tom_menegatos

Pick up a wein safe sync. If it needs it or if it doesn't, using one is an added layer of protection that doesn't cause any problems.

My favorite was this in a pre trial article "A verdict in Kodak's favor has the potential to be enormous. The company is asking for more than $1 billion in back royalties and other damages ? the equivalent of selling 400 million rolls of film at $2.50 apiece."

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400 million rolls, isn't that the amount of film sales being lost to fuji and digital every year?

Hard to believe they even won considering the patent might be invalid due to prior art based on what little I know about the patent. If the patent preceds shared libraries and COM they might have a chance.

 

Even if the patent doesn't get invalidated, no way are they going to get anywhere near $1b. That's half the operating profit of the sales of their servers for the time in which the patent was in effect. Kodak's patent probably only covers a portion of what java is to begin with. They may get a couple of hundred million at most, if anything, in my opinion.

 

Also, buying a company and using it's patents to sue technology that's been around for almost a decade doesn't win you many friends in the software world.

"Allen, you might consider a fair size dressing room big enough for a bride and her mom. That way you won't have to worry about people using one of the bedrooms to change."

 

I agree with Mellissa. I forgot to mention it but that small room is a dressing room (the larger one for storage). Especially in a detached structure like yours. Probably out of the question but a half bath or bath with shower would be nice as well. You could go with a smaller dressing room if you go with a makeup table and mirror outside of it.

Speaking of dream studios... lately I've been toying with the idea or setting up a rental studio because I have about 7000 sq ft available to me. Only problem is that it's too far away from me to use on a regular basis.

 

If anyone near new haven, ct is interested, we'd still like to build it. Planning on 4 large offices (over 140 sq ft) at least 2 enclosed shooting areas and a large shooting area that can be divided by black out curtains, conference room (or not), darkroom (or not) lots of locked storage rooms, bathrooms, dressing rooms, 12' ceilings, loading dock, etc. If anyone is interested in this let me know. We're willing to discuss arrangements. I'd really just like to get it built and used.

 

To give you an idea of what I think good space is, the smallest studio I set up was 19x24'.

 

I have the space, I just need to find people interested so I can build it out there. Anyway, I didn't mean to drift so much but someone mentioned dream studios :) I'm really hoping to get it done in time for someone to see it so if anyone's interested please contact me.

The smallest studio I'd like would be about 15x24. The extra space behind you makes a world of difference. Plus it's nice to have seating for guests of the sitter. Also a small table for holding equipment during a shoot. Working with Sunil's idea. I'd set it up more like the attached. 8-9' is workable but I'd like something a little higher.

I have switched to tf-4 as well and love the stuff. I use it for prints and film.

Get a bulkhead fitting from http://www.usplastics.com a valve and tubing and you're all set.

There are a lot of people currently participating in this weeks theme that covers this topic. Maybe some of them can help you out. <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=007tNJ">WEEKLY LIGHTING THEME: Controlling Specular Highlights............</a>

Jeff, your images keep getting better and better as the volume in the bottle gets less and less. I wonder if there's some sort of relation :)

Gary,

 

I didn't get a chance to send you out a note after reviewing your theme. Let me just say, Gary has done an excellent job for next week and I was just thinking how well it's going to fit well with the current home-made ideas. There is one little trick in there that is really cool too. So no need to appologize. :)

 

Next week will be really great follow up to this week's theme.

It's probably time you bring it in for service. It could be a number of things wrong with it and without anyone actually seeing it, them giving you the right answer will just be plain luck or will either list everything that could be wrong with it.

 

If that battery doesn't hold a charge, and you're charging it outside the flash unit then the battery, or charger is bad. If the battery is new then you should take it up with who you bought it from.

Prices vary and without knowing the model, manufacturer, age, or what type of processor it's impossible to say. I've seen stuff listed on ebay for as little as 100 bucks for a roller transport e6 processor from kreonite. It never sold. It's usually the bigger equipment that goes for cheap, except when it comes to dip and dunk stuff which is still cheap compared to new. With the big heavy items sometimes people are just happy to have someone carry them away.

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It seems like some labs are switching to smaller machines when their e6 volume becomes so low it's no longer cost effective to maintain the chemistry in a big dip and dunk or roller transport processor. The case would probably be the same for you. Depending on the machine, if you're not processing at least 50-100 rolls a day you're going to be spending too much on chemistry. So don't get all excited if you see a really great deal and you're not going to be using it that much.

