Ah, but wall-sized photos aren't done with 35 millimeter cameras. That negative is too small. Normally, you're lucky to get passable 11x17 frames out of a 35 mm exposure.
I've had recent visits to the galleries of Galen Rowell and Frans Lanting. Galen exclusively used 35mm film, Lanting used 35mm primarily and has now, I believe, started using DSLRs. I've seen blowups of their 35mm film work far larger than 11x17. Stand close to them and there's no question you'll see a difference in detail, but that doesn't make their images less than "passable".
I know this is "news for nerds", but is it so hard for people here to imagine that there's more to the quality of a photograph than its resolution?
The sky noise in those images is an artifact of the digital scanning process. Velvia viewed through a loupe on a light table does not look like that.
It does through my loupe.
I shot Velvia as my main film for four years. My first test image to compare noise between Velvia and a 1Ds digital iamge showed the 1Ds image to have enormously lower noise—and only well into the comparision did I find that I'd failed to notice the camera had been set to ISO 400, not ISO 100 as I intended.
There's a lot to be said for film, but a decent digital camera will kick fine-grained color slide film all over the carpet when it comes to noise.
So far, every attempt to find a digital camera under $1500 that works with a lense with a focus ring has failed. I've called suppliers and been assured that model X would do it; further investigations have shown that they were lying to me, and that ring on the lense does zoom, not focus. Maybe you can get this with a $3000 digital camera; you can get it with a $200 film camera.
Canon's low-end DSLR and a kit lens come in under $1500 these days, ditto Nikon, and all the Canon EF lenses have a manual focus setting. Am I missing something?
Long exposures on most (probably all) the DSLRs tend to get noisy and persnickety on exposures well above 30 sec.I expect that's what the previous poster was alluding to.
The betterlight back is $7000 ON TOP of the cost of the 4x5 camera, and you end up carrying at least a 33 pound pack.
Yep. Don't forget, however, to work in what you're spending on film or processing, my last full year using film I spent well over $3K on film and processing alone. (Agree with your main points, though, even if I'm using digital for my own work.)
Perhaps. We do get a ton of in-person cash donations. For Wiki*, I expect doing so would lead to quite a load of "answering questions from people who want to know the precise details of our paper clip vendor selections", but I doubt we'd quite get that level of attention ourselves. Of the expenditure receipts, the donation receipts, and the answering of questions, I still expect that for us the expenditure receipts would be the easiest of the three.
The real "heavy expensive... digital SLR"s aren't particularly fragile. They're just expensive enough that one wants to treat them that way anyhow, but I've put my 1Ds through an amazing amount of abuse with no troubles at all.
With a regular sensor, you can combine multiple exposures of a scene digitally to get a very large dynamic range.
So long as nothing is moving, like say, the people in the picture, flowers, streams, or the camera. (Yes, I know some of this can be worked around, and I do a bit of it myself, but it turns out to be not-helpful at least as often as it turns out to be helpful.)
It would avoid the nasty blowouts that digicams are succeptible to,
Not that different than slide film, actually, and with many digital cameras you get the benefit of knowing you've blown the shot at the moment you've taken it. But, agreed, I wouldnt' mind a little more dynamic range in my capture.
Since the original comment was about a putative Porsche, unless the Porsche isn't in terrible condition, it's unlikely that it's being yanked out of a $16K travel budget.
My problem is that it is very hard for me to trust the charities to handle my money properly. I've always thought about how charities could detail their money coming in and their money going out, and I came up with a solution. I'm not sure if anyone already has used this solution, so I don't know if its new and unique or already something everyone (but me) knew.
I certainly understand, and in no way wish to dismiss your concern. I don't have any personal contact with Wikipedia save for a few donations of information and cash.
Speaking for myself, I tend to worry less that the money is not making into Wikipedia's accounts at all because, well, frankly it doesn't seem worth the effort to leave such an obvious paper trail for the IRS to prosecute. The concern that the money for Wikipedia is being subverted to the founder (or whomever) seems likely untrue in part simply because I can "sense" the purchase of a lot of servers in the fact that Wikipedia continues to exist at all, even with it's poor response time the bandwidth being served, with the software being used, well, there's clearly a pile of hardware out there.
