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After many years of absence from photography I am thinking of taking it up againl But this time I was thinking of going digital. When i last did photography digital was not on the scene. I used medium format cameras (6x6cm) and a Linhof 5"x4", technical camera (all gone now). Spending hours with smelly chemicals in the darkroom was no fun.

I have a Mac G5 and full photoshop so I should be off to a good start with software?

This is a fresh start for me with digital cameras. Anyone recommend cameras to look out for or avoid:-3

Paul.

joesoap;737405 wrote: After many years of absence from photography I am thinking of taking it up againl But this time I was thinking of going digital. When i last did photography digital was not on the scene. I used medium format cameras (6x6cm) and a Linhof 5"x4", technical camera (all gone now). Spending hours with smelly chemicals in the darkroom was no fun.

I have a Mac G5 and full photoshop so I should be off to a good start with software?

This is a fresh start for me with digital cameras. Anyone recommend cameras to look out for or avoid:-3

Paul.


I have a fuji film digital SLR type camera, I have to say its cracking, it wasn't that expensive and it takes great pictures. I must check out the model number for you.

It's a real bind at the moment, I'm not sure it's technically possible to do what you're ideally wanting to do. The reason you used those formats was the resolution of the film combined with the size of the negative to give clean enlargements on big paper.

If you reckon a fine grain film gives effectively 3000 dots per inch (in modern terminology - there's no direct equivalent but that's a good guess) you can estimate the pixel count your 6x6 format was capable of. There just aren't any cameras on the market that will provide so much. The consequence is that you can't enlarge to the same extent you could before without showing granular artefacts.

These days you could reckon that printing 300dpi gives a clean image. That's similar to saying a 35mm negative would blow up to 16"x12" before grain effects are detectable. To get that resolution digitally you need a camera with 3600x4800 pixels which is a 17M pixel camera, and that's just to get to the upper edge of 35mm performance. To emulate even medium format is simply not an option yet.

I may be wrong at a fundamental level though I can't see why. I may also be wrong about your intention as far as image reproduction goes, but if you want to produce 30 inch exhibition prints I don't know how you'd go about that digitally. Tell us a bit more about your previous reasons for medium format and above.

spot;737415 wrote: It's a real bind at the moment, I'm not sure it's technically possible to do what you're ideally wanting to do. The reason you used those formats was the resolution of the film combined with the size of the negative to give clean enlargements on big paper.

If you reckon a fine grain film gives effectively 3000 dots per inch (in modern terminology - there's no direct equivalent but that's a good guess) you can estimate the pixel count your 6x6 format was capable of. There just aren't any cameras on the market that will provide so much. The consequence is that you can't enlarge to the same extent you could before without showing granular artefacts.

These days you could reckon that printing 300dpi gives a clean image. That's similar to saying a 35mm negative would blow up to 16"x12" before grain effects are detectable. To get that resolution digitally you need a camera with 3600x4800 pixels which is a 17M pixel camera, and that's just to get to the upper edge of 35mm performance. To emulate even medium format is simply not an option yet.

I may be wrong at a fundamental level though I can't see why. I may also be wrong about your intention as far as image reproduction goes, but if you want to produce 30 inch exhibition prints I don't know how you'd go about that digitally. Tell us a bit more about your previous reasons for medium format and above.
Hi,

I very rarely had prints made bigger than 20"x16". most of my work was printed by me up to 8"x10". The reason behind my use of medium to large format cameras back then was a purely practical one in that it was so simple to make contact prints from the neg's and have something you could look at without a viewing aid! As you rightly say you could safely crop an image and still have sharp results.

This time I will be just taking pictures for my own enjoyment and I am not thinking of selling any of my work or entering competitions or such. It would however be nice to get good sharp results up to say A4 or 8"x10"

I guess I need to do some thinking

Paul.

I like my fuji camera. It takes wonderful pictures.

joesoap;737461 wrote: I guess I need to do some thinkingNo, that's a large part of the way. Most people would reckon that an 8 Mpixel camera would print faultlessly to 10"x8" or A4.

The words to consider next are tripod or stabilized and exchangeable lens or miniaturized.

