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By Larry Roll August 18, 2006

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Muzak and I have been discussing cameras and photography in private messages. As this is a forum for topics of general interest, I thought it would be nice to get anyone else with an interest in photography involved in the discussion.

I have owned and used just about every camera in the Canon 35 mm. line, and while I am not currently active in the arena of film photography, I do own a Canon A1, several Canon lenses, and all the sundry gear that goes with them. I have also owned and used a Yashica Mat 124g, a very nice twin-lens reflex (TLR) 120/220 roll film camera. However, I sold it many years ago when I needed to make a payment on my Mitsubishi (Dodge) Colt I owned at the time. I have long since regretted that, and sometimes wish I'd sold the car instead, but walking 30 miles to work each day wasn't an option at the time!

I am now using a Sony DSC P-1000 digital camera, and I like it very much. I'm waiting for the digital SLR technology to mature a bit more, and for their prices to go down, but I'll be getting one of them someday.

So, chime in with any and all photographic discussions you care to add. Be advised, in spite of being an avid photographer since my youth, I'm by no means an expert, and hope to learn as well as share knowledge.

Max

I'm avoiding digital like the plague. I still use my fully-manual Canon AT 1 (1978) for my best work, and use a Canon Sure Shot (circa 1980 ) for a few things, too. My only nod to "modern" photography is a Canon Sure Shot 105u that I bought a couple years ago. If I want hi-res, I let Clark Color Labs scan my negs and then I download them. After reading, photography is the hobby that takes up the most of my time.

Hi Corolla/Photo Geeks:

For Me: Photography would probably keep me alive if I ever lost my job. I've entered the digital field with a half decent camera and it has a lot of advantages. The main one is not as good a picture, but I think we are loosing our foothold. I lost several of my precious cameras when I divorced many years ago, but still have a few film cameras left that remain dust free.

I'd like to see a digital camera today able to go from ISO 6 to 12,880 as the Canon A-1 was already capable of about 40 years ago.

Bio: Weddings/minor sports/Ontario Hockey League Team Photographer (man, that was a long time ago)

Canon AE-1___Canon A1___Koni Omega Rapid 6x7 medium format__Panasonic FZ30

Bikeman982

Hi Corolla/Photo Geeks:For Me: Photography would probably keep me alive if I ever lost my job. I've entered the digital field with a half decent camera and it has a lot of advantages. The main one is not as good a picture, but I think we are loosing our foothold. I lost several of my precious cameras when I divorced many years ago, but still have a few film cameras left that remain dust free.

 

I'd like to see a digital camera today able to go from ISO 6 to 12,880 as the Canon A-1 was already capable of about 40 years ago.

Bio: Weddings/minor sports/Ontario Hockey League Team Photographer (man, that was a long time ago)

Canon AE-1___Canon A1___Koni Omega Rapid 6x7 medium format__Panasonic FZ30

I bought 13 Sony Mavica FD 75's on e-Bay and sold 11 of them. That pretty much paid for the two I kept. It uses the full size floppy and I can use that right in my computer. I don't like all the adapter cables that come with other cameras.

In my line of work I take photos of various completed projects, I use a 4 mega pixel kodak easyshare. Back in '04 I did get a 35mm SLR camera, but wish I hadn't, with digital it is so much easier to distribute photos, crop, delete ones you don't want and don't have to bother with changing film every 24/27 shots or so. When I take photos it is usually for some kind of report, so publishing is easier (I just burn onto a CD at home and take it in). In addition, now we can develop photos for 22 cents each, it is marginally cheaper than chemical films. In '09 when I should stop claiming for its depreciation on my tax, I may get a digital SLR.

I got into photography when i was in high school. My first 35mm was a Voitlander, a soild German manual 35mm with Leica lens.

Next was a used Nikon F ( still have it ) , which a friend's brother brought back from Vietnam. I tended to stick with the Nikons after that..N2000..the last SLR I bought was an N70 with Sigma 60-120 Zoom.

After that I picked up a P&S Olympus Stylus 3MP digital. I agree that the prices will have to come down more to go fully to SLR digital, but you can't beat the 'zero' processing costs and instant results. I think film will still be used in medium and large format cameras for a while, like Deardorff with Zeiss lenses.

Muzak:

I think you'll find that the Canon A-1 goes back a bit less than 40 years. I bought my first AE-1 in 1976, and the A-1 came out not too long thereafter -- I bought mine in 1980, making a bad trade for my F-1 body (BIG mistake!). The A-1 makes photography pretty much point, focus and shoot, and I've exploited that capability quite well. However, there was something about the F-1's solidity that appeals to me more than the A-1's electronic wizardry.

What I'd truly love to see Canon produce is an F-1 like body, which used the old style bayonet mount lenses. The new Canon digital SLR's are all autofocus -- a feature I can do without, for the most part. So being, they have their own unique lenses, so there is no backward compatability. However, I think we'll see Canon produce my "digital SLR" body at approximately the same time we see Toyota start selling Corollas with the nifty diesel engines they're using all over the rest of the civilized world.

