ashleypomeroy

April 30, 2019

It's an old thread, but it pops up in Google searches and I thought I'd chip in. I have the same problem as the OP - a 14N with a handful of batteries and a charger, plus the fake-battery power coupler unit, but not the cable that connects the charger to the coupler. I don't like to use the batteries too often because there are no replacements.

However I've found that you don't need that cable, or indeed the charging unit. I've been using a generic power adapter plugged directly into the fake-battery coupler. I'm not going to directly link to Amazon but if you google "Powseed 36W AC Multi Voltage" you'll get the chap, although I imagine any charger than can output roughly 7-8v at 3 amps+ would work. This particular unit comes with a bunch of different plugs and the biggest one fit my 14N.

I set it to 7.5v, at which voltage it can deliver 4 amps. The minor voltage difference hasn't phased the camera so far. I've just shot 40 images over the course of an hour and a half and the camera is still working fine. Off the top of my head it's supposed to have 7.3v / 3 amps, but not many chargers put out exactly that figure.

So as long as you have the fake-battery power coupler you can at least use the 14N tethered for the foreseeable future.

May 3, 2015

My word. What a coincidence. On the day I decide to look at film scanners -> google -> photo.net thread about film scanners -> the same names -> this thread.

I've dipped in and out of Photo.net over the years. There's a core of useful posts. Genuinely good technical information. But on the whole I find the site melancholic; it was founded in the early days of the consumer internet with very high hopes, but over time the eyes of the world have drifted elsewhere. It didn't keep up with dedicated product review websites, the technical nitty-gritty about late-90s film cameras isn't going to have a long tail, and even the underlying forum software feels anachronistic. The people are predominantly of a certain age range. And time is forever moving on, moving us all towards our date with the inevitable.

A few names keep popping up in the forums. The same half a dozen people posting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of messages over a period of a decade or more. Every forum on the internet has people like this; I was one of them a long time ago. I had a sudden horrible realisation that I was not as funny or perceptive as I thought I was. You either recognise your limitations and give up, or you work to improve them, or you never recognise your limitations and the world moves on without you.

This thread's OP stood out. Because the name starts with JDM and it has a little "10" next to it and some rolls of film. One of the elite, the hardcore elite. I remember clicking on the OP's profile a few times, and it depressed me. It was the profile of a man who held himself in very high regard. Which would have been fine if there was substance behind it. But the photographic portfolio - presumably built up over decades, the cream of his crop - didn't stand out in any way. It had a negative effect; it made me want to disregard whatever the OP said, because on a fundamental level he was not operating in the same field. "Photography is a visual art form that magnetically attracts people who do not have a visual sense and are uninterested in art."

Snapshots of tourist landmarks taken in full sun; the photographer had walked up to the subject, put it in the middle of the frame, pressed the button, job done! Next. And everything looked purple, the colours were strange in a way that didn't suggest it was a deliberate creative choice. There was no attempt at composition, no visual style. The photographs were uninteresting treatments of dull subjects. They lit no spark inside my brain, and I had no desire to look at them twice. I can barely remember any of them. You have to think about the longer term. What are you going to leave behind? On Photo.net and all the other forums - Manual Focus Lenses, Rangefinders.net - the legacy is page after page of "lens tests" and resolution charts but nothing of any lasting value. They don't work as lens tests because they're too informal and they don't work otherwise. They kept you amused; you could have built something of lasting worth.

I'm younger than the typical long-term Photo.net user. I was aware, back then, that time is forever moving on, moving us all towards etc. Pushing us towards the edge of the cliff, with your generation going over the edge first, my generation following. In practice you will just fade away, stop posting, go and slowly vanish. The internet is a transient thing that has a churn, leaves no legacy. Do you ever think about Galen Rowell, with his technically brilliant but dull landscapes that wowed people in the 1990s? He's not going to last. People will not think about him in the 2030s. He was a technical photographer, and technology moves on. The next generation will see it happen to my generation, and so on forever. It happens in all fields to everybody, novelists and filmmakers and pub bores and nowadays forum posters.

I'm going to quote at length from myself, which is bad form, but I'm a terrific writer and there's no point writing the same thing twice. Look at these snappy short paragraphs with aggressive clipped sentences and not the slightest hint of sentimentality, just cold hard truth.

"Some photographers have a knack for producing arresting images with black and white film. Most don't, but why do they persist? The world of awful internet photography is full of people who shoot with black and white film because Henri Cartier-Bresson shot black and white, and they want to be like him, so they copy his gear.

But Henri Cartier-Bresson shot black and white for solid practical reasons. Film was, for him, the paper on which his art was drawn. If you want to become Cartier-Bresson you have to copy the things that inspired him, otherwise you're only imitating a surface. You are Gary Numan to Cartier-Bresson's David Bowie. And you have to accept that the things he was inspired by might not be relevant any more. Cartier-Bresson is as much Paris and the lives and times he passed amongst as he is black and white film, and Paris isn't coming back.

