swansword

You could focus while the DOF Preview feature is engaged.

Not if it's down further than F5.6, because autofocus won't work at F8 and beyond.

My experience is if you can shoot at F4 1/125th, there's enough light for autofocus to work well. Although, as light falls off I find 200mm and up have more trouble with it. Setting spot focus does help.

 

I find it difficult to believe that a F1.4 lens doesn't open all the way on focus. Then, it must open more to shoot at F1.4? But I suppose it's possible.

In the galleries I am unable to add info in the text box for camera, shutter speed and iso. The aperture box seems fixed at 0.0. I haven't been to the site for years. After reading this discussion thread, I wonder how much effort I should spend here.

Just so no one thinks I exaggerate when I write on a forum:

 

When I stated I can keep running for a 30 hour power outage, I was serious. Most ups's one would use for a PC will last about 0.5 hours after the utility power fails. I use a Liebert GXT2-3000, with a spare battery cabinet. According to the monitoring program, Multilink, battery power is sufficient to supply power at the current rate for 1832 minutes.

 

I admit I went a little overboard, but when I started looking at UPS's I found out some things I hadn't known before, and based my decision on that. To replace the batteries currently costs around $700.00. I could have bought a couple of really good computers, but I already have that. I can tell you one thing, conditioned power from a double inversion UPS cures a lot problems users get from raw, straight off the pole utility power.

 

And I do not hype Linux. I am honest about it. I can accomplish anything, computer-wise, that I wish to without using MS Windows, especially media editing, but I'm not someone else. I'm me, and I know what I like.

 

Mac OS X is about as close to Linux as you can get, with some gui dressing on it. It's BSD UNIX. There is a project Darwin that is Mac OS X, but free, because Apple legally is required, if it wants to build a computer that uses BSD UNIX, to offer a cost free version also. This is called Darwin.

 

Mac OS X is great. I'm thinking of getting a mac just to check it out. I checked one out in 2002, but I didn't like it then. I keep trying different things, because I like to use whatever is best for a couple years, and then resurvey.

An inexpensive digital thermometer - $20.00 is accurate to within 1.0 degree. An inexpensive mercury thermometer is accurate to within 0.1 degrees. Here's a page with many thermometers, at competitive prices.

 

 

http://vwrlabshop.com/thermometers/c/1554/

I don't know if anyone knows this, but media editing software for MS Windows was

inspired by UNIX tools that work much better, are much more powerful, fast, and

flexible; and don't cost anything.

 

Running MS Windows Vista is like tying lead weights on a machine and throwing it

in deep water. Vista is laced with gobs of unnecessary programming code that

turn a machine to sludge.

 

XP isn't much better with the latest service pack. I use Linux, which is like

UNIX, but cheaper, like free. I have a free program called ImageMagick, written

by the best multimedia programmers in the world. This program, or actually

suite of programs, will absolutely blow anyone away.

 

There are so many things I can't do in Windows that I wouldn't attempt to use

Windows, except to fix it for someone else.

 

Windows turns to gobbledygook when it has been running for a few days. Linux

runs for years without rebooting. And, Linux flies compared to Windows. It is

so lean, fast, and powerful I can't believe I thought MS Windows was good at one

time.

 

Linux is not a treat to learn. You need to be committed, like to a marriage,

for a while. Linux is like a classy woman. You have to give her what she wants

before she will do anything you want. This takes time getting to know Linux.

 

It is an operating system with limitless opportunity for photographers. There

is a very high quality program called the gimp, or

Gnu_Image_Manipulation_Program that is layer oriented, and has plugins and

features I had only dreamed about. The best thing is, for any Linux Program,

and for Linux itself, there is live help available, from people who use the

software every day, on the IRC server, Freenode,Net. Linux comes equipped with

several IRC clients, and anyone can log into a channel, or chat room, like so:

 

/join #Debian

 

and ask any question about Debian Linux, any time, from anywhere there is an

Internet connection.

 

Most things Linux have a corresponding FreeNode.Net channel where beginners, or

experienced users can ask about how to do something in a program. The gimp

channel is called #gimp, and most of the channels are named after the program

that is the topic of the chat room. This means tech support is easy to find and

fast, 24 hours per day.

 

It would be too much for me to explain everything in Linux on a forum, but,

Debian Linux is a free download, and installs over the internet if you download

the boot disk of about 100 MB. Then, you can install one of more of over 17,000

software packages The Debian Project stores on over 300 mirror sites all over

the world.

 

There's at least 700 media manipulation programs, including MPlayer, and its

versatile, multi format platform video editing, remastering, viewing, and

conversion capabilities that it performs with blinding speed. There is a

popular program for film making called Cinerella for Linux, which is about the

best in a comprehensive production package. There is a small fee for commercial

use, but the project is primarily supported by motion picture studios.

 

What takes two minutes for Photoshop in Windows takes five seconds in linux. My

father uses Windows and Photoshop, and when I'm trying to work on his system I

feel like I'm going to jump out of my skin. It takes enough time that I forget

what I wanted to do next, and that's on a good piece of hardware.

 

If you have inclination toward computer operation, and wouldn't mind spending a

couple of days learning a new system, with a gui, mouse, and pretty much set up

like Windows; while keeping your Windows installation also, you can download the

boot image for Ubuntu Linux, burn it to a CD, boot with it, and it will install

itself along side Windows, placing itself, and Windows on a boot menu that pops

up at boot to allow you to pick an operating system.

