Photography/Videography Discussion

Thanks for the help guys. I've placed the order and will get to blind myself repeatedly taking self portraits for practice this Wednesday!

 

I don't know if anyone has experience with the printing side of things but which produces a better result with 35mm film....

Old school enlarging then printing from a negative.

or

Scanning the negative then printing out the digital image.

I want to enlarge some old negatives for framing, the benefit of them going to a computer first is that I could remove the date stamp. I'm not sure if photo developers even do anything manual anymore, do they digitally scan all film negatives for printing anyway?

 

Unless you're printing really, really large, getting a good scan will probably work out better. The largest print I've made from 35mm was scanned and printed at 13 x 19 inches and it looked great.

 

I'm not sure what kind of quality your average high street (drug store style) photo place can scan negatives. I heard that most use home grade type scanners . Also most won't scan one image here and there, only strips.

Unfortunately my scanner doesn't have that feature and because I only want to do a handful I wouldn't really want to buy new hardware. If old school enlarging in a dark room is all but dead I guess I would have to take them somewhere which does a reasonably good digital job.

 

I just used a flatbed scanner with negative holder. The difference is that I had time to sit around while scanning at a really high resolution, which most shops probably won't do. There's a reason photo stores charge quite a lot for "high-res" scans.

 

Speaking of which, I'm about to buy a copy stand for doing that. I know a tripod can do the job just as well but it's a pain getting it set up right.

 

If I only owned a DSLR!

I know lots of cheap film "scanners" like ones sold on Amazon use the same method of actually taking a picture of the negative but they obviously use garbage phone sized cameras.

 

Can we please stop calling interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) dSLRs?

@Robin - sensor size isn't the end all be all of image quality, really just depends on the file resolution, optics, and what kind of processing is done for the jpeg output. Though I'd just do what @Turtle suggested and get a negative holder for your flatbed scanner.

 

Even with a negative holder my scanner can't do them because you need a lid mounted light source. Most modern scanners have an EL panel and turn off the main bed lamp. Even if I did some DIY job I can't turn off the main lamp.

 

Does anyone here use 18% Grey cards?

I got a set today along with the Black & White, I'm looking forward to trying them out later next week.

I'm interested to hear what others do to correct WB.

 

I have a grey card... haven't used it in years though. Might for some product types shots but I generally just have white or black in the frame and use that as the basis for white balance. For all my other stuff... kind of just eyeball it and check the RGB values at a few points if it is bit tricky.

Honestly, I'm more concerned with mood and tones than accurately balancing the colors.

 

Not sure where to put this, so I'll just put it here.

https://amyshorephotography.com/2017/05/04/the-giant-how-to-of-car-photography/

I follow this photographer and she asked for questions for a Q&A. A couple of my questions got answered. There's a lot of good stuff about how to become a professional photographer. It's a really good read if anyone's interested.

 

Ahh, Amy Shore. I am huge fan of her work and I actually communicated with her a few months ago. It goes without saying that I'm definitely going to give this a read when I get a chance (not right now while straying and doing things other than work).

 

I was asked to shoot a kickboxing night for my friend's brother, based on one image I got of him last time around taken on my phone.

As a landscape hobbyist and antique photographer I certainly don't have access to the right kit to do sports photography justice, but I attempted it anyway out of kindness. I had to crank my 5Dii to ISO 6400 and at times it began to smell of smoke as I rattled off action frames, but to its credit it didn't bug out on me, so that's something.

What I enjoyed most was getting more subtle, non fighting moments, since there was a couple of event photographers there anyway. Plus, I had a 70-200 so the distance and telephoto got me much different angles to ringside. I'm really happy with the results, for sure.