Yeh, no kidding about the auto focus or manual setting. I bought my new digital in January when there isn't much to take pictures of unless we have a good snowfall. I took many a pic at butterfly conservatories and nearly had to take every one on manual focus as auto just didn't work. Throw a light meter at some student into photography now and tell him to turn his camera on manual. Guaranteed he doesn't know how it works.

Did you have to remind me about my old F1. Now you have my interest sparked, but I only had it a few months. There's one for sale in Toronto about an hour from here and will take the lenses I have. Its far too steep for me to spend on a camera that will only sit on my shelf though.

http://cgi.ebay.com/CANON-NEW-F-1n-FILM-CA...1QQcmdZViewItem

Bikeman982

I have a Nikon 35MM SLR with lots of attachments - close-up lenses, telephoto and zooms, but it stopped working well.

Ti-Jean

In 1979 when I started to work full time, one of the first to me from me gifts was a new manual Yashica FR (black body) that I paid around $290. C, if memory serves.

I used to carry that Yashica wherever I went. Work trips, vacations in the south, motorcycle trips, everywhere. But I gradually lost interest in photography and the Yashica has been sitting unused for years with a brand new film in it.

Then, compact digital cameras came our way. I have had a Fuji 2.0 Mpx at work since 2002 to learn the basics of digital photography and my GF bought a Canon A510 last year.

Last week, after some reading, I bought a fine little Nikon Coolpix L1 for... $289. C.

All the features of a modern day digital camera for so little, relative to the big and heavy cameras of our past.

It revived my interest in photography. For a casual photographer and traveler, it is great. As others have pointed out, you can just do whatever you want with your pictures without spending a penny for development.

I'll never go back to film photography.

Wow - lots of higher end cameras and camera buffs here.

Cameras that I've used and still have (was an avid photographer, up to and include college - not much now given current workschedule, but have started to switch to collecting them)

-35mm film

Nikon F2AS

Nikon F3

Nikon FM-10

Nikon FG

Nikon 8008

Nikon N90s

Canon EOS Elan 7E

Olympus OM-1

Olympus OM-10

Pentax K-1000

-Point and Shoot

Olympus IS-2

Olympus IS-3

Olympus IS-10

Kodak Instamatic 500

Kodak Instamatic (newer, plastic one)

-NOTE: Don't laugh at these 126 format cameras, they take a damn good picture for point and shoot. The Instamatic 500 is probably over 30 years old and still works.

-Medium format

Contax 645

-Instant

Polaroid Land Camera model J66?

Polaroid Square Shooter

Polariod 600

Polaroid Spectra

-Digital

Nikon D100

Nikon D2x

Olympus Camedia C3003

Olympus D-435

As you can see - big Nikon and Olympus fan. I like that all the Nikon lenses will fit all the bodies with an F-Mount (exception with Digital - still works, but magnification is off). Most of the my equiment and chemicals for developing and processing my own negatives and imagery I've sold off (too much room and bad chemicals to have around the house). So I've concentrated more on digital (film and processing is expensive, plus they do a so-so job anyway, unless I'm willing to pay more). Can't capture the same aspects of a photograph with digital vs film (film has innate warmth that digital may never catch, most of the time has to be added with post-processing). But with big players like Canon and Nikon moving to digital - film days are numbered. But like LP records, 8 tracks, and cassettes - never completely gone.

Digital may be nice...but how do I make a double or triple exposure on one frame? Do I have to use my computer to do that or what?

mmm..speaking of LP's..I got about 700 of them here in the house that are in no hurry to go anywhere but be converted to mp3's.

Some of the CMOS sensored variants can do that - they process the images off chip and then save them. Big thing I like about digital is the storage flexibiilty - save imagery on any media of my choice, no longer having to take special care of the negatives.

Plus with the processing power of today's computers and advanced photo software - I can do pretty much everything I once did with film with digital imagery. Like red-eye with the smaller cameras (black felt tipped pen on film, felt pen tool in Photoshop) and making someone look thinner (trace around image in negative with hobby knife, warping in software).

Ok, I know I can get rid of red eye (except when I eat too much hot chili), but how do you get rid of pet eye? The only way I can get a good picture of my calico cat is without a flash as she has two different colour of eyes. They come out two different colours when the flash is used and even in the dark they glow two different colours. With my 35mm I can attach a slave to it and that solves the problem.

Muzak: You could use photoshop to alter the color of the pet's eyes, same as you would eliminate a case of red-eye in a photo of a person. Just don't ask me how -- I have photoshop but haven't been using it. I usually use the simpler photo editor programs that usually come bundled with my digital cameras.

Ti-Jean

Same here with our cat. My Nikon has a Red Eye mode for the flash and the cat's eyes come out like headlights on... But I have yet to try to modify pictures with the camera editor program.

