DSLR vs P&S a replay of Film vs Digital?

John Navas wrote:
On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:54:16 -0900, (Floyd L. Davidson)
wrote in :

Film is *not* the same as digital. Film is analog.

Really? Then what is grain?

Really! What is your point?

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

"Scott W" wrote in message
...
On Nov 30, 12:51 pm, "William Graham" wrote:
"Scott W" wrote in message

...



On Nov 30, 11:58 am, "William Graham" wrote:
"Scott W" wrote in message

. ..

William Graham wrote:

With me, I'd be wasting film, but I seldom shoot any slides that
are
so
far out of spec that Photoshop's tools can't make them good.....

I found slide to be just about the least forgiving for not getting
the
exposure right, a little too much and you loss the highlights
completely a
bit too little and the shadow detail disappears. If the slide did
not
look
good projected there was little I could do in photoshop to fix it.

Negative film on the other hand I could over expose by a huge amount
and
still get a fairly good image.

Scott

Well, I never project my slides.....I view them against a very bright
light
box (which I made myself, and has 8, 2200K fluorescents in it) and
then
scan
the ones I like into my computer, where I can view them on my monitor
and/or
send them to friends and relatives. I tend to overexpose them
slightly,
but
Photoshop CS2 seems to have the ability to make them just right for my
taste.

How do you know they are overexposed?

Scott

I keep the EV setting on my camera at +.3 or +.7 in order to get them to
look the way I like them when I view them with my light box......Once I
digitize them, then getting the detail in the shadows is fairly easy for
me.....The program has the wonderful ability to bring out that detail
without blowing the highlights.....I still can't figure out how it does
it.....One would think that would be impossible and still keep good
contrast, but apparently it is possible, because those Photoshop
programmers
have done it......It is truly a wonderful program

I would suggest that perhaps your EV setting needs to be set at +0.3
to 0.7 to get a good exposure. Some people set the ISO a bit lower to
get the same adjustment.

Scott

Yes.....I thought that's what I said that I do.....Of course, I will change
it for special circumstances, such as a bright backlit subject, but in
general, all else being equal, I keep it set at +.7 or so....I leave the ISO
on automatic, because I shoot both ISO 100 and ISO 400 slide films, and if I
take it off of the automatic sensing, I will be sure to forget and shoot a
roll at the wrong ISO..........As I get older, I have to compensate for the
deterioration of my own brains.......

"Annika1980" wrote in message
...
On Nov 30, 5:15 pm, "William Graham" wrote:
If one of you digital photographers, like Bret (for
example) posts an image that I like on the internet, I will frequently
download it and play with it with my Photoshop CS2 program

IMAGE THIEF !!!

My people will be in touch with your people soon.
Look for the local Sheriff as well.

Like others who steal your images, I have been unable to improve on
them.......

"Neil Harrington" wrote:
"Floyd L. Davidson" wrote:
"Mr. Strat" wrote:
Neil Harrington wrote:

"Decades of experience" in film is one thing. Digital is quite different in
many respects, and none of us have "decades of experience" in it.

It's just a different kind of film with specific properties and
limitations.

Actually, in this one part, neither of you got it quite
right: digital actually has been around for at least 4
decades that I can vouch for with hands on experience.
And it has existed in theory since 1949.

Interesting. Change my "none of us" to "vanishingly small numbers of us,"
then. :-)

That would probably be accurate!

It wasn't usually "photography" in the sense of taking
snapshots of grandma. In my case it was reproducing
images at multiple locations usually (weather maps being
one very common example).

I was really thinking of the digital photography period beginning when
reasonably useful digital cameras first appeared in the general marketplace,
which I'd put in the mid-'90s. But I shouldn't have said "none of us."
Absolutes are almost always dangerous.

That is when the general public began to make use of the
technology, true. I think it really went big time when
Sony introduced the Mavica series and became mainline in
1999 when Nikon came out with a professional quality
DSLR, the D1.

One of the problems with understanding it today is just
that! It is *all* crammed into a very attractive and
easy to use *small* toy intended to for even children to
use. That is just *one* thingie!

In the "good ol' days" each individual part was of
significant size (with its own manual too) and might
not only be in a different room from the next part, but
might even be in a different state or country. That had
one advantage (and countless disadvantages), which was
that people who dealt with it got to know all of the
parts, and exactly how they inter-related.

