Nikon D90 defective Matrix metering

On Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:08:34 +1200, Eric Stevens wrote:

I can't stop you wanting to throw rocks at him.

He really needs to stop creating such a tempting, deserving target.
He also is becoming somewhat troll-like. He'd be better off posting
his less obnoxious, sometimes interesting contributions here and
saving his flights of fancy posts for a personal blog, or maybe get
a job as Ken Rockwell's foreign correspondent.

In article , Bob Larter
wrote:

Yeah, Kodak Magic Cubes. One of the many camera types, mainly for
Instamatic, had the film that was in a cartridge.

Yep, that's them.

Didn't know you could have them go off by dropping them.

That's news to me too. I used to zap them with a 9V battery to set them
off for fun.

if you used a battery to fire them, then they were regular flash cubes.

magicubes were mechanically fired by a spring which when released, hit
a pin on the bulb which caused it to flash. you could flash one bulb
by poking a screwdriver into one of the holes, or if you threw a
magicube on the ground, all four springs would release and all four
bulbs would flash.

regular flash cube on the left, magicube on the right:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2062/2541617504_2606640de2.jpg

Had IR ones for IR film also. Whoo hooo. High tech.

"IR" ones? What would be the difference between those & the standard
variety?

they put out infrared light which is invisible to humans. with
infrared film, one could take flash photos without anyone noticing. a
photographer named weegee was most known for this, often taking photos
inside theatres of the audience. these days, one can use an infrared
flash head.

http://alecsothblog.wordpress.com/2007/08/02/infraweegee/

On 2009-04-09 12:54:37 -0700, Alan Browne
said:

C J Campbell wrote:

Nat Geo photographers do not always take 10,000 images and select only
a dozen. Sometimes they have the opportunity to do that; sometimes not.
Sometimes you get only a handful of images to choose from. That's the
way the cookie crumbles.

Actually some nat geo photogs don't even see the photos until they're
published, and they might see only a small percentage of the remaining
stock photos. In the film days they would ship undeveloped film back to
DC for development and the photo editors, working with the article
writer would decide which photos to use.

In the digital age, I'm not sure what the modus operandi is, but it
probably involves electronic transfer to DC, and again the photog is not
the one choosing what goes into the article.

Yeah, Gregg said he never saw his photos until they were published. He
often saw some of the rejects later and sometimes thought they were
better than the ones that were published. But the editor makes the
selection. Gregg Gibson was one of the first professional documentary
photographers to go digital. His photo of Clinton, the elder Bush, and
Perot standing together on Newsweek was the first digital photo to
appear on the cover of a national magazine. It was transmitted
electronically as he took it and thus beat his competition who depended
on film runners by several hours. The photo was one of the body of work
which got him his first Pulitzer.

It basically works the same way now. You send your photos to an editor,
usually some guy who is stationed permanently in the region who handles
a bunch of photographers, and he sends his picks on for publication.

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

ASAAR wrote:
On Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:08:34 +1200, Eric Stevens wrote:
I can't stop you wanting to throw rocks at him.

He really needs to stop creating such a tempting, deserving target.


I agree. I had to put him in my kill file, otherwise I would not be
able to resist pointing out what a serial idiot he is. It seems that
there are now plenty of people to do that, so no need to duplicate.

"nospam" wrote in message
...
In article , Bob Larter
wrote:

Yeah, Kodak Magic Cubes. One of the many camera types, mainly for
Instamatic, had the film that was in a cartridge.

Yep, that's them.

Didn't know you could have them go off by dropping them.

That's news to me too. I used to zap them with a 9V battery to set them
off for fun.

if you used a battery to fire them, then they were regular flash cubes.

magicubes were mechanically fired by a spring which when released, hit
a pin on the bulb which caused it to flash. you could flash one bulb
by poking a screwdriver into one of the holes, or if you threw a
magicube on the ground, all four springs would release and all four
bulbs would flash.

Guess there are a lot of old guys posting to this group (yeah! all right, I
remember them too!).
PDM

"Stormin Mormon" wrote in message
...
And if you throw em on the ground really hard, sometimes you
could get em to flash for you?

--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
.


"Bob Larter" wrote in message
...
frank wrote:
[...]
fast. Anybody ever used flashbulbs? Thought not...

Well, not since I was a kid. Remember the 4 shot bulbs that
rotated
after each shot?

--
W


Magicubes had an 'explosive' charge in them to create the flash. In the base
of the 'cube was a little spring wire for each bulb. The camera had a
plunger that pushed the spring wire off of it's holder, it hit the charge,
and flashed. If you could jar the 'cube sufficiently to knock the spring off
it's holder, you got a flash. I never tried it (damn things were
expensive!), but I suspect that if you threw it against a hard object and it
hit top first, you could probably fire all four sides at once. The advantage
of the Magicube was that there was no battery required to fire, and hence no
concerns of a dead battery or corroded contacts.

The Magicubes were slightly larger and had a different base from the earlier
flashcubes. The flashcubes were basically four AG1 bulbs in a cube
container. I once
'inherited' an adaptor for flashcubes that mounted on a camera shoe, had a
PC sync cord and a battery (22.5V?). This one carried the Konica brand. Not
having much use for it, I sold it on eBay, and got $10 for it!