Now, over and above that, is the money being spent "well", even if not in a corrupt manner? Were, say, Wikipedia's server receipts to be published, it might be kinda interesting to argue whether they could have saved a few bucks by using a different vendor and such.
I'm the Board Treasurer for a non-profit whose size is not all that different than Wikipedias, Impact Bay Area. Obviously my own donations to that organization are something I get the pleasure of feeling very comfortable with. But, despite considering it, I'm doubting that I'll be promoting your idea of publishing every receipt and donation to our board. I expect that that would be, roughly speaking, a half-time position, and that would be (and I'm handwaving here), a ten percent increase in expenditures, and I'm not convinced that's the best use of our resources. Moreover, I'm not sure I'm comfortable making the pay (I'd say salary, but we only have two salaried staff members) of each employee public information, when I've had "day jobs" I have rarely wanted my personal income to be a matter of public record. I'm not saying that these issues couldn't be worked out, I'm saying instead that the problems they might (or might not) solve seem, for our organization, to not be as big as the, problems they create, and it would still be fairly easy to game the system you described by the creation of false receipts for expenditures.
Again, I'm not trying to get you to donate to WF, the issues of trusting non-profits to spend money with integrity and without waste—they're at the heart of the questions I ask myself when I look at where to put my own money. I myself came to the conclusion that WF looked pretty good when I dug through what I saw... your mileage may vary, and that's totally cool.
I'm not certain if I want to give to Wiki without knowing how the money is used. I don't mind supporting dozens of servers and bandwidth fees, but I don't want to see the founder driving a Porsche.
There's a budget on-line, a quick read of it shows that the founder isn't paid a salary.
Still, I do understand your point, I aim my charitable donations and volunteer work very carefully myself.
Dust, by the way, is way overblown (sic). Sometimes people make it sound like you need to clean the sensor every month or something, which just isn't the case.
Depends a lot on how often you change lenses, and to some extent the lenses you use (the push-pull zooms seem a bit worse.) I shoot a lot, I change lenses a lot, I do find it a lot easier to clean my sensor at least once a month, but in general I agree the difficulty of the problem is overblown.
....the best photographers are not the ones who believe they captured it perfectly at the shoot, but the ones most willing to work through to produce a great print.
Absolutely. It's quite necessary too, film never quite sees a scene the way the eye does, even the most stringent fan of trying to reproduce "what it looked like" needs to understand that in a 3-d enviornment the brain discounts blue in shadows, sees colors different shades relative to the colors nearby, adjusts the color of the scene (so far, but no farther) to deal with changes in lighting color, and so forth.
If that was the design goal (and I've suggested that what you describe is a useful design point, even for me, in a comment elsewhere here), why did Apple include a red-eye feature? I can certainly do my selection without that, dare I say it, editing tool, don't you think?
Actually, sometimes a $500 program is needed for just looking. On a PC, I originally purchased Phase One's "Capture One" (P1C1) software, at a price of around $500, precisely for the process of sorting through reams of RAW files. I had come back from Oregon with over 3,000 exposures, and needed to sort through them for the best thirty-seven of the lot. Ten or fifteen seconds per image in PS8/ACR (or whatever the current version was at the time, they all blur) was suffering beyond belief.
With P1C1, I could load up a directory of a few hundred, let it chug some thumbnails while I stepped out for coffee, and really speed through the selection process, it probably saved me days of time for that shoot alone. A faster computer would have helped some, but not nearly as much as a better workflow.
Now, that having been said, I started using P1C1 for a lot of my conversions as well, because I end up making better conversions with it than I do with ACR. I don't think ACR is actually technically inferior, and in some important ways it's superior (I miss chromatic aberration reduction in P1C1, and will occasionally do conversions in ACR just for that when it's important), but for some reason I have an easier time dialing in a good conversion with P1C1, even after selection. It sounds to me as if Aperture might not be at this point, but I could imagine a later version filling very much the need I originally bought P1C1 for.
