michael_darnton1

If I had to guess, I'd say the film buckled and popped in the middle of the exposure, maybe from heat build-up in the camera. Do you have more than one image that looks like this?

Better yet, read this:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/ht/trashprefs.htm

It tells a trick to delete the file on startup.

The usual recommendation for Photoshop problems is to delete the preferences file. I can't tell you where this is for your particular version (it moves around a bit), but you can look it up on the web.

Data provided by the "info" flag for the first photo says it was shot at ISO 2000. I'd say that's the problem. No data is provided for the older one.

How about putting up some pix, so we can see what you're not liking?

I think it's more of an overall cast, but you don't see it because all the areas where it would normally show are very light. I'd do Matt's strategy, but without the gradient--just push in a bit more blue, and lower the saturation a bit.

Yes, if it says something like "100-240V" in the fine print on the charger, the only problem is a mechanical one, not electrical.

How about just saying what you like about what you see, and sticking with that until you figure out the other things that you're currently uncertain about?

So, Lex, let's be totally clear about what you just said: it's OK to be a jerk when there are other jerks around and the surroundings are dangerous and irritating.

I wonder if he get slugged a lot. He deserves it. It's non-contact assault with a camera, and a good reason for people to hate photographers. What a jerk!

I don't think the results are confusing at all: you have three people telling you not to buy a flatbed scanner, and one telling you to read the reviews carefully. What's confusing? :-)

No, believe me, I've been through the whole flatbed thing backwards and forwards. There's a good reason there's a consensus among photographers who are concerned with the best quality that flatbeds don't work with 35mm.

After my original film scanner broke, I had a succession of flatbeds, based on the glowing reviews each got. The last is a 4400f (by the time I got that one, I was too many times burned to spend much money), and the images don't even look good on a computer screen. The conclusion I've drawn is that flatbeds just don't do the job.

 

Lately I've gotten into large format, and started looking again at scanners. Interestingly, the large format guy are a lot less starry-eyed than 35mm photogs--they almost universally realize that 4X or 5X (up to 5x7 from 35mm) is about as big as you can go from a flatbed before things start falling apart, and I think that's really about right.

 

Something I have read about, but not tried yet, is to have the local on-hour photo place scan negs as if for large prints, not for 4x6 prints, which involves them setting the scanner they use to some higher resolution that's a lot better.

Ha! Try telling all those news photogs chasing after pix in the foreground of old newsreels that the Graflex (and many of them were using the 5x7 model!) isn't a hand camera!

 

For a few years I had mine (a 4x5 Super D) fitted up with a 300/4.5 Heliar and used it to shoot 4x5 Polaroid 3000, handheld, available light at 1/30. The guys who made it weren't dummies: it's a lot steadier than you think.

 

Mine had originally come from a portrait studio, where it had sat on a tripod for 30 years. They're great cameras. I've had mine for 30 years, and it's the one camera I've had that I never considered selling.

 

I see on the chart that one speed isn't noted: that's called "drop-shutter", which, if the tension is right, comes in at around 1/5 second. You set the curtain to "O" (open) and when you push the release, first the mirror rises, starting the exposure, and then the shutter closes, stopping it. That's the flash synch speed--my Super D has synch built in, but you can also rig up a switch that's fired by the mirror-setting lever, on earlier models.

I don't think you can make any generalizations at all. Who do you think shot more film, photographers shooting transparencies for publication, or all of the wedding, school and portrait photographers shooting millions of kids and families? Likewise, don't forget the stereotype horror of having to sit through amateur vacation slide shows. People have always used whatever was ppropriate.

Have you tried wiping off the electrical contacts on the back of the lens and inside the camera's lens mount?

I suspect the problem is that the printer is saying the camera doesn't have the resolution (which he's used to expressing in file size) necessary for the image size. Then, the right response is to say "print it anyway."

