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The photography questions thread

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19:24 / 05.04.07

I've started this thread for photography questions, principally because I have lots.

It can live here or in A,F&D or in Creation, I don't mind. I just bunged it here so it gets a bit of traffic to start with, then when we all know it exists it can move.

So question the first:

I have got a Canon 350D, as advised by you lovely people about a year ago. I have the ordinary lens it came with and a macro lens. I also have a Tokina, 28-70 zoom lens wihich fits on my Pentax K1000 manual film camera. This camera/lens combo is ancient; at least 18 years old. Can I get a converter to fit this ancient lens to my new digital camera, and if so will the digital know what it is or is the lens now completely redundant?

If it is redundant, what kind of second hand zoom lens should I buy?

17:27 / 06.04.07

According to the Canon website, any Canon EF or EF-S lens should work. These are autofocus lenses, mind, so may not turn up cheaply secondhand anywhere, they aren't the manual focus Canon FD range, which apparently will *not* work, and I suspect those will be the cheap ones, probably for that reason...

19:31 / 06.04.07

Does that mean I can or can't use my old lens?

20:33 / 06.04.07

It would appear that you can get an adaptor ring that sits between the old lens and the new camera. There's a thread about it on photo.net, and there's an ebay auction for one.

Just for background, the EF mount lenses came in with Canon digital cameras (and I think some newer film ones), and these are the ones that the 350D takes. It replaced the Canon FD mount, which the older Canon film ones have. It looks like the Pentax you have uses something called the K mount (I just found a picture of the K1000 - what a gorgeous piece of industrial design).

22:56 / 06.04.07

The K1000 is a lovely camera. My father (who was a professional photographer) bought it for me when I was a teenager because it's exactly the sort of camera you learn everything from. It's completely manual and it served me very well.

Thanks for the adapter advice.

07:29 / 08.04.07

lula, my first and still favourite (well, second favourite) camera is my k1000. still love black and white, so haven't made the transition to digital. i did a 3yr diploma in photography and have taught intro classes, but technical info on equipment is always an experiential thing.

get to know your local pro-photo store, is my advice : )

what do you shoot? (sadly, i do too little, though this year have joined a public access lab and will be getting back to work with my demanding lover, who has a recent penchant for the art... )

17:19 / 11.04.07

I shoot my parrots mostly because they are beautiful colours.

So clever people, what is wrong with this picture?

Why is my colour so washed out? I took it today, using the same settings as the parrot photos in the parrot thread adn they have come out fine.

How can I fix it in photoshop? I mean specifically what shall I do? Is it lacking yellow or something?

Please help.

17:35 / 11.04.07

Can I download this version and have a quick bash? I could stick it in my flickr account as a private image to put back up here and then delete it once done? I'd have to see what works, you see.

17:37 / 11.04.07

Yes of course you can!

18:49 / 11.04.07

From the same batch on the same setting:

19:09 / 11.04.07

Better? Probably a bit too yellow.

Instructions:

1. Increase Saturation by 50.

2. Colour balance:

a Highlights:
Yellow 100-70ish, Magenta 10

b Midtones:
Yellow 30 Green 10 or thereabouts

c Shadows:
Yellow 20-15, Magenta 20-15

3. Autolevels

4. Curves. Pick up the curve and push it around a bit. I preferred *slightly* darker.

Was the girl in front painted? I can't get her face to match her hand without colour balancing it seperately.

19:11 / 11.04.07

RE: shots 1 and 2 disparity: WEIRD.

Did you accidentally change the white balance on your camera halfway through? Absence of sunlight can produce dramatic changes in lighting but the fox masks do look *very* different...

19:31 / 11.04.07

That is SO much better. Thank you very, very much for your help. The face of the girl in front was painted, I forget which colour.

I really don't understand it; it can't be the white balance because then there would definitely be a sudden difference applying to all the pictures post change. But there isn't. It's seemingly random.

However. You have explained to me what to do to fix it and I am really chuffed. Thank you again!

20:02 / 11.04.07

How else shall I repay she whose inspiration freed me from my shackles of oppression?

With naught but LOVE.

20:11 / 11.04.07

Okay, overdid that, slightly.

20:37 / 11.04.07

I am delighted to be loved by the spider plant. I want it to be happy.

21:26 / 11.04.07

Great thread idea, Olulabelle. I've often thought of starting one like this.

