dansutton

September 15, 2010

my car cost $13,000. my 35 lux asph costs 3995 new, my m6 cost me a hasselblad and an 85/1.4. my v700 scanner humming next to me cost $450. these things are obtainable. I am a server at olive garden. I am not good with money. Luckily, I could sell all of my gear and probably have more money than i started out with. I will not do this. save your money. I worked for two months straight and put all my money into my pocket for my d700. i sold her for the 35 lux. get a second job or get closer to the field:)

that being said, exploit connections to get shots no one else can. befriend a maintenance guy and get on the field. talk to the coach and say youd like to take some photos and send them to the newspaper and to the school. get on the field. get in the huddle. then freelance, get a press pass and get a salary. borrow and shoot, shoot shoot.

and by the by, is sports photography your passion?

June 24, 2010

grand isle m6 50mm summicron<div>

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June 21, 2010

jane, the lens focal length does not affect exposure. you'll notice no meters will let you input focal length, size format, or brand name of camera, film, etc. thus either your fifty or 85 will be fine. see what aperture it requires for "correct" exposure at iso 100 1/500. then shoot at this aperture on your hasselblad.

June 20, 2010

push the WB button on the right. turn the front command dial a few times left or right until it says A2. continue shooting with goosebumps

June 12, 2010

taken on a buddy's m4 with 35 summicron in new orleans<div>

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June 8, 2010

repost of picture<div>

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June 8, 2010

m6 with 50 summicron red filter on tri-x at 400

March 27, 2010

haha. good talk everyone

March 8, 2010

wow. how's that for an ad: the iphone shot against a fluorescent light has greater fidelity to the provia negative than an epson v500.

and for everyone, the document back is removed, the locks are both as they need to be (on the back and on the scanner lid) the film carrier is correctly aligned into the "B" slot as indicated. thus this seems to be what scans look like

March 8, 2010

i get that iso100 on the D700 is a digitally faked iso. but i don't care. it's not my meter: a sekonic l-358 is my meter set to ISO 100 and i use the d700 to polaroid preview essentially. i see no way to make the scanner expose brighter optically. all of the "control" is just ways to adjust digitally what the scanner has gotten optically. look at the preview of my scan in the original post and at this photo as well:

March 6, 2010

an update:

I've found some slides from 35mm that are well exposed. And I have here an indictment of all scanners. It seems that the idea behind scanners is fundamental bad imaging. Scanners do not let you set the exposure that you would like for your scan. Rather they pick their own and then let you digitally manipulate the tiff afterwards. That is, you shoot way underexposed and then push up to where you need. This is terrible!. Every tutorial about how to scan involves dropping your white point and stretching the tonality to meet your scan by using a tiny fraction of the scans native range!!! it's insane.

March 5, 2010

thank you everyone for responses, and i'm going to try to tackle them in order that i read them:

for shash:

the slide looks absolutely fantastic when held up to a light table or any way to view it. i love the color, everything about it. it is exactly what i want. light and shadow, tones color and the drama is all there. but it seems it is too dense for the scanner. but further, prints and scans from the lab were TERRIBLE. muddy, dark just awful. which led me to believe that somehow the shots were underexposed--although the negatives look great with a lot of light coming through. I'm a digital baby, not afilm guy despite a few classes in darkroom, so i thought that perhaps the slides looked good to the eye with its dynamic range, but no scanner could retrieve what my eye sees, much like film adn digital to begin with.

richard:

i agree with your logic.

the scanner is a brand new (24 hours old now) v500 epson perfection photo. This is my first roll and the second was ruined by the lab (all red in the shadows) so I have no "well exposed" shots to compare with. my next assignment is to shoot all natural light and bracket just to get an idea of what under, just right and over look like on slides. so i'll have to get back on that one.

the negatives are very dense but seem to be perfect on the skin tones. my flickr gallery is www.flickr.com/rustyhinge should provide some more shots and let you look at them if you are so inclined. the flash is as consistent as alien bees get.

i agree with your third bullet point and am going to do so posthaste.

the flash did reach the film at iso100 f/8 and 1/250 unless her roomlight is incredibly harsh. the lens does have x/m sync and is on x. otherwise the frame would have been completely dark.

thank you all so very much for your time. as soon as i get some natural light bracketed shots through i'll let you know how everything is turning out. if anyone else has any suggestions i'd love to hear them. once again, thanks for your help and suggestions

dan sutton

March 5, 2010

i did. the meter read f/6.3 on the lens axis thus it might be two thirds of a stop under exposed from the meter, but that still doesn't explain the darkness seen here, right?

March 5, 2010

hi. I have described the problem here : http://www.flickr.com/groups/hasselblad/discuss/72157623560588928/

and I wanted to make sure to get the widest audience for any information and so i will duplicate the post here.

