Photography - equipment, help hints

[RabidAlien]

Photoshop is good, but I still prefer to get the picture as perfect as possible in the lens, before it hits the PC. Mainly cuz I'm too lazy to really sit down and learn Photoshop! This looks interesting, though:

Mod a Cokin P007 to fit into a screw-in filter

 

[GrauGeist]

LMAO @ lazy...

I hear ya'...but here's a place that I've always found to have real good advice on Photoshop techniques:
Infrared Photo Effect In Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

And that's a tutorial on IR conversions...looks real interesting, though I've never tried it.

 

[RabidAlien]

I haven't shot much IR in color, but everything turned out with a very reddish tint (expected, since it *was* infraRED film). The link I looked at showed the palmtrees in the pic were yellow. Someone was just playing with color balances, IMO. I gotta head out right now, but I"ll take a gander at your site this afternoon.

 

[evangilder]

I hear you, RA. The way I look at it is if I have to spend more than 2 minutes on a photo to make it look presentable, it's likely not worth futzing with.

 

[RabidAlien]

Yep. There's photography, and there's image manipulation. I've seen some incredible things done with both, mind you, and I tend to believe that each is its own art-form. I personally prefer the photography, though, as it gets me outside. I don't hike or geocache as much as I used to (ie....not at all anymore). I really need to get back into all three. But that's beside the point. In my mind, the two art forms can meet and maybe overlap a little (who doesn't need dust-spots or some brightness/contrast/color balance done? And those B&W pics with one spot of color in them....awesome!), but too much is just...I dunno. Cheating.

 

[GrauGeist]

I agree RA...I like to present to my viewers as much of what I saw through the viewfinder as possible.

I think it's fun to manipulate an image to give it an "antique" or "vintage" look (kind of what I've done to some of my aircraft shots here) but when people start changing the images or combining multiple images effects and passing them off as something like "the beauty of nature", I have to cry foul. Nature doesn't need a make over, just a few dust spots removed or a little sharpening for clarity...

I agree about the B&W with a certain object left colored, those are cool...and that becomes a type of art form.

 

[RabidAlien]

Yep. Pretty much anything that could have been done in the darkroom (B&W photos would sometimes be hand-painted to give them a spot of color, IIRC). I've always liked my B&W's to be a little darker, somewhat on the contrasty side of things, with a good solid division between light and dark, such as sunlight hitting the side of a tree trunk...you get the amazing texture of the bark, starting at almost pure blinding white on the lgiht-side then progressing to pitch black as the trunk curves away from the light. Most everybody I've ever talked to/learned from has told me I'm too heavy on my brightness/contrast. But, to each their own.

 

[GrauGeist]

Well, I just had to change out my batteries in my Pentax today, they finally died last night when I went to get some night shots of a local bridge we have here in town (It's artsy...lots of glass and lights).

So in a nutshell, I got about 5 months worth of daily shots out of it for the tune of about 8 dollars!

Anyway, I've been wondering what a good "intermediate" lens might be, to fill the gap between my 18-55 and my 70-300...The problem I find in shooting sunsets, for example, is that the 18-55 gives me a very broad landscape while the 70-300 gives too little.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[evangilder]

That might be a perception problem, Dave. You are talking about a 15mm difference between the long end of one lens and the short end of another. That being said, I did notice a difference going from the 28-80mm to the 18-200 on the wide angle end.

I looked at the Pentax site and see they have a 17-70mm, 50-200mm and a 55-300mm. You would obviously need to do some research into price and reviews, etc. If money were no object, I would probably have a big array of lenses.

Camera Lens - Official PENTAX Imaging Web Site

 

[ontos]

How many people keep their memory cards, buy this I mean "Do not erase the Pictures". Do you erase all your pictures or do you keep the card and use a new one when the card is full. I keep thinking what would happen if I lost all the pictures I saved on my hard drive, and lost all that I saved on USB.

 

[Aaron Brooks Wolters]

Ontos, I just have two 4 gig cards and when I get them full or know that I may need the space for more shots I erase them. I do have a 1 terabit storage harddrive that I keep them on and I do not keep it plugged in unless I am loading photos onto it. Cards will get expensive after a while and you could have one mess up and loose whats on it. You can also load them onto DVD's or CD's to store them also.

 

[BikerBabe]

Ontos, here's what I do:
I erase my cards after I've copied all of my photos onto my pc drive.
Then I make a backup copy on my external hard drive, and now and then I burn some photo dvd's to keep as backup copy, too.
That way I've got three copies of all of my photos, and that ought to be reasonably safe.
I've lost photos on faulty memory cards, so I usually don't keep anything stored on cards. It all goes on the hard drive w. backup copy.

 

[evangilder]

One thing I have learned with memory cards, do not erase them to make space. Format the cards before you use them again. It is like a hard drive, and formatting marks the bad sectors that happen. One bad sector in the right place can ruin an entire day of shooting.

For storage, I copy them to my local disk. For backup, I have an external drive that backs up all my images every night at midnight, along with other important files. Every 3-6 months, I grab another external, back everything up on that, and send it out of state to a relative for an off-site backup.

 

[ontos]

Thank you all for the great ideas. I'll get me an external drive tomorrow. I do have them all backed up on USB Sticks.

 

[Aaron Brooks Wolters]

Sorry Eric. Forgot to mention the format step.

 

[LA2019]

Excellent idea. As I am sitting here, I am installing a new hard drive and the OS on a friends PC. When I picked the PC up from her she asked me about all of the photos on her hard drive. Since the hard drive was toast I asked her where she backed up all of her photos'? "I didn't back them up" she replied. Guess what? She's SOL. (Short of paying hundreds of dollars for a HD recovery service).

Evangilder does things right. Multiple redundency. One can never be too safe...

 

[GrauGeist]

Well, I didn't get anything for Christmas and that's the way life is sometimes, but I figured what the heck, I'll get me something!

I ordered up a PENTAX DA 50-200mm f/4-5.6 ED Weather Resistant Lens to fill in the gap between my Pentax 18-55 and my Sigma 70-300.

It's supposed to be here tomorrow, so it looks like I'm going to have to do some "testing" this weekend!

 

[evangilder]

8) There are few joys in life bigger than a new lens, if you are a photographer. Sounds like a good lens.

 

[RabidAlien]

Nice!

 

[Gnomey]

Nice GG, would of liked a new lens myself but got one of these instead.

Canon UK - The Speedlite 430EX II: fully controllable flash for every occasion