If you have no preference there then the market's flooded with 8Mpixel hand-held image-stabilized cameras around £200. Getting one just for the experience would teach you a lot, get you a feel for what editing on the G5 is like and if you send the output to a website like Photobox you'll get prints back through the post at a fair price. Last time I sent off for 10"x8" it was about £1 a print.

As for which camera, the quality names are still a good indicator. Canon, Olympus, Pentax. I've no idea whether Leica have a sensible priced entry camera any longer. Computer companies like Sony have jumped in as have Kodak. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/timeline.asp?start=2007 is where I read up about digital cameras.

hey can anyone of u guys tell me which digital camera is the best and cheap to buy? i am planning to start photography myself .so any suggestions will be helpful.thanks

Peter Benders;1231411 wrote: hey can anyone of u guys tell me which digital camera is the best and cheap to buy? i am planning to start photography myself .so any suggestions will be helpful.thanks
Depends what you want to do. If it's mainly the tourist thing or just to get some experience, any compact (sometimes they're called point and shoot) would be fine. If you want get into it seriously your looking at a DSLR or a Prosumer at the very least.

I got this one cos I wanted something a bit more than a snapper, but didn't want to bankrupt myself getting a DSLR....I get 33-400 zoom, but without a bag full of lenses..I love it! Cost me £115 . Bargain!

FinePix S1000fd Zoom Digital Camera from Fujifilm UK

Nice: You got that for £115??? Great deal, look like a nice camera.

mikeinie;1231996 wrote: Nice: You got that for £115??? Great deal, look like a nice camera.


It's not the highest spec camera around, but it's got lots of good features which I'm trying out. Getting some decent results too.

I feel u should go for a nikon SLR camera. Thats the best in market today

I have a Fugi Finepix digital camera which is fine for me as I love my phtography. i do like taking pictures of landscapes and buildings no longer standing. To improve the quality of my pictures I upload them and use Adobe photo shop and Google Picasso to end with.

What do you hope to get out of your pictures?

Mine is a Panasonic digital camara. but i currently can't remember its model........

I think it works well.

I have an HP-but silly me, forgpt it at home on vacation.

I have a Nikon 'Cool Pic.' I love it because it's easy to use, light weight, takes nice pictures, and only uses 2 AA batteries. The only thing that I dislike is that it doesn't have a little view finder above the screen. So, if the sun is too bright, I can't see how the pic looks before I snap it.

Ever want to take your digital pictures and put them on the web or send them through e-mail? Well, you've probably wanted to resize them cuz they're just too big right from the camera. I just found this new program that's much more powerful. It's called ReaConverter. I tried it out a bit and it's pretty easy to use. In terms of resizing and convert CR2 to JPG, you can resize by percentage or set maximum height / width in pixels.

ryan;1422909 wrote: Ever want to take your digital pictures and put them on the web or send them through e-mail? Well, you've probably wanted to resize them cuz they're just too big right from the camera. I just found this new program that's much more powerful. It's called ReaConverter. I tried it out a bit and it's pretty easy to use. In terms of resizing and convert CR2 to JPG, you can resize by percentage or set maximum height / width in pixels.


Good lord, they want money for it.

I use gm convert. It's open source, free to use and runs on Microsoft Windows®, MacOS-X and linux.

Before you diss it, have a good look at those options. That's just the convert utility, the others in the gm package are listed here.

I get a lot of use out of gm composite and gm mogrify too. Over the weekend I ran a mogrify and convert on over 2,000 JPG files into around 80 PDFs, adjusting and re-running by text-editing a batch command file until I had the results exactly the way I wanted them. I'd hate to do that with a mouse. It included rotations, contrast normalizing, cropping and resizing.

If you'd like to put up a youtube video of ReaConverter in action, from starting the program to quitting, I'll do the same for gm and we can compare the two in this thread.



eta: here we are, the command I was using...gm mogrify -crop 1800x1200+200+300! -resize 25% -rotate "-90>" -normalize +profile "*" *.JPG

... and yes, it will recognize and convert CR2 files.

There are all sorts of on the internet nowadays, with pretty good quality. I don't look at the budget though when im buying one, my current camera is telescopic, and i get some badass pictures !