Q: What are the pros/cons of using a trio of fluorescent bulbs as lighting? I read somewhere that you wont get the same amount of light with each photo? Or is that hallogens?

21:37 / 11.04.07

Depends on the shutter speed. Some fluorescents flicker at ultra high speed so if you have a particularly high shutter speed the shot might be taken in between the pulses of light, leading to unpredictable results. For the similar reasons, TV screens look striped sometimes.

A low shutter speed (which is probably what you'll have if you're using fluorescent light anyway) usually smears out each pulse.

The main problem with using fluoresceont light is that they impart peculiar colour casts to the image unless you're balancing the colour fairly carefully with filters, but if you're using digital with automatic white balancing it probably won't be too much of a problem.

02:09 / 12.04.07

sibelian's right - fluouro lights emit a discontinuous spectrum of light, while halogens and tungsten (and sun!) lights are continuous - ie they have elements of the whole light spectrum. s'why you get the alien green tinge in colour film photos taken in office buildings...

colour tempature of light is an interesting, and necessary, topic if you want to shoot colour film (pos or neg).

must admit, my digital knowledge is very limited - interested to read about the white balancing capabilities of digital cameras; but how 'real' is the colour rendition under fluouros, given the intitial conditions of a discontinuous light source?

(australia has just announced that all incandescent bulbs will be phased out by '09 in favour of energy efficient cfl's - i wondered at the implications for photography when i learned this)

03:19 / 12.04.07

Olulabelle, what are you using to edit your photographs, and have you thought about using Raw when shooting? This will give you the ability to change white balance to better suit the image without any degradation. You can also change contrast, saturation and various others.

trouble at bill

16:15 / 17.04.07

i need to replace a broken point'n'shoot with a decent compact 35mm film camera and would appreciate any suggestions. It has to be film, and it has to be less than £500/$1000 (manual controls would be appreciated but not essential).

(Should i be asking a film camera question in this thread? Or should us pre-digital dinosaurs be given our own thread? This has the potential to be a very marvelous thread but I fear that it could get very fragmented very quickly. I once even wondered if we could have a photography forum here on the 'Lith, like the baby-eating anarchists on Urban75 do, but never got round to mentioning it to anyone...)

23:19 / 17.04.07

I believe that for the most part film cameras are much cheaper now, especially if you look around for used ones. You're talking compact, as in point-and-shoot? Photo.net has a ton of information on film cameras, like point and shoots.

02:35 / 20.04.07

Just wondering if anyone has a Nikon Coolpix990 and if they've tried the cPix software and their opininon of it?

Cpix link

trouble at bill

16:07 / 20.04.07

>Tsuga, cheers, i am also under the impression that used 35mm stuff will be a very cost-effective option for a little while. The website in your link has been very helpful to me, that guy is virtually obsessed with the Yashica T4 (or T5 on the other side of the pond) as far as compacts go. If anyone is interested, my researches over the last few weeks have also have dug up the cheap and automatic Olympus MJU-II, the less cheap and (I believe) automatic the Yashica T4/5, and the expensive manual Leica Minilux and the Contax T and the Ricoh GR series. As nearly all except the Olympus MJU-II are no longer being made, I am almost bound to get that one for now and scour the used outlets for any of the others as ideally I'd like something manual for the longer term.

23:39 / 27.09.07

I'm wondering if anyone has a good way of dealing with wide shots with extreme exposure differences at each end, especially with something like a stitch. This shot is kind of illustrative, not that it would ever be a great shot, but it shows how the top washes out, the bottom is underexposed, there's only a small range of correctly exposed frame. Anyone have any good ideas for something like this, other than photoshop? Really, I'm not even that good with photoshop, I wouldn't know how to do it there very well, anyway.
What I try to do is expose for the middle, to at least have some information retained in each extremity. I'm just wondering if there are any other tricks or ideas anyone has?

09:13 / 28.09.07

The short answer, Tsuga, is that it’s often impossible to correctly expose this kind of thing without recourse to some post processing. But I think you’ve actually done a pretty good job here given the huge dynamic range in this scene from cloudless sky to forest floor. I don’t know how you metered for the two shots, but spot metering for the sky in the top one, and the trunk of the tree on the bottom one might have helped (although you’d still have to do some post work blending them together, and chances are it’d still end up looking less natural than this).
My only other suggestion is to shoot RAW, which would allow you to recover 2 or 3 stops out of the sky and fill the dark areas at the bottom.

