dSLR for previews

Anyone hear using their dSLR for previewing shots before taking the "money"
shot with film? This idea just occurred to me (wondering why it took this
long).

 

Hello,

I have done this when shooting with unusual flash positioning / levels etc
to "preview" before then swapping to a film body and shooting again.

It works well and enables you to be sure of exposure, composition etc before
committing to film.

Alan.

 

Thought you were going to ask when dSLRs were going to include
preview.

I'm sure people do it but wouldn't think it would be popular.

If you are talking about MF and LF, polaroids would be better
and if talking about 35mm, Bracketing would cover it for me.

 

I've done so a few times in my "studio" to check the strobe lighting.

eg: placement,shaddows, reflections, glare.

The film exposure is set or verified with an incident flash meter.

Cheers,
Alan.

 

Polaroids have pretty much died and many pros use digital (not even
dslr, just good P&S/ZLR that have manual aperture control).

In checking a polaroid (or digital), the issue isn't so much exposure as
light placement, reflections and awkward shaddows. Working with 3 to 5
strobes is quite hard to visualize where "boo boo's" will occur.
Bracketting can't help with that.

Cheers,
Alan.

 

Today would have been a good day to ask!

http://www.pma-show.com/2006/digital_camera/olympus_review/010_olympus_e330.html

 

frankly, the LCD is barely able to give a reliable image to judge over all
quality for a digital capture, the contrast is higher, you really can't
judge focus. far too many images look great or at least good enough on the
lcd and...yikes, suck when you view the file on your monitor.

If a film image is that critical, there is polaroid backs to check focus,
glare, shadows, highlights, and reasonable exposure accuracy. If a lot is
riding on the image, old time shooters used to run a test roll down to the 4
hour slide film specialists.

it all comes down to experience, light meters don't mean a thing if you
can't interprete what its saying, its only an opinion. You experience in
figuring out what its suggesting, 2nd guessing it is what makes the info
valuable.

 

true enough. i'm always confident that I'll get the shot with digital. i'm
about 85% accurate and the other 15% is usually in the range of
pushing/pulling in the RAW converter. but since I'm about to start
developing my own film again, I wanted to be more confident of my exposures
before committing them to film - mostly because time, energy and money get
tossed down the tube if I screw up.

yeah, but I'm not checking focus with such a shot, i'm just giving a quick
preview to the exposure. unfortunately the 20D seems to brighten many shots
that are actually severely under exposed when it displays them in the LCD.

That reminds me - one of my next projects is to figure out how to use my
enlarger (35mm B&W head) to create Polaroid transfers. I read about
something like this in a book but I only have a vague idea how it might
work.

 

Try a digital tethered to a laptop. Amazing what you can tell about the
play of light, contribution of background and out of focus elements.