rodeo_joe1

Highly unlikely. The CdS cells chosen by Sover would be the closest he could get to the originals. I'm pretty sure of that. But the acid test would be to compare the meters when pointed at various coloured card or subjects with different pre-dominant colours. Maybe even to a variable-colour RGB LED strip. Also, some plant dyes reflect strongly in the UV and IR regions to attract insects. Maybe point an IR remote control right into the lens and see if it's detected by the meter? In any case, it's a match between meter sensor-response and film sensitivity curve that's important, not absolute flatness of response.

Nope, not here, and I must have developed thousands of batches of films. But then I usually stick with T-max or FP4+, and have done since shortly after T-max was introduced. Even before that though, the spent or part-used developer was a pale yellow at most coming out of the tank; while re-used D-76 was often water-clear after even several films. P. S. and WRT that Remjet removal video. Pure sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) was easily and cheaply obtainable as a drain cleaner until recently. It's now been replaced with a drain cleaner labeled "with Caustic Soda" in near identical bottles, and consists of mainly sodium carbonate plus a little caustic soda. So beware, and stock up with pure Caustic Soda if and when you can find it. Damned safety nannies at work no doubt!

Unlike any batteries provided with a Metz 45CT-x, or any other make or model of hammerhead flash from that era. Yes, you can pick up a Metz 'potato masher' for next to nothing, but then you'll pay through the nose for a replacement battery pack, or spend hours replacing the furry Nicads in the pack supplied. There's nothing unusual about a flash lasting 40, 50, 60 or more years. Even cheap Hanimex and similar brands from the 1960s and '70s can be found in working condition. It's just that faster recycling, more efficient circuitry and more compact and ergonomic designs have made old flashes largely redundant.

It's 4 meters, not millimeters. That's the subject distance. The calculation of depth-of-field is a complicated formula that involves calculating the interception of the film or sensor plane with the cone of light rays projected by the lens. Where the cone diameter equals something called a 'circle of confusion' - honest, no kidding - is deemed to be the limit of acceptable focus. This 'circle of confusion' is dependent on the film or sensor frame size. E.G. For the 36mm x 24mm 'Full-frame" size it's usually set at 0.029mm, but it's a fairly arbitrary choice, since some people will think a larger circle of blur is acceptable, and others that it's too much. The angle of the cone of rays varies with the aperture diameter and the focal-length of the lens (plus any lens extension due to focussing). So you can see that a lot of variables have to be taken into account by any accurate D-o-F formula. Which is why I leave it to my spreadsheet to calculate. It all starts with the basic formula for conjugate-focii (subject-to-lens, and lens-to-image distances) The formula is: 1/f = 1/v + 1/u Where f is the lens focal length, v is the lens to image distance, and u is the distance from lens to subject; all expressed in the same units. With millimetres being the most preferred unit of measurement. Starting with that basic formula and a bit of trigonometry, you can work out the out-of-focus light cone intersection with the image-plane and calculate the corresponding subject distances for near and far limits of focus. Easy! (Not) 🤔

That's true, I am old and I do need new specs, but I can still tell camera shake from out-of-focus blur! The first shot exhibits both focus blur and camera shake! Look at the chrome trim of the car window - it appears thinner and more defined in the vertical strips than in the horizontal parts. Showing that the camera was jabbed downward as the shutter was pressed. And the tractor shot is definitely sharper in the vertical axis than it is horizontally. And now that I look closer at the small shot of the two girls in white frocks, there's some diagonal blur there too. So presumably all taken by a fairly inexperienced photographer. P. S. I've just tried the camera-shake 'correction' filter in PS 2022 version. It's not very good I'm afraid, but does get a bit more definition into the image. It supposedly uses AI, so you get no say in the direction in which sharpening is applied.

Yes, it's a legacy from Broadcast TV and linked to the mains power frequencies used in those different areas. 60Hz/60 fps in the states, and 50Hz/50 fps used in the UK and Europe. The idea was to prevent a rolling beat-frequency between the mains power and the TV frame rate. It has some use today when filming/videoing under flickering mains-powered artificial light. All very well... except the flicker rate is at twice the mains frequency. So you might still get a 'hum bar' across the middle of the frame, but static and not rolling.

If you use the free VLC player it gives complete details about the Codec used. IIRC the option is in the tools tab. Whatever, the option is in there somewhere.

The usual symptom of a faulty DP-11 is a jittery reading. The needle will flicker with the slightest touch of the aperture ring or shutter-speed knob. Sometimes just tapping the prism-housing will cause a jitter. That's the symptom of a worn or dirty resistor ring. A steady reading that's just different from another meter could be due to any number of reasons. Maybe the meter on-switch in the base of the camera might be corroded, a dying battery, a sticky AI follower, a lens with a lot of vignetting, or simply the different response or acceptance-angle characteristics between the TTL meter and the handheld one. None of those latter issues, apart from a sticky AI follower, will be fixed by getting a new finder. And as I already said, the centre-weighted averaging used in Nikon's F2 finders isn't that great. It's very subject dependant and only slightly better than a straightforward averaging reading. It's also affected by the focussing screen fitted.

