Anyone still shoot film?

On 10-01-27 0:40 , Annika1980 wrote:
On Jan 26, 4:17 pm, Alan
wrote:
On 10-01-25 23:06 , Annika1980 wrote:

My experiences with slides are much better. The slides usually come
out looking the way they were shot. But now I have to scan them (a
VERY tedious process with the Minolta SE 5400)

I assure you that the Nikon scanner s/w and procedure is even more
tedious than the Minolta 5400...

How can that be? Nothing is more tedious than hearing all those
clanking noises as the Minolta fires up and cycles through it's
endless machinations before anything ever happens. There is a way to
do "Raw" batch scans with minimal processing at scan time, but I've
never mastered it. Also, when you do that you are throwing away the
ability to make micro-focus adjustments as well as basic color
corrections.

If I sit down with only one exposure to scan, I'm lucky if I can get
it done in 15 minutes with the 5400, and that's if I just use a single
pass.

I could usually manage up to 12 per hour (single pass with ICE) once up
and running on the 5400. So I could be editing files while it was
scanning (though that could slow down the scan a bit when ICE was on.

Can't compare well with the 9000 as that's MF, and takes more setup
time, and aligning frames is painfully awkward with the
stupid-stupid-stupid Nikon s/w.


--
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On 10-01-27 8:20 , Rol_Lei Nut wrote:
Annika1980 wrote:

How can that be? Nothing is more tedious than hearing all those
clanking noises as the Minolta fires up and cycles through it's
endless machinations before anything ever happens. There is a way to
do "Raw" batch scans with minimal processing at scan time, but I've
never mastered it. Also, when you do that you are throwing away the
ability to make micro-focus adjustments as well as basic color
corrections.


Google Vuescan.
(If you're going to complain about film, at least learn how to do it
right first...)

I find the Minolta s/w better in most respects than Vuescan unless I'm
having a specific problem with an image.

--
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Scott W wrote:

Nice shot, I am trying to understand what you find film does better
then digital, is it the colors?

You know... I'm not even sure I *am* saying it's better. I am saying
that I prefer it at the moment.

One thing that it does is look the way I want without extensive fussing.

Another thing it does is eliminate the "hand-held computer" between me
and the pictures. I don't need a camera with more computing power than
it took to send men to the moon, just to take some pictures. It just
gets in the way. With digital I can shut off the matrix metering, and
shut off the auto-review, and shut off all the other nonsense, and yet
I *still* have this big computer in the way.

Now, I'm a computer programmer in real life, so I know how to work with
that stuff quite well. But that doesn't mean I want to work with it
when there's no real need to.

So another thing it does is make photography more enjoyable.

You say you have worked out how to get really good color out of your
scans, did you give the same effort to getting good color out of your
digital shots?

Sure. I think I'm pretty good at it, too, and I certainly don't mean
to say that digital sucks. It doesn't.

BTW this is one of my scans, I believe that was Kodachrome
http://www.flickr.com/photos/3693962...7623285264902/

When viewed at that size it would be hard to tell that scan from a
digital shot, but viewed closer and I see the noise in the scan that
drives me nuts. I could spend a lot of time with a noise reducing
program to try and clean up the scan, and for old photos where I have
not choice I sometimes do. But at least for me I find it much easier
to start with a clean image to start with.

That image, on my screen, is 9 inches by 6 inches, and looks great. How
big are you going to print it?

Is that noise, or is that grain? The grain is supposed to be there. It
is part of the look, part of the texture. Sure, if you want to make a
30x20 print of a landscape, that's no good -- and sometimes I do want
that, and then I use digital. (Though if I had medium format gear I might
use that instead.)

In other words, why the obsession with what the images look like at
absurd magnification levels, unless you're actually going to be printing
at that size? I guess some people find grain inherently objectionable,
but I'm not one of them. Sometimes it's bad, other times it's not.
Sometimes digital images look too sterile, too perfect.

Kodachrome 64 can resolve more detail than my digital camera, but it
can't produce images that are as clean. So what? It's basically a
wash. When it's not appropriate you don't use it.

That's another thing film can do: it lets me buy "full-frame sensors"
by the roll from Kodak and use a different kind any time I want. When
I need to shoot with digital, I'm stuck with what's in the camera, just
because the manufacturers finally found a way to get us to buy a new
camera every couple of years.

--
Jeremy Nixon | http://www.defocus.net
Email address in header is valid

Paul Furman wrote:

So any ideas for slide film and developing? I'm assuming mail order
would be the way to go or maybe there is a decent one walgreens could
develop?

Walgreen's won't be able to develop any E-6. If you want to go that route
you'd need to stick with C-41, which isn't necessarily a bad thing: Portra
and Ektar are very good. Portra is easier. Get a roll of 160nc, meter off
the shadows, and if in doubt, overexpose.

With E-6, unless you're lucky enough to have a pro lab nearby that can do
it, you'll be sending it off.

The problem with good scans is that they are so expensive that buying
a scanner starts to make sense after about the first roll of film.
If you don't need the absolute best scans, it makes sense after only
a few frames -- a flatbed scanner than can also do film isn't terribly
expensive. It won't give you the best possible scans, but neither will
Walgreen's.