Much as I am suspicious of the Lomo people, there is something to be said for photography as an extension of a life lived. Put the best camera in the hands of a boring person and you get nothing; give a thinker or feeler or life-liver a cheap point-and-shoot and he or she will bring back something, from a world of dreams and life.

For Cartier-Bresson photography was not the process of photographing things with black and white film, it was the act of capturing the emotional truth of a scene, or the act of generating a new sensation with an image, or perhaps he was simply paying the rent with some grab-shots of cute Parisians. Arty girly touchy-feely stuff, practical business stuff. Internet photographers never talk about that. They're not photographers at all, they're gear enthusiasts. They aren't fighters in the arena. Their faces are untouched by dust and sweat and blood.

Neither is mine. There's a point when every DJ realises he is just a DJ, and that no matter who hard he can rock a party he's still playing records made by other people. Photographers are DJs whose records are the stuff of human life. Eddie Adams watched as another man's brains were blown out, he did not pull the trigger. He watched as real life happened in front of him."

And inevitably this will appear with wonky formatting because Photo.net doesn't have a proper WYSIWYG editor. Let it be said that JDM von Weinberg and his mates inspired me, but not in a way he expected.

August 10, 2014

Firstly, I haven't read the responses. Taking your points in order: transience. I remember the first time I visited in St Mark's Square, Venice, pondering whether I should enjoy the experience or run around taking pictures of everything. It struck me that St Mark's Square had been around since before I was born and would be around long after I am dead, so I could take my time. Plenty of things will be around more than fifty years from now in broadly similar form. Of course St Mark's Square hasn't been around *forever* and it might be obliterated in a few centuries by the waves, but humanity has lost a great deal. We lost the ancient wonders of the world. There will be new wonders.

Fifty years from now the people will be dead or old, but again there will be new people to replace them, hopefully better and more interesting people. For those subjects that are born to die, a photographer can only take a snapshot of a moment, to present to an audience that is moving through time, in a culture that is moving through time; this is inevitable and you have to accept it. We are nomads drifting along on shifting sands.

There comes a time when you realise that your culture, your art, your education and upbringing were not the objective single truth. And that your history books were just one telling of events, and that the world you grew up in was just a small bubble that will eventually shrivel and pop. You realise that in the States they have no idea who Tony Hancock was; and I imagine that in India and China they are unaware of Parks & Recreation or the career of Robin Thicke, or indeed The Byrds, who were huge in America, not so much here in the UK, probably meaningless in China. We all all specks, and the camera pulls back and there are billions of us, clumped in larger specks that shift and fade.

Within living memory the European Powers *were* the whole of the meaningful world, with China and India and Africa as useful deposits of raw materials with some people living there. Five hundred years from now it will be *their* world - if not nationalities, then religions - and they probably won't care much for Edward Weston or European photographic art of the 20th century. They will have their own culture and art, and five hundred years further on they will be obliterated as well. To paraphrase Half-Life 2, one day all we cherish will be a thin layer of plastic ten metres beneath the topsoil. "Uncle Claudius, I wasn't the Messiah after all, would you believe that?"

The same is true of iconic news photographs. As a British person I am acutely aware of the fact that the things my grandfather and great-grandfather thought of as objectively important are now a thin layer of brass and bakelite; there were probably iconic news photographs of the second Boer War, but they mean nothing now. The same will gradually happen to the American Civil War, the Great War, Vietnam. Things date and age. You can try to keep them alive, but it's like a dam; the longer you hold back the tide, the faster the reservoir will empty when the dam finally breaks. If history is strong it will preserve itself.

And yet Julia Margaret Cameron's "Iago" still makes people pause, because the man is very handsome and the photograph is voluptuously beautiful. No matter that the model was just a hired model and that Cameron didn't have anything to say. The times, the technology, everything else is gone except for that man's face, which still makes women go weak at the knees. People are still the same, and until we evolve into blobs or develop nanotechnology we will respond to simple images of attractive people, or images of people doing something we can relate to. The simple stuff lasts, simple animal stuff. Childbearing hips, pornography, appealing people, the shallow silly stupid stuff of everyday life. We don't need to know why the kid with the big wine bottles has those bottles, the image is appealing because he looks triumphant and we were kids as well. The man about to jump into the puddle didn't quite avoid the water, and never will; we will never know what happened next, he is frozen forever. In my opinion art is the process of stimulating the minds of strangers who have not yet been born.

Point two, the pepper. In theory art as pure form *should* be timeless. Art that has a kind of objective connection with the human vision should should last just as long as human beings see the world in a certain world. In contrast, art that derives its value from knowledge of the story behind the art, or of the theory, is subject to two entropic forces. Firstly the art itself dates; secondly the theory because muddled with the passing. I always use the example of The Transformers, the popular toy range. The toys were launched in Japan under the Diaclone name, with no attempt at a story or charaterisation, and they flopped; they were relaunched in the West a year later with a comic, a cartoon, characterisation, and they were hugely popular, because the toys suddenly had meaning. The toys were the same, but now they had meaning. Eventually they will be just toys again, as meaningless as Dan Dare and Brassneck and forgotten superheroes and ancient Greek gods. They will be old plastic and metal toys from long ago, mantelpiece ornaments, because ultimately they're neat toys but I can't see people of the future idolising them.

