rodeo_joe1

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.

And there's the reason I spent good money on a rotary processor and started doing my own C-41 processing!

I'm still idly curious as to how a transmission-lit scan can make dust on the film or platen surface show as white spots, rather than dark ones?

Prompted by another thread, I was recently looking at the spectral sensitivity curves of some B&W films. This one seems pretty typical: So if the aim is to emulate the look of film, then I'm wondering if the PhotoShop 'auto' conversion option puts that kind of spectral bias onto a colour original? With a dip in the green response and a boost to the blues and orange-reds. Because I seem to remember reading previously somewhere, that the aim was to emulate the apparent colour luminosity response of the human eye, which is totally different. Just curious really, since I generally simply 'play' with the colour sliders until the preview looks right. And all totally irrelevant if the aim is to emulate a yellow, orange or red lens filter of course. However, there are some features, like highlight and shadow preservation sliders, that are only available during RAW processing. Those are extremely useful in some cases and would need to be used before B&W conversion. WRT to non-destructive editing - surely it's all 'non destructive' as long as you don't overwrite the original raw or camera JPEG file? And philosophically; isn't all editing essentially destructive? I.e. getting rid of the unwanted. (Re: The above film spectral curve - it might be more useful if translated from a logarithmic to a linear form... or then again maybe not.)

But that would show more of the 6x6 Rolleiflex frame, not less. With some of the adjacent frame(s) showing, top and bottom.

Download the free 'GIMP' image-editing program. It has several functions that can fairly automatically correct colour casts like this. Using the 'Curves' tool and its grey-point picker, for example. Or 'Auto-colour' or 'Auto Levels' will usually also work. "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for life."

Lenses vary greatly in their construction, and it also depends whether the inner or outer helicoid has been inserted at the wrong thread start. I just had a Minolta lens apart that had a third ring with a very fine thread for infinity adjustment. That one nearly caught me, because I hadn't touched the main helicoid. Luckily I'd scribed up the alignment before moving it. P.S. The only thing lovely about Kowa lenses is that they're no longer made! 🤭

Weird that the full width of the film is shown in the scan, as well as the very top of the frame, but about 5mm has been cropped from the bottom. What kind of scanner does that? The colour's a bit piss-poor as well, and what's posted isn't orthogonal. So we're obviously not seeing the scanned file, but a screenshot. Are you sure it's not the viewing software that's cropping the image? What are the pixel dimensions of the file? If they're the same in height and width then your viewer software is at fault.

Surely that's a question to direct to the lab?