The best solution to this problem is provided by HDR imaging and tone mapping. It’s quite complicated stuff, but the software is remarkably simple to use. You’d need a tripod, but then you bracket 3 (or more) exposures of each shot (say +/- 1 stop each way), and then run them through an application like Photomatix. That’s how I got an even looking exposure of the slides in Tate Modern here.
HDR has become enormously popular in the last couple of years and the effect suffers from overuse a little I think. But while it doesn’t suit everything, it can get you out of a tight spot sometimes.

22:19 / 28.09.07

Thanks very much, Smoothly- it's a little more complicated than I'd hoped for, but at least there are some standardized processes for this in a digital format. It may be popular but I don't know jack about it. I try not to do any processing on my photos, if I can help it, but this is a time when I really should. My stupid camera doesn't shoot in RAW, unfortunately.

00:47 / 29.09.07

That's a shame because the RAW format is really useful. When you shoot in jpeg the camera actually does a lot of processing for you (and throws away loads of data as it's doing it).

Your only other option is using the flash or some other lighting to fill the areas in shadow. That's probably not practical your example here, but worth thinking about if you're confronted with this problem in other situations.

Bear in mind that your eyes (and brain) are really good at adjusting for contrast. Your film or sensor is a lot dumber. But you can get a better insight into what your camera sees - and anticipate this problem - by squinting at the scene. You look a bit stupid but it can spare you disappointment when you get home.

11:28 / 30.09.07

Is it possible that my lens could be making my pictures a weird colour? I seem to be missing some red or something when I take pictures with a particular telephoto lens. My pictures seem washed out, like they were maybe taken with a rubbishy little camera.

This a picture with the lens:

and this is one with my macro lens:

Can you see how the colours are deeper, richer and more vibrant? My macro lens takes a lovely picture, and the telephoto one does not. Is it technically possible for this to be something to do with my lens? I don't really understand the technology of my camera, so I apologise for the possible stupidity of this question.

12:03 / 30.09.07

Is it a zoom lens, or a fixed-focus one? Zooms can tend to diffract light more as it passes through more elements. If it is fixed focus, and it's not the lighting, it may be crappy optics or lens coatings.

12:42 / 30.09.07

It's a zoom lens.

13:36 / 30.09.07

I tried to find something else I'd read before on photo.net and couldn't, but I did see this: Photographic lenses in general are not very good. They only appear to be good because people very seldom enlarge or closely inspect images. Camera lenses are subject to many kinds of distortion, all of which are more difficult to reduce in a zoom lens design. Furthermore, zoom lenses tend to be slower (admit less light) than prime lenses.
However, this may not be as true as it used to, according to this article, which is actually pretty interesting.

trouble at bill

17:28 / 05.10.07

Olulabelle, really I'm no expert but possibly I have the ordinary lens it came with may contain part of an answer. Like the posters above say, a lot of photographers hold the first step to getting better pictures is upgrading from 'the one that it came with', to something better, preferably a prime lens; otherwise (they say) you won't necessarily get substantially better pictures than you would with a cheaper camera. That said, I too can't help wondering about the time (or times) of day you shot those differing pics above, and if you had a filter of any sort on.

Talking of which, Smoothly, Tsuga, my next plan (for my SLR stuff) had been to start using a graduated neutral density filter to address exactly the problem Tsuga mentions. Am I being over-simplistic in thinking that they solve the problem of light-top, dark-bottom shots?

13:41 / 06.10.07

Bilgamesh, yes! A graduated ND filter would be the old skool solution the problem Tsuga describes (although not quite with his stitched example where you'd still have blending issues). That's not over-simplistic at all, quite the opposite really because in my very limited experience, using grad ND filters can be a bit of a faff. First you've got to select the right density and transition for the scene, then position it correctly (which will vary according to where you're placing the horizon etc). But I'm lazy, and if you can't shoot RAW and/or don't use Photoshop, they're just the ticket.

15:40 / 06.10.07

Oh, and Olulabelle, I think Bilgamesh is probably right about your problem too. Some lenses can be particularly prone to flare (particularly ones with lots of elements like most kit zooms) which can manifest as a contrast-sapping wash across the whole image. That might not be the case here (if it is, it's a relatively mild case), but it's a possibility. Do you remember if you were using a hood? If not, it might be worth trying that.

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