--
Jeremy Nixon | http://www.defocus.net
Email address in header is valid

Frank ess wrote:
Savageduck wrote:

Nice stuff.

Ayuh.

Whatever Mr Nixon prefers looks good to me.

/Really/ nice stuff.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

--
Jeremy Nixon | http://www.defocus.net
Email address in header is valid

On 1/27/2010 11:34 AM Bruce spake thus:

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:28:07 -0800, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

On 1/26/2010 3:24 PM Bruce spake thus:

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:19:33 -0800, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

On 1/25/2010 9:47 PM Noons spake thus:

Ektar 100 is great indoors with tungsten light. The colours are
superb. Try a roll with a wide open small tele and get it processed
by someone who knows what they are doing: you'll love it.

But doesn't that leave you with a distinct orange cast?

Only if you use an incompetent processor.

I don't believe that's the case; you're basically mis-exposing the
film, color-wise. How can a processor compensate for tungsten
exposure on daylight film?

How does a DSLR compensate for tungsten exposure on a
daylight-balanced sensor? You are basically mis-exposing the shot in
just the same way.

From what little I know about digital, that's done by adjusting the
white balance.

It is a non-problem. You only need colour correcting filters when
using slide film, and not always then.

That's what I'm hearing, which is news to me.


--
You were wrong, and I'm man enough to admit it.

- a Usenet "apology"

On 1/27/2010 11:36 AM Bruce spake thus:

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:28:57 -0800, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

On 1/26/2010 3:09 PM Bruce spake thus:

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:07:18 -0500, Michael Benveniste
wrote:

Today, I picked up from the lab a roll of Velveeta 100 I shot this
weekend with my Pentax 645n.

Velveeta is a type of cheese. Did you mean "Velvia"?

The fact that you had to ask meant that the joke was lost on you,
apparently.

Yes, it was lost on me.

As Winston Churchill once said, the USA and the UK are two nations
divided by a common language. ;-)

Whoops, my bad. Mea culpa. I'd forgotten about that whole thing about
there being Brits and stuff here; and this just after I recently chided
someone on another forum about using a region-specific term (Araldite)
that I'd never heard before.


--
You were wrong, and I'm man enough to admit it.

- a Usenet "apology"

Paul Furman wrote:

Oh. I thought there was special film so you don't have to put a black
filter on. I guess not.

I expect someone could make one, but the potential market would
be tiny. Ultra-violet photography does not usually result in
dramatic pictures. It is still an interesting thing to try out.

Film is no problem - Tri-x and Ilford films work fine.

The filter is no problem - I got mine at B&H for not too much.

Lenses can be a problem. Special UV lenses with quartz and
fluorite instead of glass are rare and expensive. Some regular
lenses will pass much of the UVA spectrum, but many modern lenses
have built in UV filtration. You can't tell by looking, and they
usually don't tell you in the spec sheet. El-Nikkor enlarging
lenses are known not only pass near-UV but to be well corrected
for ultraviolet. If you can find a helical extension tube and an
adapter, you are set.

Peter.
--

"Patrick L" wrote in message
news
I've got four dSLRs, but I miss shooting film, so come Christmas, my mom
wanted me to take pictures so I dusted off my old ElanII, 28-105 lens, and
bought a roll of Kodak Gold ( nothin' particularly fancy about this rig )
with a 580ex flash took some snaps and had the pictures developed at a
local drugstore. The shots were beautiful, or at least I thought so and
so did my family. The "white balance" ( as we now call it in the digital
world ) was stunning. I couldn't get 50 bucks for that camera now ( minus
the lens and flash, of course), so no point in selling it. In fact, I
bought it at a flea market for 10 bucks.

I picked up an old Polaroid Land 250 and a bulb flash unit for a song,
and I can still get batteries and film ( fuji ) for it, so I'm looking to
have some fun with it. I found a guy that sells bulbs for it, but, I
was a little boy the last time they used them, and these bulbs have been
sitting in a warehouse for a long time. Expensive 'cuz they no longer make
them. I'm doing some math, and I think each shot, with flash, is going to
cost about 4 bucks. Sheesh -- better get it right the first time !!


I shoot Tri-X and T-Max in my EOS Elan 7N and Mamiya C330f. Process the
film and prints myself. It's very satisfying and the results are beautiful.

SW



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"Savageduck" wrote in message
news:2010012622052871490-savageduck1@REMOVESPAMmecom...
On 2010-01-26 20:59:48 -0800, tony cooper
said:

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:55:49 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:


Nobody from outside the Bay area is going to have any idea who Herb Caen
was.

(Raises hand) I have, but I don't know why. I've never lived
westcoastly and Caen was not syndicated, but mention Caen and I know
he was a Pulitzer-winning columnist...probably because many of his
witticisms were picked up by other columnists that I did read.

So do you have any idea who Irv Kupcinet was? The two are often
compared.

Without the aid of Google I have to plead ignorance. Chiis one of those
places I have only visited a few times and those were brief visits.
Even though I have never read him he sounds like another of those
vanishing city icons.

--
Regards,

Savageduck


I believe Kupcinet had a talk show for a while.....I seem to remember
watching him on the TV.....He had a little more personality than Herb Caen,
and he would interview guests on his show.