Today if I refer to the "communications channel" between
the ADC input and the processor, many folks think that
is conceptually insane! But it isn't significantly
different, from an engineering point of view, than
transmitting live digital images from a rocket launch
pad in Alaska to NASA on the East Coast...

(Or, come to think of it, transmission of seismic data
that eventually ended up on 35mm film for analysis...
used by the US Department of Defense to monitor nuclear
testing. That began in the mid-1960's in Alaska.)

Digital imaging has a much longer history than just
consumer snapshot cameras.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

In rec.photo.digital.zlr George Kerby wrote:

On 11/30/07 5:44 PM, in article ,
"Mr. Strat" wrote:

In article , John Navas
wrote:

Many working pros and commercial users think slides are nicer than
negatives despite the more limited exposure range.

It depends on what the final product will be. If the client wants
prints, shooting transparencies would be a poor choice.
No ****, Sherlock!

The ONLY reason to shoot chromes in the commercial world is for separations
for offset printing. Or a 1980's type slide presentation.

Or for preservation of exact unambiguous colour in photographs of works of art.

--
Chris Malcolm DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

"Floyd L. Davidson" wrote in message
...
"Neil Harrington" wrote:
"Floyd L. Davidson" wrote:
"Mr. Strat" wrote:
Neil Harrington wrote:

"Decades of experience" in film is one thing. Digital is quite
different in
many respects, and none of us have "decades of experience" in it.

It's just a different kind of film with specific properties and
limitations.

Actually, in this one part, neither of you got it quite
right: digital actually has been around for at least 4
decades that I can vouch for with hands on experience.
And it has existed in theory since 1949.

Interesting. Change my "none of us" to "vanishingly small numbers of us,"
then. :-)

That would probably be accurate!

It wasn't usually "photography" in the sense of taking
snapshots of grandma. In my case it was reproducing
images at multiple locations usually (weather maps being
one very common example).

I was really thinking of the digital photography period beginning when
reasonably useful digital cameras first appeared in the general
marketplace,
which I'd put in the mid-'90s. But I shouldn't have said "none of us."
Absolutes are almost always dangerous.

That is when the general public began to make use of the
technology, true. I think it really went big time when
Sony introduced the Mavica series and became mainline in
1999 when Nikon came out with a professional quality
DSLR, the D1.

One of the problems with understanding it today is just
that! It is *all* crammed into a very attractive and
easy to use *small* toy intended to for even children to
use. That is just *one* thingie!

Ain't that the truth. A couple of Christmases ago at the family
get-together, the kiddies had a little Coolpix that they were passing back
and forth, shooting videos of each other and laughing. It struck me at the
time how much more advanced their "toy" was than my first digital camera, an
Agfa CL-30 in 1999. Now that Agfa wouldn't even be a satisfactory toy.


In the "good ol' days" each individual part was of
significant size (with its own manual too) and might
not only be in a different room from the next part, but
might even be in a different state or country. That had
one advantage (and countless disadvantages), which was
that people who dealt with it got to know all of the
parts, and exactly how they inter-related.

Today if I refer to the "communications channel" between
the ADC input and the processor, many folks think that
is conceptually insane! But it isn't significantly
different, from an engineering point of view, than
transmitting live digital images from a rocket launch
pad in Alaska to NASA on the East Coast...

(Or, come to think of it, transmission of seismic data
that eventually ended up on 35mm film for analysis...
used by the US Department of Defense to monitor nuclear
testing. That began in the mid-1960's in Alaska.)

Digital imaging has a much longer history than just
consumer snapshot cameras.

Very interesting.

Neil

In article , George Kerby
wrote:

It depends on what the final product will be. If the client wants
prints, shooting transparencies would be a poor choice.
No ****, Sherlock!

The ONLY reason to shoot chromes in the commercial world is for separations
for offset printing. Or a 1980's type slide presentation.

Well, I can't count the number of amateurs I've seen through the years
bitch about crappy looking prints from slides.

In article , Wilba
wrote:

Let me see if I've understood you correctly. In most cases, you set the
shutter speed, then determine camera settings based on your experience. What
does "determine camera settings" mean? Are you setting an exposure
compensation to deviate from the aperture indicated by the camera's or some
other meter, or are you deciding on an aperture without any input from any
meter? IOW, who or what does the metering?