Maybe $1K/year, it'd be worth that much in extra traffic and domain recognition. But I'm a fairly small-time nature photographer. It's not hard for me to believe that there's some company out there that could make j.com worth $10-50K/yr. Some'd probably do better (a.com!), some worse (q.org), but I wouldn't be surprised by that as an estimate, which would net a few million, at least.
I'm less suprrised that Qwest hasn't used it, they don't sell a lot based on their brand, unlike a lot of arists, consumer products companies, and so on.
Wouldn't surprise me they could net millions off of carefully thought out auctions of those--what, 75 or so domains? (org, biz, com).
professional photographers (pretty much everything)
Just a data point: For myself, the big features would be RAW conversion, healing brush/spot healing brush (for cleaning up sensor dust or scanner dust), most of the adjustment layers (levels, curves, color balance, contrast/brightness, hue/sat/lightness), a regular layer with the soft-light property and the paintbrush (I use that as a reversible dodge/burn/etc.), layer masks, selection tools, layer flatten, resize, unsharp mask (narrow radius very wide radius), color space conversion/profiling/previewing, save.
Hmmm, my edge-sharpening stuff uses a lot of weird filters, though. A better edge-sharpening built-in would probably be a better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
My 1Ds does that too, and it helps some, but not enough to make very long exposures an attractive option.
Still can't get landscapes horizontal.
That's what the bubble level on my tripod is for. :)
I've had recent visits to the galleries of Galen Rowell and Frans Lanting. Galen exclusively used 35mm film, Lanting used 35mm primarily and has now, I believe, started using DSLRs. I've seen blowups of their 35mm film work far larger than 11x17. Stand close to them and there's no question you'll see a difference in detail, but that doesn't make their images less than "passable".
I know this is "news for nerds", but is it so hard for people here to imagine that there's more to the quality of a photograph than its resolution?
It does through my loupe.
I shot Velvia as my main film for four years. My first test image to compare noise between Velvia and a 1Ds digital iamge showed the 1Ds image to have enormously lower noise—and only well into the comparision did I find that I'd failed to notice the camera had been set to ISO 400, not ISO 100 as I intended.
There's a lot to be said for film, but a decent digital camera will kick fine-grained color slide film all over the carpet when it comes to noise.
Canon's low-end DSLR and a kit lens come in under $1500 these days, ditto Nikon, and all the Canon EF lenses have a manual focus setting. Am I missing something?
Long exposures on most (probably all) the DSLRs tend to get noisy and persnickety on exposures well above 30 sec.I expect that's what the previous poster was alluding to.
Yep. Don't forget, however, to work in what you're spending on film or processing, my last full year using film I spent well over $3K on film and processing alone. (Agree with your main points, though, even if I'm using digital for my own work.)
Oh?
But perhaps.
Yep, most of my blends have required more than an extra stop, probably just the nature of my subject material.
The real "heavy expensive ... digital SLR"s aren't particularly fragile. They're just expensive enough that one wants to treat them that way anyhow, but I've put my 1Ds through an amazing amount of abuse with no troubles at all.
So long as nothing is moving, like say, the people in the picture, flowers, streams, or the camera. (Yes, I know some of this can be worked around, and I do a bit of it myself, but it turns out to be not-helpful at least as often as it turns out to be helpful.)
Not that different than slide film, actually, and with many digital cameras you get the benefit of knowing you've blown the shot at the moment you've taken it. But, agreed, I wouldnt' mind a little more dynamic range in my capture.
Since the original comment was about a putative Porsche, unless the Porsche isn't in terrible condition, it's unlikely that it's being yanked out of a $16K travel budget.
I certainly understand, and in no way wish to dismiss your concern. I don't have any personal contact with Wikipedia save for a few donations of information and cash.
Speaking for myself, I tend to worry less that the money is not making into Wikipedia's accounts at all because, well, frankly it doesn't seem worth the effort to leave such an obvious paper trail for the IRS to prosecute. The concern that the money for Wikipedia is being subverted to the founder (or whomever) seems likely untrue in part simply because I can "sense" the purchase of a lot of servers in the fact that Wikipedia continues to exist at all, even with it's poor response time the bandwidth being served, with the software being used, well, there's clearly a pile of hardware out there.