I bought a Jobo CPE-2 rotary processor, specifically to do C-41 and 5"x4" sheet film. I found that a pre-rinse was absolutely necessary to avoid foaming marks, due to the developer not immediately covering the whole film. After my first few sheets of 5"x4" were ruined, I went online and found the advice to use a pre-rinse. Problem solved, and no more foaming marks! But a pre-rinse is not necessary with a small inversion-agitation tank at all. Unless you just want to bring a very cold tank up to temperature. Even then, an external dunk in a tempering bath can acheive that without pre-wetting the film. P. S. I'm also curious which 120 films turn a pre-rinse black. Unless you're putting the backing paper in the tank along with the film?! 😄

There's usually no need to pull the backing paper any tighter than it comes out of the camera. In fact over-tightening can give 'cinch marks' which are stress lines that turn black in the developer. If the camera has such a sloppy winding mechanism or slack pressure-plate that it gives loose-spooled film, then the camera needs repair! FWIW I always used to pack a bit of aluminium kitchen foil in my rollfilm camera bag. Then you can quickly wrap exposed film to protect it from even the strongest light while carrying it. No need to be neat, you can just scrunch the foil around the film - after taping the spool with the lickey-sticky tab of course. Oh, and in my experience at least 50% of photography-related YouTube videos are full of BS.... and the rest just give dubious advice!

A phone camera is about 1/10th of the size of a 'proper' camera. Everything scales down, (or up in the case of depth-of-field) and according to my depth-of-field spreadsheet, the D-o-F of a 5mm lens at f/1.7 is about 18m with a 4m focus; while a 50mm lens @ f/1.7 has only 0.6m focus-depth with the same subject distance. In short, a phone camera has almost no selective focus ability, and no way to throw the grating out-of-focus. OTOH, the lens in the phone camera is probably small enough to 'see' completely through one of those grating holes if poked close enough to it. Whereas the bigger SLR lens will always be 'looking' at some of the surrounding metal. There are online depth-of-field calculators where you can see the effect of different focal-lengths and apertures. It'll be instructive to plug different numbers into one and see how the D-o-F is affected. This is the first such calculator that Google threw at me. You need to select a specific camera rather than having a free choice of format size, but it does the job.

It is - very! But why not just use one of your 'bench-marked separate meters'? The DP-12 will still only give you rather variable centre-weighted averaged readings. Whereas even Nikon's early attempts at matrix metering - FA, F801, etc. - gave far more consistent exposures. Plus the DP-12 also uses a dirt-prone variable resistor connected to the shutter speed knob by a bit of string. So no guarantee of it being any more reliable.

Me neither. I've done quite a bit of C-41 processing, and even when totally 'clapped out' the developer has only been a tawny brown. Usable C-41 colour dev should be no more than a mid Amber colour. About the colour of British Bitter beer at the darkest. If the dev was pale when it went in the tank and black when it came out, then the film is definitely suspect. Ferrania haven't been in business for decades, so goodness knows what stuff is being sold under that label.

Museum curators and archivists don't get paid a fortune, and most that I've met are glad to talk about their work. Maybe get friendly with the archivist(s) at your nearest museum - that's if you can find them in their (usually basement) dungeon. There's also lots of stuff online about archival procedures - not so much about putting right the result of not following it! P. S. The PN member called 'Invisible Flash' runs an archive. It probably wouldn't hurt to contact them.

I've been tempted by a number of iterations of Bronica models, but all that I tried seemed to want to leap out of my hand when fired. Not to mention making a dead-awakening racket. Just couldn't ever bring myself to buy one of the noisy beasts. I'm sure they all work just fine - inside a sound blimp!

The SB-24 hotshoe connection can be tested by shorting the centre pin to the 'earth' contacts hidden between the plastic hotshoe foot and the lock-down screw. These sideways contacts are often overlooked when it comes to checking for dirt or corrosion. They can also get pushed in, such that they don't make proper contact with the side of the camera's metal hotshoe slide. The test fire button on the flash is no guarantee of connection between camera hotshoe and flash foot.

CdS was generally accepted to have a flatter response to colour than the early SPDs. Or at least closer to the human eye response. Whereas Silicon is naturally more sensitive to red and IR, and almost blind to blue. This is rectified these days by special doping, coupled with optical filtering directly on the chip, but back in the late 1960s/early 1970s it needed quite a thick optical filter in front of the diode to attenuate the red response. I'm guessing that the CdS meter is actually more correct than the SPD meter. P. S. I'd be interested to know more about the element 'Silicium'. Is it anything like Silicon? Or Silcone as it's often called by those airheads in the media. I've often wondered how those non-conductive silicone chips they keep talking about actually work.