I generally set the shutter speed first, then determine if I agree with
the meter for the f/stop. I film days, I used a Gossen Luna Pro (which
I still have). These days, I use the camera's meter.

That sounds like a claim of supernatural ability. To be credible you have to
be much more specific about what you're doing.

There's no substitute for time and experience.

In article , John
McWilliams wrote:

Not really irritated, and sorry I hadn't noticed your posting with
respect to that particular man: I do believe you've become the group's
most prolific poster (r.p.d., which has the most traffic of this set) by
a long shot. Intentional?

Navas just torques me off. He ****ed me off (and everyone else) with
his bi-weekly posting in the cell phone groups about how bad Motorola
cell phone chargers are. Then he shows up here with a mediocre digital
camera and equally mediocre photographic skills...telling everyone else
how to do it.

On 11/30/07 7:37 PM, in article ,
"George Furby" wrote:

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:10:00 -0600, George Kerby
wrote:




On 11/30/07 3:46 PM, in article ,
"John Navas" wrote:

Panasonic DMC-FZ8
From Amazon.com review pages:

Customer Review


26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
Good value, that's about it, July 23, 2007
By D. Fox
I bought this camera from Amazon, but returned it two weeks later.
Everything about this camera is good value except the lens, which is
excellent.
There is a lot of noise even at the lowest ISO (100). I had a beautiful
picture of my backyard in which noise was really visible in a shadow, thus
making the picture appear grainy in that area...and this was in good light.
If you're going to be limiting the printing to 4x6 or 5x7 and you don't look
at the pictures full-size on your monitor, then this is the camera for you.
I would recommend it 100% for people like that. I am not prepared to 'shoot
in raw' and post-process either. I don't have time for that. Maybe some
people do. Raw also takes up quite a bit of space (11.3 Megs each), and the
shot-to-shot time is around 5 seconds(maybe 4).
The lens cap is nice and it comes with conversion adapter and lens hood. All
work great, although the conversion adapter is plastic and will get chewed
up by inserting and removing over time (again, a 'value' camera). If it
weren't for the noise, I would have kept this camera. I like inspecting
pictures on my screen, so I got frustrated when details like grass or
foliage would be muddied up due to noise (or noise reduction, depending on
how you have it set).
The flash is nice, although it loses power quick. You can't take more than 4
or 5 flash shots within a minute or else the power of the flash
deteriorates. You have to give it time for the battery to cool down. In
Panasonic's manual for this camera they indicate their flash performance is
based on waiting 30 seconds between shots. Again, another value decision.
The preset white balances are fairly inaccurate, at least under the lights
in my house. I had to use the custom white balances to get decent
white-levels in my photos. This is ok, except I always had to have a white
piece of paper with me and set it manually. The white-balance fine-tuning is
pretty nice.
As far as photo quality, there was very little purple fringing. In fact,
almost none. I only saw some at the full telephoto zoom end at the corners
of the picture. Kudos to Panasonic for this.
Corner blurriness and distortion was not an issue either. This is an awesome
lens. It's just too bad the electronics inside the camera don't match the
quality of the lens. I would not take this camera above ISO 200. I would not
use it for indoor pictures (unless using the flash). The optical
stabilization works great though, so you can keep to ISO 100 more often than
with other cams.
I decided that there isn't an ultra-zoom on the market right now that lives
up to my expectations. The S5 IS is not very good due to lens distortion and
purple(red)-fringing. Alas I might have to do what the market dictates I
must do and buy a D-SLR.

So much for NavAss's "superior equipment....

Sounds like just the kind of post that camera companies hire people to type
for
them. They just post to review sites to increase their dslr sales, given a
small
commission to do so during their breaks and lunch hours, coming off sounding
like they are some average person out there. They even post derogatory
"customer
reviews" for competing products even before the cameras are being sold. Are
you
this dense to not know this? How do you think all those pre-production
customer
reviews show up at dpreview a month before they are in stores? Wow are you an
idiot.

So much for George Kerby's "superior proof". All he has for experience in
photography and cameras is what he reads and regurgitates online. I bet he's
got
a closet full of viagra too. He read it online, it must be true that he needs
it.

Holy ****'n idiots Batman.

If a moron like you cannot appreciate the 26 of 29 found this to be an
accurate report on one of the most open forums there is in the marketplace,
then I just cannot help it that your hydrocephalic condition prevents you
from being able to comprehend much more than a lump of lignite.

Have a nice day!