BTW, do you know if I could download and look at pictures from my GF's Canon on the Nikon's Picture Project that came with my Coolpix? Or the other way around?

If so, I could suppress the Zoom Browser EX that came bundled with the Canon and use only 1 application on my computer.

I'm in the process of "streamlining" my old Dell home computer and want to get rid of all I can to gain disk space.

Only if the images were processed as standard formats (JPEG, TIFF, BMP, etc.). Even then, the Canon software may only be looking for specific Canon proprietary tags in the images. Even though both Nikon and Canon have a RAW output (Nikon also has its own NEF ouput) - probably not cross-compatible with the bundled software. Thrid party software, like PhotoShop or similar, would have the software necessary to decode the imagery - but usually much to cumbersome to use.

Even though both Nikon and Canon have a RAW output .....
My new digital will do "RAW" and this guy at work keeps telling me to use it. With a 2 gig memory card, is it worthwhile and why???

 

 

With the bundled software - images saved in the RAW or other proprietary output are basically imagery read straight (no processing) from the imaging sensor. using the software, you can do a host if items to the raw image that would be lost if the camera had processed the image before saving it to some media.

I'm not 100% convinced this is necessary for your generall shutterbug - I only take RAW images if I need to process them for image registration, temporal processing, etc.

Only advantage I would see from this RAW format is that there is no compression involved. You generally will get no digital "artifacts" or weird interpolation issues that you get from a compressed image format like JPEG or others.

OK, hold on a minute here. Someone PLEASE explain RAW format to me. My Sony DSC P-1000 camera doesn't seem to have any such setting. It saves it's images in .jpg (JPEG) format, with the file name just being "DSC" and a series number, i.e. DSC00123.jpg. I have NO way to save the images from the camera in any other format -- they all come out as jpeg's.

Is the RAW format just a simple, binary, uncompressed output of the image sensor? If so, does anyone know if there's a way to get such output from my camera? Hit the keys, and see if you can give me some smarts here!

RAW format is like it sounds - takes the raw information from the imaging sensor and saves it in an uncompressed format with no loss in bit depth. Though there is much more to it - I will not go into too many details.

Example (assuming a Bayer Mosaic) - If I have a 4MP sensor (2464 x 1632) pixels, 12-bit depth CCD chip - in a RAW format, the image saved would be 2464 x 1632 x 12bits = 48,254,967 bits of image data in a single channel (~6 MB). The RAW format is the most efficient way to save all the data coming off the imaging sensor.

This doesn't neccesarily mean that it will be the largest, file size-wise. You could have an uncompressed TIFF (2464 x 1632 x 8 bit) x 3 channels (for RGB components - in most cases, 8-bit color depth, because most output devices only support an 8-bit grayscale (256 levels)). This will yield a image that is DOUBLE the RAW size (~12MB).

Most Digital SLRs and semi-programmable point and shoot cameras have this RAW capability - but most point and shoot cameras do not. For most people, getting imagery saved on disc as JPEG just makes it that much easier to work with. If you have a RAW image file - it has to be processed into a file that can be read and properly displayed.

I'm going to try the RAW stuff and see what it can do. I've got nothing to loose as I get a jpeg simulateously apparently.

The problem with jpeg that I've found is that you loose quality each time you do something to it. I had a file over 3 meg and all I did was copy and paste over a cigarette butt in the parking lot and it went down to less than 100k when saved. That's why I always keep the originals separate.

I'm going to try the RAW stuff and see what it can do. I've got nothing to loose as I get a jpeg simulateously apparently. The problem with jpeg that I've found is that you loose quality each time you do something to it. I had a file over 3 meg and all I did was copy and paste over a cigarette butt in the parking lot and it went down to less than 100k when saved. That's why I always keep the originals separate.

Did the quality of the image you copied/pasted decline in porportion to the file size? If you answer "yes," how could you tell? Was there a visible degradation?

The problem with jpeg that I've found is that you loose quality each time you do something to it. I had a file over 3 meg and all I did was copy and paste over a cigarette butt in the parking lot and it went down to less than 100k when saved.
I know that when saving a file as JPEG in Photoshop, there is a "Level" or something of that type from "1-10". I think this is used to determine how much compression to do. I use this feature to make my JPEGs at 5MP smaller (if the pictures are something I don't care much about).

 

 

foorbar is absolutely correct - that level is the compression ratio of the JPEG format. That is the great thing with JPEG - it is the relative compression you can get (smaller file size) and still retain a decent looking image - perfect for websites, for example.

As with all things, there is a trade off between image file size and image quality. Generally the compression takes the original image and divides it into sub patches, usually around 8 x 8 pixels which are then compressed with some algorithm. You can see these sub patches manifesting themselves as "hair-like" artifacts around edges, lines, strong contrast areas. The higher the compression, the more apparent these artifacts become to the point of actually seeing the sub patches.

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