Fuji Velvia RULES! ;-)

I did not know Hammer made a version of it.

 

Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the 1962 film was from Hammer. It was
certainly in their style.

 

Annika1980 wrote
(in article

Since you've already admitted you're broke, I understand why you
may not comprehend this. However, you don't get wealthy by
purchasing expensive items and giving them away to strangers
that aren't competent to use them in a way beneficial to you.

 

Since you've already admitted you're broke, I understand why you

C'mon dude, you don't wanna be rich all your life do ya?
Where's the fun in that? Show me some love.
Buy me the daddy cammy. I assure I'm quite competent in it's use.

 

For about 10 years I rode my bike to work every day....It was 6 miles,
slightly uphill most of the way, with a steep hill the last mile or so. I
had the latest $1000 Motobecane. There was this old geezer on a cheap Shwinn
who would blow by me every so often on that last hill. I could hear him
coming, because of the squeak, squeak, and the chain noise from his
misaligned, unlubricated chain. I would pedal furiously with everything I
had left in me, but he would always pass me before I got to my turn off into
work.......It was damned frustrating, I'll tell you.......

 

For what reason? Your pictures will all still be the same, they'll just
have more pixels.

 

Read the book, Bret. It's called "It's not about the bike".

By Lance's own admission one of the things that he has in his favour is
his genes. He has bigger lungs than most other human beings and that by
itself is enough to give him a slight advantage over many of his peers.
But having said that, it wasn't what made him a 7-time Tour De France
winner, because prior to getting cancer he didn't perform all that well
on the tour. It was his attitude that mattered most of all.

Better equipment is not going to make you a better photographer or
produce better pics. The sooner you accept that and just get on with
what you've got, the better off you will be.

 

Annika1980 wrote
(in article

Actually, I do.

It's exceedingly fun. Trust me.

I'd rather not.

Your reading comprehension skills leave something to be desired.

 

OK, it was a bad example. I'll admit that a better bike won't help me
beat Lance Armstrong. My original point was that even Lance Armstrong
uses a high-tech bike in order to get the most out of his talent. So
it makes him better. Lance's bike would make me go faster than my old
Schwinn as well.

Whether better equipment makes you a better photographer is certainly
arguable, but the fact that it will produce better pictures is not.
Surely you aren't arguing that one can produce the same work with a
cheap disposable as they could with MF or LF gear are you? If
equipment didn't matter we wouldn't be having this conversation and
this newsgroup wouldn't exist.

 

No, not at all. Of course there is a difference, but the point I am
trying to make is that your gear doesn't produce images on its own. It's
up to the brain behind the viewfinder to do that.

In the pursuit of photographic Nirvana we all too often forget about the
reason why we have equipment in the first place: to take pictures that
we can look at for a variety of reasons, be they sentimental or not.
When I see pictures I took of my kids as they were growing up I don't
look at how much detail is in the shadows, or how sharp the picture is,
I look at them for reference in my life. Remembering is important and
photography helps us to do that.

Not all photography is undertaken with reference in mind. Naturally your
pictures are indicative of a different passion and I suppose a lot of
your satisfaction is derived from seeing just how much detail you can
capture, or how accurately you can reproduce a scene. Sure, having the
right gear will do wonders for that, but it definitely won't make you a
better photographer!

To do that you have to consider your technique and approach. For every
picture that you take ask yourself how you might have been able to
improve on it. Angle? Lighting? Background? DOF? FOV? The best equipment
in the world will never be able to improve poor selections in those all-
important areas for you.

 

Naturally your pictures are indicative of a different passion and

Couldn't have put it better myself!

 

It all depends sometimes on what excites the brain. For instance I took a
grab shot 3 or so months ago and thought I had gotten my perfect picture,
it was of a cat coming to my granddaughter for the first time. We could all
see the excitement of the baby, and it was great. Come to find out that
most people just see a baby smiling at a cat. I still like the picture, oh
well, so be it. The same people see one lowlight sunrise I have and ohh and
ahh, It isn't my favorite, it is underexposed as far as I'm concerned.