 

Linux will always be ahead of Windows. Currently, 10% of the PC market uses

Linux, and that's not including companies like Google, IBM, or Oracle that

extensively employ Linux. Google has thousands of servers running Linux. nVidia

uses Linux Clusters to test their engineering sample boards.

 

The US Department of Energy uses Linux on the most powerful computer in the

world. The communication giant, SBC/AT&T uses Linux and mysql as a relational

database management system, with hundreds of thousands of tables, and trillions

of field values.

 

Linux is set to dominate the PC market in several years. Many of the largest

corporations are offering support to the Linux community. Anyone who sells

Linux is legally obligated to offer an equivalent distribution for no charge.

Fedora uses a file called boot.iso, found in the fedora mirror structure if one

pokes around a little. OpenSuse also uses boot.iso for network (Internet

install). Debian uses CD #1, or the network install CD.

 

All these disks are .iso files, gotten off any mirror site, like

http://mirrors.kernel.org , that need to be burned to disk. You'll never need

to worry about out of date application programs because Linux lets you install

the latest versions of all the software; and I think there are over 1,000,000

programs for Linux, roughly 100 times the available software for Windows; over

the Internet, whenever you feel like clicking the icon. You can keep working

while it upgrades, and you never need to reboot Linux after you install something.

 

Linux is industrial grade, and routinely performs for years without being

rebooted. My Linux system has been up since the last power failure, but now I

have a UPS, so if the power goes out, I can keep working for 30 hours, or until

it comes back on.

 

I only bring this information to your attention in the hopes it may be useful.

If it isn't useful to one person, it may of use to another. I surely do not

intend to force anyone into anything. We're all independent thinkers. I have a

degree in computer science, and computer programmer/analyst. It didn't take me

long to learn another operating system.

 

I don't say this to discourage anyone, but it does take aptitude for computer

operation to succeed with Linux on a desktop PC. Switching was one of the best

things I ever did.

Ok, here we go. Memory is where programs and data are stored, temporarily, for use by the processor. Hard drives are mass storage media. I couldn't imagine saving 200 GB of pictures in my whole life. You are saving too much stuff. You'll need a 10 TB array the way you're going. The key is to use good sense. In Windows, which I don't use, you can search for files by creation date, or last modification date, and you can look at all the old stuff, and toss what you don't need, like half of someone's head you don't know, and can't remember who they are.

 

Digital photography generates more garbage, because you can shoot practically forever, everything you want, and keep it all on a hard drive. You don't want to do that. Your hard drive will get like your bathroom if you always tossed toilet paper in the corner. It would get full. So, you have to flush the toilet paper, and flush the garbage photos you are never going to print, and don't even know what is a picture of anymore.

 

If it makes you feel better, you can upload all the garbage to any one of many digital graveyards, that host mostly worthless shots people didn't want to keep, but were afraid to delete from the entire Universe.

 

Many people have 150 GB of deleted files in the recycle bin. That should be emptied from time to time. You can also do a disk cleanup by going into my computer, right clicking on the drive, like c:\, choosing "properties", and picking "disk cleanup". That should buy you 40 GB back.

 

You're going to have to defrag the drive also, sometime, periodically. I know that's not a rigid, definitive answer, but it's really a matter of tastes. Some people like all their files contiguous, and other people don't mind the 30% performance hit on the machine you get with file fragments. I've seen where the machine boots so slow, people leave it on all the time.

I think it looks awesome the way it is.

Film v Digital: Why does anyone want digital to look like film? Digital image files, printers, and to a lesser extent, cameras have limitations on dynamic range film does not. Whenever a digital image is made into a compressed format, like jpeg, dynamic range is sacrificed.

 

To keep dynamic range means astronomically large image files, 100 MB for a 3 MP image, that todays computers could never manage manipulating. I have a 35 mm film scanner that produces 65 MB image files. It takes forever to load one in an editing program, and you need 512 MB of ram memory just to handle the image, plus more for the computer to operate.

 

When you save the image as jpeg, there went all your dynamic range, so the 65 MB file, containing the full range was a big waste of time, because the image was compressed to jpeg in the end. You can't see the difference on a computer monitor because the monitor also lacks dynamic range.

 

The technology of printing image files that look good is an occult science in and of itself. It's digital voodoo. It is the most complex concept, but it in essence means that the eye can be fooled into thinking a print looks very good. When it is examined with a loupe, it looks terrible. It isn't sharp, or colorful, but when it is looked at with good light, unmagnified, it is convincing.

 

Digital imagery is a science that has consumed the careers of some of the brightest people who ever lived. One step in the right direction is the .png file encoding. This is a lossless compression, with some sacrifice of dynamic range, but much less than jpeg. The file sizes are considerably larger, but the results are considerably better.

 

Png is an open source format, so anyone can write a program, build a camera, or make a printer that uses .png, and they don't need to pay a royalty, like with tiff images. And, tiffs are huge.

 

Printers are capable of wide dynamic range, but they aren't designed to print that way now. There will need to be some quantum leaps in computer speed to manage full dynamic range images. The thing is, most people don't care. They look at a print, and say, "Isn't she cute, all those curls", and they don't care if she's blurry, purple, a silhouette someone drew a face on, if half of her head is cut off by the photographer, or if the camera was zoomed out, and she's 1 mm tall.

 

I'm keeping my film camera for things that just can't be done with digital, at least not at this time. The technology exists to make CCDs capable of recording a wide dynamic range, and these are used in telescopes, because the dynamic range is so wide it is considerably greater than the eye can perceive. That might be fun in a camera, because you could shoot through outer clothing, and capture people in their undergarments. Wouldn't that freak some people out?