But human beings love stories; they pass them down from generation to generation, and have done so for thousands of years. People love to think of Van Gogh as a tragic, haunted failure, and will tell stories about him for centuries to come, even if the stories no longer reflect reality. Nobody alive today knew Van Gogh, he is already mostly legend, an appealing legend that is easy to pass on. We remember the Greek gods because their stories were complex enough to be entertaining but were ultimately based on archetypes that date back to before history. Tragic lovers, boastful warriors, beautiful people cursed by envy, the successful king who had one fatal flaw, all of these will exist as long as we exist.

If I'm driving to a thesis, it's that story-based art will survive because people will generate or pass down the story, and the art will survive, albeit that the artist's original intentions may be forgotten. Form-based art on the other hand is "form that craves art", with the problem that the art is just an illustration of something lurking in the human vision system. Weston's pepper is a striking image that will eventually be replaced by imitations, or made obsolete by advances in technology. Why should we remember Weston's pepper, and not the exact same image shot by someone else? Who owns form? The form will survive long after the art has gone, which is unfortunate if you expect that your portfolio of abstract compositions will live on after you are dead.

Point ninety-seven: Time's effect on my own work. If human history is a train driving into the future, my work is asleep in bed because I decided to have a lie-in that day. I've been on the internet since before Photo.net and Flickr existed, and I can state with confidence that most if not all of the work exhibited here and elsewhere is "not even wrong". It doesn't exist on the spectrum of good or bad. It's just blank empty nothingness. Neither technically gifted nor meaningful nor honest. This includes my own work. In my opinion internet photographers who aspire to art are actually killing themselves, because they're perverting and obliterating whatever honest, unaffected truth they might have captured.

We would all be better off just taking snapshots of our families, because a hundred years from now someone might look at those snapshots and think "these people were like me; I wonder if they were happy? What were they like? What life did they lead?" No-one will remember you, or the people in the pictures; if your motivating force is the pursuit of personal immortality or lasting fame, your ghost will have a very disappointing afterlife. He will witness your life's work fade and vanish. The men and women who built and launched Voyager 2 did so in the knowledge that they would not be around to see how far it got. Not be around to see it fall into a star, or simply evaporate over the course of twenty trillion years. They were motivated by what they would learn in their own lifetimes.

Doomed to die. You know what happens after you die? Nothing. Your brain ceases to function. The universe is just a set of electromagnetic forces whirling about for no reason at all, it will eventually unravel into nothingness. There is no meaning, no end, nothing. And so forth. I could opine at great length on this topic, but the problem is that it takes a lot of work and it's just going to end up at the bottom of page three of a comments thread. It doesn't benefit me in this life and I was bored. And of course it will be dust in the wind when Photo.net goes away. That's a thousand words, let's not count the final paragraph. As always I meant every word and I am sincere. And as I hit submit there will be jitter and the formatting will be wrong, and the words I strove over will be made to look silly.

June 7, 2012

As far as I can tell the cheapest way of doing it, but not by much, is with a second-hand RZ67 (£200 or so), the appropriate adapter (£800), and any number of second-hand digital backs (£1,500 for a very old one). You'll be left with a gnawing empty feeling when you assemble it. You'll stand there thinking "what have I done?", just like in Bridge on the River Kwai. One problem you might not like is the cropping factor. Virtually all medium format digital backs have a 645-style aspect ratio and the sensors are slightly smaller than a 645 film frame, so with a 6x7 RZ67 you'd have a double cropping factor. No wide angle. This might explain why you can pick up RZ67s and RB67s cheaply on eBay. The professionals who once used them have done the maths already.

Kodak's old DCS Pro Back had a square sensor, but with an even heftier cropping factor (it was roughly the same size as one and a half 35mm film frames stacked on top of each other). Used prices are such that you have to ask yourself if it's worth spending thousands on something that will be unserviceable and unsellable in a few years, and this is assuming you can run it tethered with your modern computer, and ultimately for what? Medium format digital is only rationally relevant in a narrow set of contexts; it's one of those things where if you're not sure you need it, you *are* sure.

"Whenever there's any doubt, there's no doubt", that's the quote. From Ronin. Do you do a tonne of semi-automated commercial catalogue or portrait work involving fine fabrics? Are you a surveyor? Could you instead spend the money on a really good used film scanner and a huge bag of film? Or put it aside in case you get made redundant or you have to replace the exhaust on your car?

June 4, 2012

"I have had this suspicion for a while that those folks who are the most vocal on forums don't have many photographs to Photo.net."

