty good too. OTOH, I would still use my old Minolta A2 if it didn't lock up and take about 30 seconds after a shutter-press to save every image. And the Fuji 'Finepix' that was my first foray into digital was utter garbage, both optically and in it's digital output.... not helped by Fuji just plain lying about its sensor's pixel count! (2mp interpolated to 4 and claimed to be a 4mp camera.)

There is only one orientation possible. The film must be positioned with its length running in the '7' direction, as it is in the camera. And in any case a 6x6cm frame will fully show in a rectangular 6x7cm carrier, no matter which way round it's fitted, because it's square.

Wow. It's that magic!? The term 'non-permanent' is much more appropriate and positive than labelling non-parametric editing as 'destructive' in a very negative and denigrating way. Yes, I fully understand that reversing, say, a tone curve change parametrically is a better solution than trying to apply an inverse curve. However that's not the way that most people work. There's an Undo, Step Back or History pallette to choose from. Rather than forging ahead and creating that reverse curve, and then letting the parametric software sort out the mistake.

It would better be described as non-permanent editing, since all it's doing is creating a script to 'push the pixels around' rather than immediately 'pushing them around'. (a bit of emotive word-play being used there, to make direct editing sound more crude and basic than it really is) In the end, what's needed for nearly all purposes is an edited file in which the changes have been made permanent and baked-in (pixel-pushed or 'destructive' if you like). Since one cannot rely on a customer or printer or viewer of the file to have access to software that can read the parametric script. This drawback is clearly explained in that article. What happens between starting file and edited end-product file is largely irrelevant unless and until all image editing/viewing/printing software settles on a standardised script and sidecar format - and that's probably never going to happen. So, no editing method is truly 'destructive' unless the camera original file is lost, deleted or overwritten. The rest is just a workflow choice.

The X2Tn should imitate a Nikon speedlight being fitted to the hotshoe. Does the camera shutter automatically switch to 1/60th when the X2Tn is fitted and turned on? If not the contacts on your hotshoe might be dirty or even faulty. Does the camera fire any speedlight fitted directly into its hotshoe? The D90 is pretty old, so if the hotshoe hasn't been used for some time the contacts might well need cleaning.

Aldis (Birmingham) and AGI (Croydon) are two names at least that should be added to the 'also ran' list of English lens-makers. Aldis are perhaps best remembered for their projection lenses, but they also made, mainly large format, camera lenses. They were still making at least a 6" f/4.5 Anastigmat when later incorporated into the Rank organisation as Rank-Aldis. I own one such lens as proof. AGI - Aeronautical and General Instruments - also apparently made their own Agilux lenses. As fitted to the Agiflex series of 6x6cm SLRs. (The lenses were actually pretty awful, but let's gloss over that!) Somewhere I have some negatives shot with Agilux lenses on an Agiflex II camera. 'Characterful' would be a charitable description of the image-quality. The same could be said of prints made with a 2" f/3.5 Wray Supar enlarging lens. Wray churned out those nasty little optics by the gross, judging by how many of them are still out there. My sample of 50mm f/2 Unilite is nothing to rave about either, sadly.

Even if they still work, and with the cell acting like new, there's still the issue that the selenium meters built into old cameras, as well as some handheld ones, take an integrating-average reading over a wide angle. Often wider than the lens fitted to the camera. Which is a very hit-or-miss way to read an exposure. Not much better than an educated guess.

I had the same thought, but nearly bit my tongue right off resisting the urge to say it! 😇 Totally off topic - anyone else think that the selection of emojis we're offered here is a bit weird? Most of them need a sub-title.

Honestly, when a camera system spends more time being repaired/maintained than it does taking pictures, it's time to abandon it and find something else. Something like an old metal-bodied Mamiya 645 1000s - a camera that's only suffered from the minor aggravation of a sticky self-timer in all the decades that I've owned it. However, the optically excellent 70mm leaf-shuttered Mamiya lens is another story, but I bet nothing like the pain of keeping a Seikosha-shuttered Kowa 6 lens fully operational.

It's still weird that the frame is pretty near fully shown side-to-side, but only the bottom is cropped. The colour still looks bad - almost cross-processed. If this was fresh and properly stored film then I'd definitely find another lab. WRT posting the original file: It was probably rejected due to a size issue. You need to re-size pix down to a sub megabyte file in order to post them in line here.