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A smaller machine like a phototherm or a jobo atl processor might be better and is what a lot of these labs are switching to when their in a market that doesn't process as much e6 as they used to.

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I have a <a href="http://www.newvisionphoto.com/search.jsp?searchTerms=phototherm">phototherm sidekick</a> which I got from Jay Overmoen at <a href="http://www.newvisionphoto.com/">http://www.newvisionphoto.com/</a>. His site is a little bare right now as we're just getting done putting it together but he has a lot of stuff and access to alot of equipment.

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The phototherms are great machines. He sends them to the factory (in NJ) to be refurbished. When I looked into getting a processor like this I was really impressed with the phototherm sidekick. The main thing I liked was that it didn't have a water bath and it didn't need to be hooked up to a water panel, or water at all. You can hook it up to water or you can run water from a jug. It's a completely self contained system that only needs power.

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I feel funny since I am working on the guys site but I really do have a lot of good things to say about this processor. It's so nice being able to process film while you wait. E6 takes less than an hour including drying (it has a dryer) with the 6 step process. Since there's no water bath you can go from doing a batch of E6 and then a batch of C41 right after the other or black and white. No need to wait for the water bath to reach a new temperature.

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My favorite aspect though is that it doesn't need a water panel like the jobo atl (except for this new small jobo atl)or wing-lynch machines. I don't know how much your looking to spend but this is a great machine that comes factory refurbished. (I don't know if he has any non refurbished ones).

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Depending on the unit you get there are options to set up the bleach (and/or fix depending on the unit) to be replenished but it's generally a one shot machine. It's good with the kodak one shot e6 kit.

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It can do e6, c41 and black and white but I like doing my black and white by hand in steel tanks. At least for now.

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I don't know if it's just me since I've never worked in a lab or had any automated film processor before but I think this is great. Something like a jobo cpe or cpp isn't for me. You have to sit there and time and drain and pour chemicals. Even with the lift accessory you still have to be there. With something like this or the atl you simple load the film on the reels, put the reels in the machine and can walk away. Come back, set up the dryer and in 15 more minutes, dry film.

I haven't tried it but I once read online about someone using one of those styrophone coolers to build a softbox. Light, cheap, about the right size and already white inside. Just cut part of the top off, leaving the rim, and attach diffusion material.

 

Good to keep your limes in too! :)

I can't comment exactly as I haven't used SS and rodinal that much but I have used it with other developers. Basically I use it with other developers that already contain sodium sulfite but when I dilute them the concentration is less.

 

I prefer to use rodinal straight but in my reasearch I ran across a lot of information on rodinal and ss.

 

Sodium sulfite has a solvent effect. It eats away at the grain clumps and breaks them up. Those broken up grain clumps then become target sites for new grain clumps to form. This results in better shadow detail and finer grain but the grain isn't as sharp.

 

It really depends on why you want to use SS. If you're looking to get better shadow detail, don't change dev time. If you're looking for the same shadow detail but with smoother grain increase your ei a bit and keep your dev time the same. In either case it's worth experiment to see which you prefer.

 

I like rodinal straight because I don't find the grain objectionable. With slower films like pan f+ and tmx the grain isn't much of a factor but rodinal gives very crisp results.

"Do you actually do this??"

 

Do I, no. Have I yes. I do most of my own printing by hand. All my black and white. I've compared black and white prints from myself and others printed traditional and digitally. I prefer traditinal black and white prints on black and white paper based on what I've seen and I've seen a bit. That's my preference at least.

 

If I wasn't concerned about prints I'd probably go with color neg and convert to black and white. I've played around a lot with converting color and making it look like black and white. On the screen you can't really tell a difference.

 

"Cause if lugging two camera outfits is not going to get the job done, and now I need three, I'd probably just want to quit altogether. "

 

The comment was directed to Stelios who shoots MF and LF. It's easy to bring three film holders with three different types of film and one camera. If you're shooting 35 mm you can do it with one camera and three rolls of film. Burning three rolls of film on the same scene to do this one time test to determine what you like better shouldn't be a big deal.

 

"The look of output will be different from a traditional darkroom, not worse, but different."

 

Different yes. "not worse" that's a subjective judgement. Apples are different than oranges. Your preference may be for apples so oranges would be worse for you to eat.