In my experience there's a core of posters with 10,000+ posts - they're sitting at their computers hitting F5 right now - who either have two boring photographs in their portfolio, or thousands of boring photographs uploaded over several years. This isn't specifically a Photo.net problem. It happens to every website with a forum. The most obsessive F5-F5-F5-pounce people tend to dominate the proceedings because they're relentless. There's literally nothing else in their lives. It's their major social outlet, they would be destroyed without it. It's what they *do*. They cling to it.

In the long term they'll die of old age and be gone. Ordinarily this wouldn't solve the problem, because a new generation of the same people would just take their place, but given Photo.net's generally ageing demographics this will eventually solve itself. A lot depends on how long Photo.net can stay around; it's lasted quite some time, but I can't see it attracting a Facebook-style takeover, in which case rising costs will squash it eventually. The basic idea betrays its late-90s genesis. Remember Genesis in the late 90s? Phil Collins left and was replaced by a man called Ray Wilson. When even Phil Collins deserts you, you know you've got problems.

It is distressing that a website ostensibly about photography should so swiftly have become a haven for wafflers. You'd think that over fifteen years of so Photo.net would have thrown up dozens of incredibly talented people who would now dominate the world's image-making industries - top cinematographers, editorial photographers, photojournalists, a generation who got their start on Photo.net - but instead this did not happen. It's become something else entirely.<div></div>

June 4, 2012

I wasn't massively impressed with Genie Imaging's scanning service. Development wasn't a problem but the scan looked oversharpened and undetailed, like a very bad digital image from long ago. Viz the enclosed example, which has Genie's standard £5.99 scan on the left, my own using an Epson V500 on the right. It's 120 Kodak Ektachrome shot with a Yashica Mat. Their scan is 7200x7200, mine was 4779x4779, but seems to have more detail and looks nicer.

The Epson V500 cost me about £150. It takes time to scan stuff, and colour negative is a bind; no doubt a professional lab would do wonders, but I prefer the level of control I get scanning by myself.<div></div>

March 23, 2012

"Isn't that all the Kodak slide film currently on the market?"

Sadly yes. In brief, Kodak no longer makes slide film. Unless there's an obscure line they only sell to special customers, e.g. some kind of lithographic slide film, or something equally arcane. It's odd that the discontinuation of Kodachrome got quite a bit of press attention, but the end of the rest of Kodak's slide films seems to have passed the world with nary a whisper. I guess Ektachrome never had Paul Simon and the Afghan Girl.

Were there any famous photographs taken with Ektachrome? Probably thousands of advertising images, vivid landscape shots in National Geographic etc, but what about famous photographs, on a par with the burning monk or the migrant mother or the policeman blowing the brains out of the guerilla etc, or Marilyn Monroe in the nude. Photographs that people might point at and say "this was Ektachrome". Or was it too neutral for that?

March 3, 2012

"The techniuque may already have been covered, but I just wanted to contribute to the thread with a link to Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's amazing photographs using red/green/blue filters."

I was intrigued by this after seeing it many years ago, and so this afternoon I had a go myself - not at all scientifically, though, just using some of those disco light-style filters. I shot three exposures with my Yashica Mat, swapping filters, and ended up with something like this:

A quick shufty with Photoshop's auto-alignment and some colour balancing, and voila:

It's bloody awful, but I was pleasantly surprised just to get something that looks a bit like real life. The horizontal flip isn't a consequence of the colour process, by the way. The flare is from holding the filter in front of the lens. More examples (with twelve exposures a roll, I get four shots), and bear in mind I picked them for the colour, not the subject:

I was curious to see if there were any three-shot black and white cameras, because I remember reading about a three-shot colour wheel accessory for the Kodak DCS 460M, an early monochrome digital SLR. The example in one of the links above looks very bulky. I wonder if anyone sold a spinny colour wheel with a regular filter size? It would be a pain to use.

Imagine if one day there was a way to take a colour picture with a single exposure. Imagine that. It would transform the world - there would be no more racism, no more war.

March 1, 2012

"As you can see at the page Brian linked, the only remaining Ektachrome options are E100G and E100VS."

Alas, <a href="http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2156493/kodak-discontinues-colour-reversal-films">not any more</a>. Or not for much longer, anyway:

"In a notice sent to retailers and distributors around the world, and seen by BJP, Kodak has announced that "due to a steady decrease in sales and customer usage, combined with highly complex product formulation and manufacturing processes, Kodak is discontinuing three Ektachrome (color reversal) films."

The films are the Kodak Professional Ektachrome E100G, Kodak Professional Ektachrome E100VS Film and Kodak Professional Elite Chrome Extra Color 100.

"We estimate that, based on current sales pace, supplies of these films are expected to be available in the market for the next six to nine months; however, inventories may run out before then, depending on demand," says Kodak."

