Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
02-15-2024, 04:38 PM
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I don't think it has to be an either/or choice in exploring XP2 vs colour neg conversions. I know from experience that it is possible to do very good black and white conversions from colour negs. I also know that XP2 is an excellent black and white film. I've used a lot of XP2 and other black and white chromogenic films since 1981. If you want to experiment with colour negs, you won't be wasting time or film provided you get exposure right. Try both approaches and see which you prefer. As others have mentioned, it would be a good idea to use Photoshop or Lightroom conversion for colour negs rather than simple desaturation. That will give you more control over tones, including the ability to emulate black and white lens filters to some degree.
In dealing with labs I would choose C-41 processing over black and white film processing. C-41 is much more standardized.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
11-27-2023, 05:36 PM
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I have two LXs- one for 20 years and the other for 25. One needed a CLA including mirror bumpers etc. about 10 years ago and has been fine since. The other had a less thorough mirror repair 5 years ago and will be back tomorrow from a full CLA. I would say that the cost of ownership is higher than for my mechanical Pentaxes such as Spotmatics, KXs and MXs.
That being said, I find the LX very pleasant to use, particularly for things like tripod-mounted work in very dim conditions. It is convenient that light entering through the viewfinder does not affect metering.
If you just want aperture priority automation and do not need mirror lockup or an exceptional light meter, the ME Super will do the job nicely. Another option is the Chinon CE-4, which is comparable to the ME Super but uses a knob rather than buttons for shutter speed selection.
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Forum: Vintage Cameras and Equipment
10-31-2023, 06:04 PM
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I've had two LXs for about 25 years. They are lovely cameras to use. They've been pretty reliable with occasional servicing for mirror issues. One is going out soon for repair of a sluggish mirror. The techs I'm using have worked on my cameras before and say there is no problem. However, I think buying one with unknown history and no guarantee would be a bit of a crap shoot. When I was a salaried professional I used Nikon F3 extensively. They are also very nice cameras. I'd recommend going to groups in the Nikon world to research reliability. As a really long-term proposition I would go for mechanical cameras such as the MX, KX or KM which can be used with external meters if necessary.
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Forum: General Photography
09-23-2023, 04:34 PM
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I do have a Spot Meter V (bought in Whitehorse, Yukon in 1976, still working well) and a couple of MXs. I'm not Ansel Adams, though.
I've read Ansel Adams' autobiography and a couple of biographies as well as his technical series. No mention of using Pentax 35mm gear.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
05-04-2023, 07:03 PM
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Dogsled race finish on the Mackenzie River at Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, 1983. Probably with a Ricoh XR-1s and Rikenon 50mm. The dog in the lead nailed a local dog resulting in a pup that I raised and had for many years. 83-07-004 Master.jpg by John Poirier, on Flickr
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
05-04-2023, 02:42 PM
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I agree with others that there are good non-Pentax K-mount bodies around. I found the Chinon CE-4 and Ricoh XR-1s very good. I owned both in the early 80s.
In terms of Pentax bodies, the KM is basically a Spotmatic F with k mount. I very much like the KX, which is somewhat more sophisticated. The MX is very good. One factor for me is that with my aging eyes I find the KX match needle metering much easier to read than the MX LED display in bright light.
I've had two LXs for 25 years and kept them well maintained. Lovely cameras. I have heard that repairs are becoming problematic, although I recently found a repairman in Vancouver BC who did a nice job on some minor repairs, a sticky mirror and deteriorated mirror bumper.
In terms of affordability and availability of repairs I would lean toward the KM or the KX.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
05-03-2023, 02:26 PM
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My roots with Pentax go back to the early 1970s when I was teaching myself photography. M42 gear was widely used by beginners.
I went on to a long career doing technical photography at a museum/archives. As I inherited Nikon gear as part of the job, I carried on with that. It's a good system. (I also used Pentax 6x7, Hasselblad and a couple of 4x5 systems.) For my personal work I stayed with Pentax because I was fairly well known among local photographers and did not want to appear to be in a conflict of interest by using my work gear on personal time. I did a good deal of stock and documentary photography on the side.
I still have 2 LXs (bought about 25 years ago), a K2DMD, a KX and several Spotmatic era bodies in regular rotation. I take a nostalgic pleasure in using fine old equipment. Like others, I enjoy working with some things I could not have afforded in my youth.
In the early 2000s as people began to dump film cameras I picked up a bunch of equipment very cheaply. Canon, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus and various odds and ends. It was interesting to mess around with them, but now I'm ready to pass them along so that they are used rather than slowly deteriorating in storage. I've given a few to young friends who are learning film photography. I Intend to sell most of the rest to a shop who will give them tuneups as needed and get them back in circulation.
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I can understand the enjoyment that people get from collecting cameras. It is a relatively affordable hobby as collecting goes unless you are in to Leica. Keep them on the shelf or use them? Up to you!