We'll, there's a big clue that either the developer or blix is done for. The film should at least be clear at the edges if the blix is working though. Colour developer doesn't keep. It's best used fresh. It'll oxidise in almost any container within days or weeks, no matter how airtight you think the bottle is. Plastic containers are the worst, because most common plastics are gas-porous and will let oxygen atoms slip past their molecules easily. Glass bottles are OK, provided the stopper has a truly airtight gasket of some sort, and that they're filled brim full. Otherwise the developer will almost certainly spoil in storage. Even with good storage, home colour developing is always a gamble if you haven't got enough throughput of film to use up the chemicals within a week or two of mixing. What was the film, BTW? Bulk cine stock has a 'remjet' coating that's dark and opaque until rubbed off.

All scanners have, and need, a clear calibration area to allow the sensor and light source to be measured across the scan width. This compensates for vignetting in the scan lens, and pixel-to-pixel sensitivity variation, etc. If the calibration area is partially blocked - by a stray hair or dust-ball or the like, then the calibration procedure will apply an unneeded compensation that shows up as a darker or lighter* line or streak running across the scan. This might be what happened here, but in any case a scanner will need internal cleaning from time to time, because dust in any optical system is never good. OTOH the fault might have nothing to do with the calibration area, but that would be the first and most obvious thing to check. *Depending on whether a positive or negative image is being scanned. Also any coloured obstruction, such as a stray piece of film in the calibration aperture, will give a coloured streak.

The physics of this are a bit complicated, but two easily explainable points are: 1. A shorter focal length lens and a small sensor size - such as in a phone-camera - have a much greater depth of field than larger sensors and longer focal length lenses of the same aperture. Therefore your phone-camera is unable to throw the grating out of focus enough to become invisible. 2. Light radiates away from objects (after reflection) as if the object was a collection of tiny point sources. Such that distant objects radiate light towards you in almost parallel bundles of rays. These parallel bunches of light pass through holes more easily than light that's closer to the holes and will hit the holes 'side on' - if that makes sense. Like a pencil or your finger, that can easily poke straight through a hole, while a pointed cone cannot. Meaning distant light rays can 'poke' through the grating and hit the camera lens much more easily than light radiating from just the other side of the grating. And when the camera lens is focused at a distance it can catch these near-parallel pencils of light and reassemble them into a sharp(ish) image. Not a physically perfect analogy, but close enough I think.

Good thinking! But could I suggest that a similarly folded strip of aluminium kitchen foil would be slightly stiffer, more robust and reflect more efficiently? P. S. It's not just the D80 popup flash that still emits when set to "--". This can be easily checked by pointing your camera into a mirror and seeing the popup flash blind the camera when reviewed. Yet another reason why i-TTL's optical slaving is a bit crap and radio triggers are the way forward.

The revival of this thread seems quite fortuitous, since I just dug out an old Rollei SL35 along with Zeiss West-German made, single-pin 50mm Planar f/1.8 lens. I acquired it years ago and put it aside since the camera's FP shutter tapes had come unglued and repair was going to be a tedious job. More than the camera was worth at the time. However, it's interesting that the lens versus body opinion expressed above has now completely reversed; with nobody wanting a QBM fit body, but plenty of people lusting after the Zeiss Planar and Voigtlander Color-Ultron lenses. That old Planar has cleaned up nicely, and I'm looking forward to using it on a Sony body when the adapter I just ordered arrives.

You might want to try another forum Jose. I suspect most LF users know, and practise, how to stop their negs and prints from deteriorating or getting damaged in the first place. Old (pre-digital) books on photography tended to have a 'prevention is better than cure' attitude as well. I'd surf some archivist's websites and the like. Most of those processes involve re-wetting film or prints and applying, or dunking in, chemical baths. All risky stuff that can easily go wrong and make things worse. Go the digital restoration, or film copying route first, because at least that's fairly risk free and non-destructive. For example: Increasing the contrast of a faded print chemically would involve bleaching back to a halide and re-development, or metal toning. A skill that is likely to involve destroying a few prints to acquire. Whereas simply optically filtering and copying has almost zero risk of damage to the original. Plus I don't think anyone here would want to advise you to do anything that might put your negs or prints at any risk. Professional archivists, OTOH, should have been through that apprenticeship and know what works and what doesn't. But I suspect most of them will still advise a non-physical form of restoration as a first resort.

And a set of ear defenders and a sturdy tripod to combat the mirror slap! I always liked the look of Pentax's 645, but never owned one. A Contax 645 might be a good option too, except a bit harder to come by... not to mention staggeringly expensive. Nothing wrong with the old metal Mami 645 bodies, but the more plasticky N series Mamiya lenses were optically better on the whole than the C series.

The blur of the 1st and 3rd images is due to camera-shake. So no clue as to the focussing ability of the camera or photographer to be got there. (There's a motion-blur correction filter available in PS too, that could improve the definition.) I'm pretty sure that direct vision (eye-level) viewfinder bakelite Brownie cameras were available in the mid 1950s. A few wire-frame finder cameras as well, and most TLRs had a sports finder facility. Beyond that it's pure guesswork as to what camera might have been used... and why does it even matter?