February 2, 2012

Years late, but here's a shot taken with a Yashica Mat 124G, f/3.5, using a Rolleisoft 1, which was the stronger of the two, on Kodak Portra 400:

"Maybe try doing a search on Flickr?"

You've made 3,600 postings here, and that's the best you can do? "Try searching on the internet"?

February 2, 2012

"I also noticed from people's picture of the duto filter that the glass has ecentric circles on it. Does rolleisoft filter have the same?"

I have a Rolleisoft 1, and it appears to have concentric circles. I use mine on a Yashica Mat 124G, which has a bay 1 filter mount. Here's an example of the effect, shot at f/3.5, which is wide open, with Kodak Portra 400:

January 31, 2012

Interesting discussion - I recently bought a roll that had expired back in August 1971 and stuck it through my Yashica Mat. ISO 32, red filter, two extra clicks on the shutter knob. "An extremely fine-grain panchromatic film of low speed and moderate contrast", it says in the little paper sheet that came in the box.

Example one:

Obviously very blotchy - doubly so given that I boosted the contrast with Photoshop - although the detail is there. I had no control over development, which was done by Genie Imaging in the UK. The whole roll turned out, although I bracketed a lot so there are basically only five photos. Here's the second example, without any retouching:

Very old-world look there. I have no idea how the box was stored. Still, 1971.

January 2, 2012

"I've not entered photo contests previously, but thought it might be helpful to gain some recognition."

No, it won't help in the slightest.

Let's play a game. Off the top of your head, name the winner of the 2008 World Press Photo Awards, go on. Don't look it up. That's a proper, prestigious award - no fee, by the way - that gets coverage in the press. Most people couldn't name any of the winners; there's no chance whatsoever that your local "lovely flowers, lovely trees" photo competition will help you at all. The National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Prize is also free. The National Geographic prize has a $15 entry fee. These have a $200 fee, presumably to keep out the riff-raff:

http://www.opcofamerica.org/awards_entry

It might bring you to the attention of other competition entrants. Photo competitions exist in a bubble, apart from the real world. Like Flickr groups and so forth. You'll end up trapped in a bubble of people who congratulate each other. You might enjoy this for a while; but one day you'll be puzzled that no-one in the street knows or cares who you are. Your photography will deteriorate because you'll be afraid to upset your fellow backslappers and that will be the end of you.

Anthony Suau, by the way. He also won in 1987. The ironic thing is that most people in the street don't know or care who *he* is, either.

January 2, 2012

"Further, he was generous enough to share the details of his approach to post-processing freely with the photographic community."

It's pathetic. I was expecting some kind of HDR-ed monstrosity but it's just a pathetic photography. The kind of thing most people could knock up in five minutes. It's a facile, useless example of instructional technique and - more importantly - it's a rubbish image. It looks tacky and cheap, like the kind of thing you'd see on a Hong Kong eBay auction for UV filters. He's chopped the tops off the trees, used awful selective colour with a shoddy mask, and it just looks rubbish. It makes the castle look like a cheap plastic model.

Shot with a Phase One P45+, no less. I picture a self-unaware idiot waffling on about the rapturous wonder of nature, etc; either incredibly naive and pampered, living in a bubble, or a trained salesman with a fixed smile. I'm seriously unimpressed with Luminous Landscape, to put it mildly, and all the people who write for it. Vast, vast quantities of expensive equipment lugged across striking landscape; utterly bland photographs of distant trees, pelicans, the same picture postcard rubbish year after year. Small businessmen who shoot images to illustrate lectures and workshops, pompous self-aggrandising miniature people who want their shot at immortality without putting in the work. They will pass from this world leaving nothing behind.

"I was so impressed with Belmonte that I took my family back the next day and was treated to a beautiful misty morning" - yeah, I bet you did, you woke them up at 06:00 so you could take a rubbish photograph of a castle. The weird thing is that the rest of his work, on his website, is often very good. Perhaps he was asked to submit an article to Luminous Landscape, and he just tossed something worthless off for the publicity. It doesn't help me at all.

January 2, 2012

"Is it possible to just put an IR filter on s digital camera?"

Yes, but the practicality of the results will depend on the camera. The infrared blocking filter in my modern 5D MkII is far too strong for this - the exposures are thirty seconds or more at ISO 1600 in bright daylight - but I used to have an old Kodak DCS 560 that could take hand-held exposures with a filter. The trick was to take several shots at different focus points until you work out infinity, and then stop down a little bit. Older cameras - Fuji S2, Olympus E-20 era - have thinner filters. The obvious problem is that you're stuck with infinity shots of landscapes, and by Gum you're going to get bored with the standard shot of trees next to a lake with clouds.

At least, I *hope* you're going to get bored. Otherwise you'll bore other people, with hundreds of interchangeable photographs of trees next to a lake with clouds. That's been done, you know? By other people. With access to taller trees, a nicer lake, bigger clouds. Than you.