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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
05-02-2023, 08:27 PM
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I agree. My main interest for the last 15 years or so has been highly detailed landscape images. Mostly I use a 36MP full frame camera. I used to make and sell prints up to 2x3 feet, although I have largely retired from that. I continue to print my finished work on 13x19 paper because in my view prints are the true measure of a good landscape photograph.
I've been experimenting with Topaz Photo AI for landscapes. Noise reduction is very valuable to me as I cannot carry a tripod any distance and often work in dense forests under heavy clouds. My choices are to either hand-hold at high ISOs or to not photograph the subjects that I love. With Denoise AI and now Photo AI I can achieve excellent results up to ISO 12,800. Without that capability I would have to give up much of my photography.
My images need little sharpening, so I use that function sparingly. It can be nice to add a little crispness to things like small leaves.
Human guidance:
I have customized Photo AI in the preferences settings. I disabled facial recognition and subject recognition. I enabled the low (soft) option in the sharpen preferences.
So far I have found that I rarely need to manually adjust noise reduction. I often reduce sharpening a bit.
Limited tests with old low-resolution digital files and film images look promising.
One of the reasons for this screed is that I've grown tired of people very aggressively stating that you are not a real photographer if you use tools like Photo AI. The tone reminds me of those who were outraged by digital cameras. Perhaps the purists could go back to producing daguerreotypes.
Some real photographers, like photojournalists, work under fast-changing, often poorly lit conditions. Some real photographers have to find workarounds for disabilities.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
04-08-2023, 05:29 PM
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You might consider Kodak XTOL or Adox XT-3 as a low-toxicity and more predictable alternative to caffeinol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xtol
As well, rather than relying on YouTube U for technical information, I suggest that you look for books. I have no idea what is in print now. However, if you have access to a serious used book store you may find some useful things in the photography section. The books may be outdated in terms of some film and developer specifics, but black and white film technology has not changed all that much for many decades. One advantage of photo books vs. YouTube is that in the good old days only books by authors with proven expertise were published.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
02-23-2023, 06:58 PM
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I've kept all my negatives since 1971.
I've been doing my own scanning since 1994 and did preservation management in an archives for 20 years. I've been retired for many years.
Unless you are paying for custom scanning, I would not count on scans from a lab to be of high quality or of high enough resolution to be useful for serious printing. It is wise to hang on to the negatives in case you want higher quality.
Last year I finished a project involving high resolution scanning over 15000 frames of my film images for donation to the archives where I used to work. While it would have been easier for them to simply take on the images solely as digital files, they badly wanted the original film for backup. They are in the process of extracting the selected film originals from many archival storage pages.
I think many archives are just beginning to come to grips with managing digital images.
One thing about film is that it survives quite well with a minimum of attention other than proper enclosures and sometimes cold storage. Much film will last a long time without that care.
Proper preservation of digital images requires ongoing monitoring of multiple backups, data migration as storage devices fail or become obsolete, and format conversion in the event that a format is in danger of becoming unreadable.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
06-16-2019, 08:38 AM
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Your images look far more grainy than XP2 should. In particular, note the grain in the shadows in the first image. I suspect that the film may have been processed in black and white chemicals rather than C-41.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-10-2019, 02:23 PM
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That should work well enough. However, I'm not familiar with that particular lens. Some inexpensive lenses are not great at the extremes of their focal range. You'll just have to try it and find out. Of course, the amount of high ISO noise depends on sensor performance. It's up to you to decide how much noise is acceptable. With my current gear I often use ISO 800. I've been happy with that in print sizes up to 24x36 inches.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-10-2019, 12:35 PM
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Many years ago constant aperture zooms were significantly more useful than variable aperture in certain situations. Before the days of TTL flash, it could be a pain to be constantly guestimating aperture settings to compensate for variable aperture zooming. The same is the case when using hand-held light meters. It was particularly inconvenient in fast-changing situations such as news photography. I think this is the main reason for fixed aperture zooms becoming the professional standard. As the professional standard, fixed aperture zooms have tended to be better built than variable aperture.
There are advantages to a 2.8 maximum aperture vs. the 3.5 or 4 common in variable aperture zooms for low-light work. This has become much less of an issue with modern sensors' high ISO performance.
I don't think fixed aperture lenses have any more potential for high optical quality than variable aperture. I have used some very good variable aperture zooms. From my perspective as a retired professional I see little value in the expense and size of fixed aperture zooms for most applications.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
02-20-2019, 09:16 PM
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It's good to see some Koni Omega work showing up. I've used Koni Omegas since 1987. Here is one of my earliest Kon Omega shots (Pangnirtung, Nunavut) done with the 90mm: |
Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
10-15-2018, 07:11 AM
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I'd never do something like that. Nope, never. On the other hand, I have been known to go out shooting with no card in my digital cameras...