Now, over and above that, is the money being spent "well", even if not in a corrupt manner? Were, say, Wikipedia's server receipts to be published, it might be kinda interesting to argue whether they could have saved a few bucks by using a different vendor and such.
I'm the Board Treasurer for a non-profit whose size is not all that different than Wikipedias, Impact Bay Area. Obviously my own donations to that organization are something I get the pleasure of feeling very comfortable with. But, despite considering it, I'm doubting that I'll be promoting your idea of publishing every receipt and donation to our board. I expect that that would be, roughly speaking, a half-time position, and that would be (and I'm handwaving here), a ten percent increase in expenditures, and I'm not convinced that's the best use of our resources. Moreover, I'm not sure I'm comfortable making the pay (I'd say salary, but we only have two salaried staff members) of each employee public information, when I've had "day jobs" I have rarely wanted my personal income to be a matter of public record. I'm not saying that these issues couldn't be worked out, I'm saying instead that the problems they might (or might not) solve seem, for our organization, to not be as big as the, problems they create, and it would still be fairly easy to game the system you described by the creation of false receipts for expenditures.
Again, I'm not trying to get you to donate to WF, the issues of trusting non-profits to spend money with integrity and without waste—they're at the heart of the questions I ask myself when I look at where to put my own money. I myself came to the conclusion that WF looked pretty good when I dug through what I saw... your mileage may vary, and that's totally cool.
If you look at the budget, you'll see that the purchase of servers is the biggest line-item.
There's a budget on-line, a quick read of it shows that the founder isn't paid a salary. Still, I do understand your point, I aim my charitable donations and volunteer work very carefully myself.
"An elite few?" Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
Depends a lot on how often you change lenses, and to some extent the lenses you use (the push-pull zooms seem a bit worse.) I shoot a lot, I change lenses a lot, I do find it a lot easier to clean my sensor at least once a month, but in general I agree the difficulty of the problem is overblown.
Absolutely. It's quite necessary too, film never quite sees a scene the way the eye does, even the most stringent fan of trying to reproduce "what it looked like" needs to understand that in a 3-d enviornment the brain discounts blue in shadows, sees colors different shades relative to the colors nearby, adjusts the color of the scene (so far, but no farther) to deal with changes in lighting color, and so forth.
Anyway, yeah. That. What he said.
If that was the design goal (and I've suggested that what you describe is a useful design point, even for me, in a comment elsewhere here), why did Apple include a red-eye feature? I can certainly do my selection without that, dare I say it, editing tool, don't you think?
With P1C1, I could load up a directory of a few hundred, let it chug some thumbnails while I stepped out for coffee, and really speed through the selection process, it probably saved me days of time for that shoot alone. A faster computer would have helped some, but not nearly as much as a better workflow.
Now, that having been said, I started using P1C1 for a lot of my conversions as well, because I end up making better conversions with it than I do with ACR. I don't think ACR is actually technically inferior, and in some important ways it's superior (I miss chromatic aberration reduction in P1C1, and will occasionally do conversions in ACR just for that when it's important), but for some reason I have an easier time dialing in a good conversion with P1C1, even after selection. It sounds to me as if Aperture might not be at this point, but I could imagine a later version filling very much the need I originally bought P1C1 for.
Clearly they should send me in their place, I'd take better pics. (I'm planning an arctic expedition next September.)
I'm less suprrised that Qwest hasn't used it, they don't sell a lot based on their brand, unlike a lot of arists, consumer products companies, and so on.
Wouldn't surprise me they could net millions off of carefully thought out auctions of those--what, 75 or so domains? (org, biz, com).
I'd give a thou or two for "j.com"...
Just a data point: For myself, the big features would be RAW conversion, healing brush/spot healing brush (for cleaning up sensor dust or scanner dust), most of the adjustment layers (levels, curves, color balance, contrast/brightness, hue/sat/lightness), a regular layer with the soft-light property and the paintbrush (I use that as a reversible dodge/burn/etc.), layer masks, selection tools, layer flatten, resize, unsharp mask (narrow radius very wide radius), color space conversion/profiling/previewing, save.
Hmmm, my edge-sharpening stuff uses a lot of weird filters, though. A better edge-sharpening built-in would probably be a better choice.