EDIT: This wasn't personally aimed at one of the posters above, by the way: I scrolled past the other messages and ignored them. And lo and behold, an image of trees next to a lake with clouds. It's *the* cliche of infrared photography, because the trees are bright, the lake makes the ground look dark thus contrasting with the trees, and the clouds prevent the sky from being a solid black shape. Back to the original post...

But the thing is, if you're going to buy an older camera, you might as well get it converted. A second-hand 10D or something similar plus conversion and you have something far more flexible that you can always sell on eventually. E.g. if all goes well with Photo.net's attachments the photo below should be of the lovely Hannah Ashlea, shot with such a setup, which wouldn't have been practical otherwise (short of measuring out the distance with a tape measure).<div></div>

November 15, 2011

"If you read Ray's bio you may get a better understanding of what drives him to experiment with this stuff."

It's pretty obvious "what drives him to experiment with this stuff". People like that can often make a positive contribution to society, but their combination of relentlessness and complete lack of self-awareness is a killer when the obsession is misguided. They will continue to drive over the edge of the cliff. Since writing the above the user appears to have embarked on a quest to become a flying unicyclist, which will take years and end in failure which he will blame on external factors.

June 4, 2011

"I am disappointed in how a lot of people chime in on this issue with using the Old Canon FD lenses with the new digital bodies-- Nikon or Canon-- or in this case, Nikon 35mm film bodies."

The thread dates from 1997; the previous reply was posted in May 1997. All of the people above your reply have since lost their hair. Back in 1997 the only 35mm digital bodies were the older Kodak DCS models, which were astronomically expensive. The internet wasn't a great deal of use for this kind of information back in 1997, instead people had to make do with lengthy Usenet posts full of nonsense. Remember the paperclip in Microsoft Office? That was about five months old when this was originally posted. People still thought it was hilarious. 1997 is an unimaginably distant and primitive time. You, yourself, posted the above message over a year ago and you haven't posted since then.

Nonetheless this turns up as Google's top result for "canon fd nikon adapter". Bob Atkins has a pretty decent guide to the issue here, with some samples taken with an optical FD-EOS adapter:

<a href="http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/reviews/canon_fd_eos_adapters.html">http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/reviews/canon_fd_eos_adapters.html</a>

I surmise that FD-F adapters would have similar performance. They are widely available on eBay for about £20 or so; probably not very good, but as a novelty they're cheap. This chap had a go with the official FD-EOS adapter mounted on one of the extremely rare FD versions of the 200mm f/1.8 - the last FD lens of all, released several years into the EOS era - and although it's in Italian the caption says it all:

<a href="http://www.marcocavina.com/articoli_fotografici/Canon_200_1,8L_con_FD-EOS_converter/00_pag.htm">http://www.marcocavina.com/articoli_fotografici/Canon_200_1,8L_con_FD-EOS_converter/00_pag.htm</a>

There is also the option of mounting the lens on a Micro Four Thirds body, in which case there is no optical element but the focal length is effectively doubled, or alternatively you can mount FD lenses on a Sony NEX, in which case there's the standard APS-C crop.

All of this was science fiction back in 1997. The poor fools thought that we would have made contact with aliens by 2011, or that the United Nations would have invaded the USA with the help of FEMA; or that liberal democracy would have triumped and we would now be sticking machines into our bodies. Or there would have been a nuclear war with China. They had no clue back in 1997. eBay was barely around. No Facebook, can you imagine that? No Facebook. People lived separate lives and died alone.

May 15, 2011

I've tried something similar, also using CHDK, but with an old Canon S3IS, and I would definitely suggest using more than one camera, set apart by quite a distance. At some point the tripod is bound to be knocked, and if you have just one camera location there will be a noticeable jump in the footage at that point. With a second camera you can mask this with a cut. And you're bound to have days where someone stood directly in front of the camera for eight hours, supervising the work. On the positive side, shooting indoors you'll hopefully have constant lighting. And the Eye.fi card sounds sensible, because it means you won't have to touch the camera in order to pull out the memory card. I believe I used VirtualDub to assemble the individual frames into a film, although it wasn't nearly six months long. As I understand it most compacts have a digital shutter, rather than physical shutter blades, and so in theory they should be more durable than an SLR; I'm always worried that I will burn out the SLR's shutter. Although - as Mr DeSimone points out - you could cover 6x30 days with 3600 shots, it would be good form to shoot at a much higher rate than that, because you'll then have more flexibility in post-production to use different frame rates. I'll be interesting to see the results, anyway. "I did a 24-hour time lapse project of my daughter, and the tethering worked great." Did your daughter not mind being tied up?

May 15, 2011

I generally use DPReview for specifications, and their reviews are very thorough. Photozone.de is handy although I prefer the clever 3D blur plot graphs at SLRGear, which do a much better job of illustrating the performance of a lens. I like to slide the sliders back and forth, back and forth, watching the graph wobble.