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
08-03-2018, 09:24 PM
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You're welcome
Using a digital camera meter would very likely get you into the right ballpark, but may well be off in purist terms. In other words, your cameras may be wrong.
There is a Wikipedia article that contains a paragraph illustrating why I am skeptical about using digital cameras for metering film. I quote it below:
"Despite these detailed standard definitions, cameras typically do not clearly indicate whether the user "ISO" setting refers to the noise-based speed, saturation-based speed, or the specified output sensitivity, or even some made-up number for marketing purposes. Because the 1998 version of ISO 12232 did not permit measurement of camera output that had lossy compression, it was not possible to correctly apply any of those measurements to cameras that did not produce sRGB files in an uncompressed format such as TIFF. Following the publication of CIPA DC-004 in 2006, Japanese manufacturers of digital still cameras are required to specify whether a sensitivity rating is REI or SOS.[citation needed] "
Link to the full article, which discusses both film speed and digital camera ISO measurement: Film speed - Wikipedia
Colour negative film has quite a bit of latitude, especially for overexposure. In other words, you won't necessarily see the difference between a correctly exposed neg and an overexposed one unless you have a totally exposure locked printing process, or a densitometer, or are quite experienced in "reading" negatives.
In the real world there are variables such as shutter speed accuracy that can further muddy the waters.
It's better to moderately overexpose than to underexpose negs. If you are one stop over, the effects will usually not be very obvious- particularly if you are scanning the negs for printing. I tend to err on the side of overexposure if I'm not sure about what the camera is telling me.
If what you are doing works for you, by all means continue doing so. However, I know from hard-won experience that it is unwise to assume that results from a limited sample will be the same for everyone.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
08-02-2018, 07:12 PM
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Today I decided to confirm some tests I did a number of years ago. I don't completely trust comparisons with digital camera meters. My chief concerns are that digital camera ISO ratings can be fudged, and that "matrix" metering can behave differently from the metering pattern of old film cameras. As well, testing methodology affects results. Metering off an 18% gray card, which is considered a standard method for testing meters, will produce different results from metering off a random subject.
I used a Sekonic L-358 incident meter, in incident mode, and a Pentax Spotmeter V. With a gray card used for the spot meter, the two meters agree within about .1 stop.
I tested a Spotmatic, Spotmatic 1000, and a Spotmatic II. I used the same fresh 394 battery in all three. My results with the various Spotmatics reading off a gray card were within .1 to .3 stops of the readings from the hand-held meters. All three cameras would have produced slight overexposure.
My results were consistent with my testing from years ago. At that time I tested three different types of silver oxide batteries and observed no differences in their behaviour.
Over the years my results on film from Spotmatics have been consistent with what the meters tell me.
I used to do large format process control involving hand-held meters and densitometers, so I am pretty confident in my procedures.
|What it boils down to is that, speaking for myself, I would not hesitate to use silver oxide batteries as a replacement for mercury batteries in Spotmatic bodies. I would not worry about recalibration or use of special adapters such as CRIS.
Cheers
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
08-01-2018, 03:14 AM
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As a retired professional I've done regular solo shows at various galleries in my region. Also a goodly number of group shows. My shows are of what I considered my personal work when I was a working pro. I have sold a reasonable number of prints. I would not try to make a living from it. Very, very few "fine art" photographers make substantial incomes from print sales. They make most of their money from day jobs, from commercial work, of from teaching photography.
I've slowed down a lot and in future expect to do one or two shows a year at local galleries. I can do the photography but the travel and schmoozing to market my work to major urban galleries is more than I care to take on at this stage in life. However, I intend to continue making prints to please myself. For me a good print is a much more true expression of photography than an "image" on a (usually uncalibrated) monitor.
Incidentally, much of my work is on FF digital. I continue to shoot film because I enjoy the process, including messing around with old cameras. Some of the film work is good enough to show, but usually as 12x18 prints from 35mm rather than the 24x36 prints I can easily pull from FF digital. There's nothing wrong with a good 12x18 print, but these days catching audience attention is more a matter of large size than of whether the image has anything interesting to say. Once you have peoples' attention, some begin to see the qualities in pictures that make them worth hanging on their walls and revisiting many times. From my perspective, that is what has made selling my prints worthwhile.
In terms of your image, jellygeist, it's colourful and probably saleable. If it's of a well-known local landmark, that increases the odds of sales. That sort of thing can be sold at local arts/crafts fairs. Cards can also work for shots in this style. However, a single image is unlikely to carry much weight in marketing prints. As a standalone image you might get paid peanuts for it from a stock agency. If you want to sell prints, in my view the image should be part of a body of work that demonstrates that your picture is an example of a consistent artistic vision rather than a fluke.
You may want to look around and see what people are charging for prints at fairs in your area. You will probably find that a lot of them are selling cheap and nasty prints for barely enough money to cover printing and framing expenses, with nothing for their time or operating costs. It's up to you to decide whether you want to compete in that market or aim higher.
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