Answering this from a Nikon perspective (sorry) I think it matters what lens. With mids and teles, which are sort of the same all across, then the larger the "film" the greater the amount of data, and full frame has to be better, and that's totally logical. But with wide angles, which is what I mostly use, it's nice to have the often really poor corners (in full frame) cut off, and what remains is better than it would have been from full frame, though you need to use wider lenses. Currently my favorite lens is my 20mm, and with film it was a 28. . . but my 20 with the edges cut off is a better 28 than any 28 I ever owned.

Batteries don't last forever----life is based on calendar time, not recharge cycles. Two, three years might be the limit. How old are yours.

The last big paragraph in the link above-- http://www.markerink.org/WJM/HTML/af_expla.htm -- deals with that. The number 5.6 was suggested by someone else, and I went with it. The salient point, though is that the functional f opening must be at least (small) high enough to allow *every* lens that will be focused to function, and given that many commonly-used zooms shift to 5.6 at their long ends, that seems to dictate 5.6 if not something even smaller. Consequently, no matter how fast of a lens you hang on your camera, the autofocus isn't going to be focusing at anything close to the max aperture--it will simply ignore the extra glass hanging out past the f5.6 limit that's predetermined by the system.

 

This is similar to the reason point-source enlargers work so well: it doesn't matter how fast of a lens you're using: the effective aperture is the size of the light cone at the aperture plane, which, ideally, in a perfect system, is less than the full opening. With that situation, you use the sharper central portion of the lens (effectively, stopping down for sharpness) without a bit of diffraction loss, since there's no aperture for the light to pass through and diffract and degrade.

 

I sense that some of the critics of these concepts are protesting not because they understand the concepts and disagree, but because they don't understand, so maybe some deeper thinking is required, what?

Lacking a Nikon statement, which I don't think we'll get, here's another analysis supporting my position:

http://www.markerink.org/WJM/HTML/af_expla.htm

Don't knock it if you don't understand it. :-)

For a start, read the definition of phase detection here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofocus

which is basically the definition I gave.

Whoops--I cut a sentence:

"... this is where the need to adjust the system so that it works properly" is an advantage in the D300 additional to the possibilities we had before, not a "fix" for a defect in the camera, I suspect.

 

This may not matter at all to most people because, frankly, I don't see a whole lot of well-focused pictures out there. . . most people don't really care, if you look at their photos, not their words. I think, then, that the inclusion of this on the D300 mostly stirred up a hornet's nest, making people think there's a new problem rather than an old one finally being dealt with.

My understanding, which may not be authoritative, is that the autofocus system works like the split-image screen in a manual-focus camera.

 

The split-image effectively changes the view at the center of the screen via prisms pointed to either side of center of the back of the lens' aperture. Focusing uses triangulation similar to how the two windows of RF cameras determine a distance.

 

This has to happen at some aperture less than full, because not all lenses are the same speed/size-of-hole, and the system has to focus all of them. So the manufacturer picks a width--say f5.6, and all lenses focus with that effective aperture, not wide open--glass outside the borders of where the RF system is looking is ignored. When a smaller aperture is used, half of the split-image blacks out because you can slide your eye left or right to include one or the other side of the slightly-blocked aperture hole, but not both at once. That's why the effective focusing aperture is less than that of the lens. To make up for the resulting zone-of-no-feedback in the center of the range on larger apertures we compensate for by racking focus back and forth to center between equally out-of-focus areas and hopefully find the focus point within the dead zone.

 

People who've done a lot with split-image focus vs groundglass, doing critical work, know that because the center of the lens isn't being used for the distance calculation, aberrations in the lens can throw the focus off a bit, and all lenses are different in this regard--for critical work it's better to use the groundglass ring. Since each lens is slightly different, this is where the need to adjust the system so that it works properly.

 

As already pointed out, calibration of the flange distance has nothing at all to do with this, since on both manual and autofocus cameras the focus is determined based on perceived sharpness, not flange distance, which is completely irrelevant to the process.

 

In the D300, this system isn't used for live view focusing in tripod mode--that's done on contrast which is similar to the way we focus on groundglass, not as when using split-image or normal autofocus.

http://ddunleavy.typepad.com/the_big_picture/2005/02/hand_of_god.html