There's also Lenstip.com, which seems unknown outside Europe, but has a wide range of lens reviews which *seem* extraordinarily obsessive although they might be nonsense. They certainly use more technical terms. SLRlensreview has a useful bunch of reviews of older lenses mounted on Canon bodies, although it also seems to be very obscure (perhaps people confuse it with SLRGear).

For modern Canon lenses The-Digital-Picture is pretty much definitive, although the writer goes ON and ON and ON and, like so many of these sites, I have a mental picture of a man who routinely asks his kids to stop, walk back ten paces, and then walk towards him again so that he can photograph them walking towards him. My desire for objective data jars with my innate humanism - because, in a way, I made this happen, it's MY FAULT - and it just reinforces my alienation.

"For me, the most ATTRACTIVE thing about the focus limiter switch is its POSITIVE ACTION. When I slide it forwards it MOVES into PLACE with an authoritative CLICK. Like the rest of the lens it is weather sealed. This is a GOOD FEATURE. The ridges on the switch are carefully aligned so that I can grip them with my thumb. This is useful because my thumb is quite smooth. The ridges are painted white, just like the rest of the lens. Compared to the earlier version of the lens, the focus limiter switch has moved slightly clockwise around the barrel. This will be of concern to people who use a quick-release tripod head. Fortunately etc etc etc"

"Juza Nature Photography" is very good, too, although it's heavier on pretty pictures than objective test data. The fool who runs it spends most of his time traveling abroad and taking stunning photographs than photographing resolution charts! What a lunatic. I hate him because he's younger and more handsome than me, but at the same time I admire him. And, dammit, men can admire other men, can't they? Even if he doesn't move my loins, I can understand why women would melt at the sight of him. I mean, Marlon Brando was a handsome man when he was young, with his big muscles... his strong arms, but I never wanted to kiss him or anything.

William Castleman's website also has a good range of entirely Canon-based tests, using a creepy-looking and yet seductively attractive showroom dummy. He also has a go at the Canon 50mm f/1.0 and lays into it like Ike Turner laying into Tina Turner - but scientifically - and that pleases me. The other posters above have some good answers, too, don't just dismiss them.

Do I use Photo.net? When I think of Photo.net I think of this page:

http://www.photo.net/equipment/sigma/sigma20-vs-canon2035

In which the original poster has a sincere go at evaluating two lenses; the people in the thread below immediately savage the man, absolutely rip him to shreds as if offended that someone is trying to help them! It just puts me off. And there's the Nikon D1X review which has some underexposed photos of a boat hull. Some of the historical information is useful. Olympus date codes, that kind of thing.

May 15, 2011

"If you don't mind shooting film, there is an interval timer built in to the Canon EOS 10s (10 outside USA)."

While we're just showing off our knowledge - 'cause that's what we're doing, really, it doesn't answer the question and it's of no practical use to the original poster, or anybody - the old Kodak DCS 520 and 560 digital SLRs, which were based on EOS 1n film bodies, also had intervalometers, as did the fourteen-megapixel full-frame SLR/c. You'd be mad out of your head to swap your 5D for one of those, or indeed an EOS 10.

Also, DVD stands for "digital VERSATILE disc", and despite urban legend men *do* have lower-pitched voices them women. Bigger larynxes, you see. For this reason women often affect a lower-pitched voice, in order to appear more authoritative. Ultimately however this just freaks men out; I should know, I am one.

I've always wondered if there's a patent issue that prevents Canon from including intervalometers in modern bodies, or if they're just trying to sell more remote controls; it's a useful feature, handy if you're shooting e.g. lightning, or timelapse footage, or you just don't like touching the shutter button in case of germs. Kodak put all kinds of odd things in their firmware; the option to develop raw images in-camera seems to have made a comeback in recent years, lens optimisation was ahead of its time (although it didn't work at all), perhaps someone will start putting games in the cameras again.

May 15, 2011

I used to have a 350D, and I bought one of the cheap clonse grips to go with it - my theory was that an official grip would add almost nothing more to the resale value of the 350D, although it might make it sell a little bit faster. The same with the batteries; I bought the Hong Kong replacements, and they worked and took nothing from the resale value.

You know, Photo.net threads have a habit of wandering from the topic - usually with a "why the hell would you want to do that?", or "you're the idiot for shooting digital, when you could be shooting film", but I admire the speed with which this one turned into a debate about the relative merits of a grip versus carrying spare batteries. Or "I don't have one of those; but I *do* have a completely different model, and it's sweet! BLOWS X OUT OF THE WATER!" I'm going to return to the topic at hand in the next paragraph, which is just after the end of this sentence.

In my experience the clone grip worked absolutely fine over the course of a year, with quite heavy use, before I sold it and the 350D. The battery compartment did not pop open; the buttons continued to work; the slot for the 350D's battery compartment door was the right size; it fed power to the camera; the camera did not fizz and sputter and short-circuit and blow up. The shutter button felt a bit springier than the camera's shutter button, but it worked. There is a risk that the cloned grip might break, and that the cost of the original plus its replacement will outweigh the cost of a brand new and presumably more reliable Canon original. Having said that, I have read about official Canon grips breaking, and my old 10D's built-in shutter button is ropey as heck, so I suspect you'd be stuffed either way. You're probably going to sell the 350D long before the grip breaks.