Just to elaborate a little more after reading the technical info on your friends shot. The source of your friend's accent light seems to be from the little vivitar flash that he used as a background light. The background light spilled onto models arm. Shoud have had a bit more distance between model and background to prevent this unless you can really control where it's going.

 

The FHM shot most likely used a much larger light souce like a large softbox or diffusion screen to get the highlight intentionally on the whole side.

Another thought I've suggested before. If the forums table isn't currently partitioned by forum would it be possible to create partitions based on date? I would think that would help things out and be easy to implement.

 

Also, image uploading seems to be very resource intensive. Uploading an image is slow even when the site is responding well in other areas. My guess is that it's fairly database light but front end processing heavy. Would it be possible to designate one or two front end servers to handle all the image uploading so that the rest of the servers wouldn't have to deal with that load?

What bothers me is that the unified forum view has been down for days but none of the ratings features have been touched. Every once in a while it seems like photo.net is trying to become something else rather than waht it was that made it become popular in the first place.

 

Couldn't a quick fix be put in place to fix the unified view?

 

Create a new cached table. Have all new postings be written to both tables. Copy the last 2-3 weeks of postings from the forums table to the cached table. Performance drain solved on unified forum. Then when there is time build a mechanism to clear the cache before the cahced table starts to be too big.

 

Or just turn of the forums all together and add three more letters to the site's name. Though that site doesn't seem to be running today either :)

The difference between the two is that in the FHM photo, the hilight on the side is not only on the arm but also on the hair. Pretty much the whole side of the model.

 

In your friend picture it's just on the arm. It makes the light stand out more and it doesn't appear to me that the arm is meant to be the main focus of the photo

Want to learn how to build a battery pack go to <a href="http://www.aljacobs.com/universal_battery_packs.htm">Al Jacob's page on building a battery pack</a>

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<i>This place is a hoot!</i>

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Yeah. It did actually draw out some useful information here and there. I just hope these types of postings don't become the norm again.

"I came here for technical and artistic help and fellowship but ended up feeling ignored and abandoned. Not much help found here beyond the few times when someone answered a direct question."

 

I guess you didn't realize there was more here on photo.net than just the ratings/critiquing.

 

I see many people getting a lot of techinical and artistic help here very day.

 

Direct questions are easy to answer.

Basically I agree with Scot and KL IX. If you're going to be printing them traditionally, black and white film is the way to go. If you're scanning them, color films or even the c41 black and white films scan much much much better. I have to scan a lot of black and white film to get it online for previews but I make my prints in a darkroom. (I hate that darkrooms are now being called 'wet darkrooms' because people confuse dakroom with photoshop)

 

As far as printing goes. I still like traditional black and white prints over digital prints. Since you're not making your own prints it might be worth it to take three shots of the same scene. One on color neg, one on color slide, one on regular black and white. Have your lab process them and make a traditional print of the black and whtie one. Then scan all three, tweak them and send them in for printing and see which one of the 4 you like better and which workflow works better for you.

I wonder who would be behind the malicious attacks. Could it be that a favorite merchant is no longer offering discounts for recomendations on photo.net and is now asking it's customers to help them launch a small DDoS attack? Or maybe a competing site?

 

A lot of the popular features seem to be resource intensive. Could that just be the case instead of a malicious attack? Some people are quick to hit the reload button when a page doesn't come up quick enough and I'm sure there are some people that constatly check their photos for new ratings and comments after submitting them for critique?

 

I take it the new database isn't back online again. The site really moved along quickly when it was up.

 

Jason, your subscription does help the site along. As bad as it may seem now, things would be even worse without the contributions of people like you. Photo.net seems to be in an awkward state where it needs the financial support of subscribers to just keep things going. With continued support things should get better. For years photo.net was offered completely free as a valuable resource. Because of how good it was at doing that it developed a large number of visitors and it has tried to grow by add new features to make the photo.net experience even better. It's frustrating but hopefully will be resolved soon. It does really suck though to be paying for something and not seeing the benefit.

 

Maybe setting something up so that subscribers can get a better QOS than non subscribers may be in order. Have a seperate environment for subscribers that hit their own db and web servers. Non subscribers get on a different environment that gets replicated from the subscribers db? Just a thought.

Thanks Barry, that helps a lot!