While on the subject of convenience-oriented flashbulbs, there was also the
FlipFlash. This was a unit with 8 (AG-1?) bulbs, 2-wide and 4-high. It had a
connector on each end that fit into the flipflash socket on the camera. The
top bulbs fired first, and as each bulb was used, the conductive path on the
internal circuit board was burned away so that the next bulb would fire.
After using the four top bulbs, you removed the unit, flipped it over, and
fired the other four bulbs. In a moment of rare engineering genius, the
designers set it up so that the bulbs fartherest away from the camera were
active, decreasing the red-eye effect. The FlipFlash was common on the later
Kodak Pocket Instamatics, also the Kodak Instant print cameras. Kodak also
came out with an electronic flash that would attach to these cameras and
sync through the flash socket.

"Bob Larter" wrote in message
...
frank wrote:
On Apr 10, 5:19 am, Bob Larter wrote:
frank wrote:
[...]
fast. Anybody ever used flashbulbs? Thought not...
Well, not since I was a kid. Remember the 4 shot bulbs that rotated
after each shot?

Yeah, Kodak Magic Cubes. One of the many camera types, mainly for
Instamatic, had the film that was in a cartridge.

Yep, that's them.

Didn't know you could have them go off by dropping them.

That's news to me too. I used to zap them with a 9V battery to set them
off for fun.


Magicubes had no electical connection. If you were zapping cube flashes with
a battery, you were zapping flashcubes. Althougth you could zap Magicubes by
pushing a small screwdriver into the base and tripping the trigger wire.
If you really what to have fun with flashbulbs, get some of the big bulbs
with the standard Edison/household screw-in base (either #5 or #25, I can
never remember which), screw it into a ceiling lamp (make sure it's turned
off!), then wait for someone to turn on the light. Keep in mind that the
bulb could shatter, start a fire, cause a heart attack, break up a marriage,
or other fun stuff!

As for Kodak's film in cartridge, first there was the 126 "Instamatic" size.
Twelve exposures to a roll, the film about the width of 35mm. There was a
sprocket hole for each square frame that caught a pawl inside the camera for
double exposure prevention. Neg size was about 25mmX25mm. After 126 size,
there was 110 "Pocket Instamatic" size. The cartridge was similar in shape,
except much narrower as the film was about 16mm wide. Again there was a
sprocket hole for each rectangular frame. Finally in the Kodak cartridge
saga was the APS size, but the less said about that the better!

"Bruce" wrote in message
...
ASAAR wrote:
On Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:08:34 +1200, Eric Stevens wrote:
I can't stop you wanting to throw rocks at him.

He really needs to stop creating such a tempting, deserving target.


I agree. I had to put him in my kill file, otherwise I would not be
able to resist pointing out what a serial idiot he is. It seems that
there are now plenty of people to do that, so no need to duplicate.


KMA, dumb****...
--
---
Focus

C J Campbell wrote:
Bruce said:
C J Campbell wrote:

Even Bresson did not just walk around pointing the camera
aimlessly, squeezing the shutter with his shut. Bresson worked hard to
capture his moments. He was not a chimpanzee randomly pecking keys on a
typewriter to produce the works of Shakespeare. Bresson's work is a
tribute to the documentary photographer's ability to anticipate,
visualize and capture a moment all in a split second. But he did not
skip any of those steps, whether he realized it or not.

All true, but HCB was a prolific shooter and took a great many photos
while out shooting. Even though there are many volumes of his published
work, we have seen only very few of those shots.

Perhaps there is a valid comparison to be made with National Geographic
shooters who typically produced over 10,000 shots on film in order to
illustrate an article with only a couple of dozen, if that.

Gregg Gibson told me that he typically takes over 7,000 frames at a
wedding. He winnows those down to about 130 that he shows the happy
couple, and they make their selection from those.

Gibson did not win two Pulitzer Prizes by taking 10,000 copies of the
same image with only slight variation among them. I have seen him at
work; he takes one shot -- then changes position, focal length, or
something else. When he is done with a shoot he is literally dripping
with sweat because he is moving around so actively. He may shoot 100
frames or more in the space of a minute or two. Each frame will be
radically different.

How he keeps that energy level up at an entire wedding is beyond me.

Nat Geo photographers do not always take 10,000 images and select only a
dozen. Sometimes they have the opportunity to do that; sometimes not.
Sometimes you get only a handful of images to choose from. That's the
way the cookie crumbles.

I do not know how many pictures Eddie Adams took on February 1, 1968. He
got the Pulitzer for only one of them -- the execution of a Viet Cong
officer by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. This execution was also filmed by a
TV crew. A documentary interviewing Adams, showing the picture, and also
a film clip of the execution can be seen he

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...81285349469159

I like that idea of roaming around snapping as you explore. I usually do
about 200 photos for a few hours of visiting some place and winnow that
down to about 50 photos. That's hard work, culling.


Obviously, Adams could not take 10,000 images of this execution. He had
time for one. The entire execution, from the time that they start
dragging the Viet Cong into the street to the time that he is lying in
it, is less then 5 seconds. That was it. I do not know what else he shot
that day, but for that day, and perhaps for the entire war, it was "the"
picture.


I am not suggesting (in either case) that the published shots happened
by chance. Far from it: I have no doubt that great care was taken with
the majority of shots taken, and that a very large percentage of them
would be considered suitable for publication.

However, I also have no doubt that the taking of such large numbers of
images in both cases actively contributes to the extremely high standard
of published work - work to which we are privileged to have access at
the small cost of buying a book, or the magazine.

Indeed. I don't think people fully appreciate this. We have come a long
way from attempting to communicate with stained glass windows and
illuminated manuscripts painstakingly constructed over a period of
decades. I am not sure that it is always for the better, but on the
whole I believe it is.



--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

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