I'll add that I also bought a clone grip for my 5D - which worked - and as I write these words I am sitting precisely seven feet to the left and two inches above the clone grip that I have screwed into the base of my 5D MkII, which also works. The money I saved I spent on something else.

On a tangent, as far as I remember the 350D was the first digital EOS that had a widely-cloned grip; the grips for the D30/D60/10D and the 300D were never copied, or at least I have never seen any on eBay. For this I reason I have an official Canon grip with my infrared 10D, and it works. I assume that the digital SLR market was too small for the Chinese clonse manufacturers to bother with until the 300D came out; the 350D was the next Canon camera along, and the fourth-shift factories were waiting for it. There's a secret history of Chinese clone manufacturers that will probably never be written.

Posted April 11, 2011 · April 11, 2011

Same lens, same model - freckles don't show in infrared - but mounted on an infrared 10D:

It's a bit too long for comfort on an APS-C camera; the 135mm f/2.3 would be a pretty good APS-C analogue of the 200mm f/3 on a full-frame camera, although I suspect it would be hard to tell them apart in the camera bag!

Posted April 10, 2011 · April 10, 2011

For the heck of it, and because I could, and the weather was nice, and so forth, I decided to use this very lens to photograph an actual person, viz:

The lovely Hannah Ashlea there - she almost has the same name as me, except that it's spelled differently and has Hannah in front of it. You have no idea how long it took me to Photoshop those freckles in.

Anyway, as a portrait lens for portraits rather than test charts it's a lot better. The purple fringing is less obvious with low-contrast subjects - such as a human being - and the centre sharpess is, if not outstanding, or even particularly good, at least not awful. That picture was shot with a full-frame 5D MkII with no cropping at all, at f/3, and there's very little vignetting. The background is far enough away that it's mush.

April 6, 2011

I've had one of these stuck on the front of my 5D MkII for the last few months, and I wrote a blog post about it back in December:

<a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/olympus-24mm-f2-stay-frosty.html">http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/olympus-24mm-f2-stay-frosty.html</a>

Here's a shot at f/2:

Previously I had the 24mm f/2.8 (in fact I still have it), and I was curious to see if the 24mm f/2 was better; it's pretty obscure on the internet, as the original poster points out. I don't have a formal test setup, but my copy was sharper in the middle at f/2.8 than the f/2.8 at f/2.8, and at narrower apertures it was essentially the same, although the f/2.8 seemed fractionally sharper in the corners. NB These are individual samples of long-discontinued, second-hand lenses that I mounted non-natively with a cheap adapter (the same cheap adapter), so it's possible that your sample might be better. I think of the f/2 setting as a kind of emergency; the centre is decently sharp, but there's a purple glow to everything, and the borders are hopeless.

The bokeh isn't very attractive and even at f/2 you can't generate much of it, viz:

Alpacas come in pairs. One problem at f/2 seems to be coma, which may be a function of the adapter, may be a function of the lens, dunno. Point light sources around the edge of the frame assume a swirly appearance. For astrophotography at f/2 it would be a disaster although, as I say, this might be a consequence of the adapter. I have read that old manual focus lenses with floating elements fare badly when used with an adapter unless the adapter is precisely machined to exacting tolerances, whereas my OM-EOS adapter is a bit wobbly. Nonetheless, stopped down to f/8 I have no problems with it. There is waveform distortion, as per one of the earlier posts, but it's not noticeable unless there are horizontal lines top and bottom of the frame.

Every 55mm filter I have vignettes with the lens, so I use a 55-67mm step up ring and a 67mm filter instead, which makes the lens look like a miniature copy of the Zeiss 21mm. As with all the other Olympus lenses I have, the colours seem a bit flat. Here's a shot of Salisbury Cathedral wide-open:

Overall I like it, although I don't really love it. The f/2.8 version is cheaper, smaller, and - except for central sharpness at f/2.8 - it's just as good. I suspect for my shooting style I would be better off with the Olympus 35mm f/2 or 28mm f/2 however.

February 15, 2011

"Sticky grip"

I had a similar problem with an old Canon 1000. One thing you can try is talcum powder - puff some of it on the grip and wait. It doesn't look very nice, because the grip goes off-white, but it gets rid of the stickiness. Plus you have nice-smelling hands.

I wonder what went wrong? My older EOS 620 and my newer EOS 50 have perfectly fine grips, but it seems that the mid-period EOS film cameras went gooey. Perhaps there was some wonky rubber going around.

Sign In

Profiles

Forums

Blogs

Events

Downloads

Gallery

Store

Posts posted by ashleypomeroy