Hi. I am having a problem with exposure and scanning flash photography on my 503cw and epson v500 scanner. I recently got the camera and put some provia through it. I used an alien bee b800 with an umbrella with a pc sync cord. these shots were metered with a sekonic l-358. and this is why i'm so confused with my results. I metered the first shot at f/8 pointing at the light and took a picture with d700 dropped to iso 100.

beautiful. hook the sync cord to the 150mm f/4 and shoot at f/8:

I don't care about color cast issues as yet as those i understand. But this had to be pumped in epson scan to get it anywhere near the digital file. But the problem is more exemplified in the next example. Once again, meter f/8, shoot d700 and here you go:

that is straight out of the bridge conversion no tweaking. and the slide:

And at first glance it looks similar but the saturation and detail is gone because this had to be pumped with levels and curves in both epson scan and bridge! for instance, here is the scan preview with no levels and curves adjustments:

So my question to the film buffs out there, am i metering incorrectly, is provia 100f a slower film that its rating. is my lens perhaps stopping down too far, does my lab suck? or is it just the nature of slide film that it comes out pretty dark and takes some light and tweaking to get a good scan? the part about the lab is pretty key too. The lab here cannot be trusted with prints or scans. This was my first roll of 120 film to them and it was dark. The second roll they screwed up and it came back red. So I'm wondering if they "pulled" my film without knowing it or if they just don't know what they're doing in general. I was just wondering if anyone had struggled with this issue on their transition to film and scanning or if i am having headaches that must be resolved. thanks for your info and help. dan sutton

October 28, 2009

alvin: if you want to use manual control set at the flash unit itself instead of the camera body, there is no advantage that i can think of to using CLS--just use optical slaves. but depending on your camera body, you can set (at least with d700 and d90) the function button to access the top menu in your myMenu or whatever. put the custom function that controls the onboard camera there and then you can whiz through it pretty quickly, certainly faster than adjusting powers at different flash bodies.

hope you have a body with this function. happy shooting.

October 26, 2009

mark, a question. why do you try to keep your aperture so wide? wouldn't you want to pop some f/8 or f/11 sometimes. this being the sharpest lenses tend to be?

October 26, 2009

kent you've got a whole lot of light there. wow

October 24, 2009

hi sally. i have one small phrase to add into the fray. the best brand for you is the one that the majority of the people you know use. this allows you access to all of the equipment that they use. if you friends shoot nikon, shoot nikon. if they shoot kiev, shoot kiev.

October 19, 2009

i owned the 85/1.8 for two weeks. i did some research and thought that wide open smoothness wouldn't be worth the extra 700 bucks for the 1.4. i owned it and kept running into highlights in the background that were very polygonal as the picture above in this thread illustrates nicely. i got my 500 back for the lens and decided that i'd bite the bullet and have the 1.4 for a couple decades thus negating any real extra cost of the lens. i'd rather use the 500 in the 1.8 towards the 1.4 than eventually end up with the 1.4 later without the 500 from the 1.8 or some partial depreciated sum from selling the 1.8 second hand. i'm glad i did.

but in the end, get the one you can afford and then don't think about it and shoot great pictures.

October 19, 2009

"Over here in The Netherlands the price is €1889 that's $ 2818 or 1727 GBP. For 200 pounds I can easily take a plane to London, burn some cash on lukewarm beers and still have cash for the cab ride...."

you should definitely set up a travel agency that sells d700's and free trips to london with a couple beers and a taxi thrown in. that sounds like a hot seller. want a camera, or want a camera and a beer in a foreign country for the same price? which would you choose? haha. just send me a small portion of your huge profits when they start rolling in:)

October 4, 2009

i would not purchase a thing. you've got every conceivable focal length covered, 18-300. learn to use your flash. keep shooting. you can't buy good pictures. (i spent quite a sum learning this :) )

October 3, 2009

too be honest i just see some harsh, not too pleasant bokeh. do you mean film grain or noise? the blur should take care of that. otherwise, i guess i don't see what you mean. i just don't care for the bokeh on nikon's 50's.

September 21, 2009

make sure you have the latest firmware. i believe Nikon raised the temperature threshold before shutoff with the new software.

September 19, 2009

"A great irony is that many MF Nikon users have come over to Canon because they can use their lenses on EOS bodies; and it's doubly ironic that Canon FD users cannot do the same. Sadly, apart from macro use, FD lenses are incompatible with EOS bodies"

that's funny. it's the reason that i went with nikon. my d700 meters without having to stop down on just about every nikkor lens that i'd want to own. and the focusing is great. also, the viewfinder of the d700 is far, far superior to any DX or aps-c finder i've used, making it hard to manually focus on something smaller. i shoot film for a class and digital for personal, and i don't have any overlap in lenses: all of my nikkor lenses work on both my Nikon FE and my d700.

i'm not sure if the older lenses will have the autofocus confirmation or not, but they certainly can be metered externally, so they still retain some use on the lesser nikon digital bodies. but what i like about the nikon system is that i do not have to have two separate systems, film and digital. thus only my camera body itself must be changed.

granted this comes at the cost of a $2500 digital body, but that's the price of FX (full frame) these days, excluding the new alpha850 from sony i suppose. but when i read that the OP wanted manual focus on his digital, i immediately thought of suggesting a light meter and a d40 for about $300 used off of fleabay and not the other way around.

September 17, 2009

i've got a nikon FE that is great as it allows for good night photography as it has aperture priority that will apparently select minutes long shutter speeds at night. that said, have you thought about finding an old F2 or the all manual FM. as a photography student, though, you should know that the camera has the least impact on your work. shoot what you have and make photos, right? what's the matter with the cameras that you have right now anyways?

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Posts posted by dansutton