I've been looking at annika1980/Brett's pictures since 2000, and I have
liked lots of them, some are "whimsical" some are serious, and some are
pretty boring *to me*. The same goes for most every photographer who's work
I see. Ansel A. doesn't bore me ever, but then I dont have to see his bad
vacatation snaps, or his kids at Christmas. I like G. Parks, and Henri
Cartier-Bresson (but gay guy jumping over a puddle isn't my favorite).

The golf pictures put me to sleep, I was forced to play golf as a kid
starting at about 8yrs. and I had a sister 4yrs older than me who beat the
living piss out of me at every game in the world. The only fun I ever had
playing sports was later as a lineman in Jr. High and High school, where I
became an assasin, I was huge, evil and cruel, if I was good enough, I'd
still be playing, because I loved getting even with that bitch over and
over and over and over, muhahahahahaha (oops, I need my valium).

"Forget about all that macho shit and learn how to play guitar" -One of the
John Cougar dudes (AXIS???Melencamph???)

 

Lance hasn't ridden that forty pound Schwinn 10 speed in a few years either

 

And your photography is in the same league as his riding.....??

He's good enough to benefit from every small advantage he can get.
Given the world class competition he faces, a top-rate bike is a must.

At your level, the equipment is, within reasonable bounds, irrelevant.
A few more pixels, or 10 extra lp/mm, will make no discernible
difference in images you make. None.

BTW, how _do_ you think Lance made it to the top? Do you really believe
that Santa left a $50,000 Unobtanium Special under the tree many years
ago? Has he been riding a superior bike all his life? Hell no. He
worked he ass off. He has no doubt dissected, analyzed, and
relentlessly improved every aspect of his training, riding, and racing.
I strongly doubt he has ever hung out in newsgroups bragging about his
latest Schwinn, or how his new 1.3mm spokes (the latest thing, you
know!) "rule!"

(Think about that.)

Hoo-boy. That's a whopper! Assuming his single gear ratio is even
roughly appropriate to the course, he will whip you sorry ass to a
degree you can't comprehend.

 

Greg Campbell wrote

No doubt about it. I used to ride cross-country quite a bit in
the same area he did his off-season training. On more than one
occasion I had him go blowing by me like I was sitting on the
side changing a tire, and I thought (prior to his arrival over
my shoulder) that I was going along pretty good. Totally
demoralizing.

Judging by Bret's reported donut habit, it would be far more
depressing for him.

 

-------------

There was an interesting discussion this morning amongst a few of the local
(Pro) Photographers on this very subject When I introduced them to my new
printer. I lamented that Digitals produced too much "edge sharpness" to make
a really usable portrait camera - Photoshop mangling aside.

Lo and behold, 3 others agreed. Somewhere along the line, the designers of
digital cameras decided on a path to illusion which attempted to make up for
the lower detail of digital capture by using edge sharpening to produce the
impression of a highly detailed image when all that happened was the edges
were made sharper.

Some time further along the development, the capture of detail in digital
images became pretty much as good as film but the edge sharpness remained. I
have my 5D Custom Functions set with sharpness and contrast at their lowest
level. Even this, produces portraits where the subject still looks as if
it's pasted on the surface of the photograph. I much prefer the results I
get from Portra film. Even 35mm although I don't shoot on film that small.

In recent times I've used edge detection to locate and blur - rather than
sharpen the edges. This still does not equal 20 year old Portraits I've
taken but it's getting close. I think Bret has embraced the cult of edge
sharpness to the exclusion of other composition and image deployment
options. For his pictures it is probably quite appropriate. For mine,
totally inappropriate. Probably answers why he says mine are crap too.

Someone in another group called for the end to the "sharpness cult". I don't
think his was a lone voice either. Sharpness is OK for objects. Maybe even
landscapes but where people are concerned, sharpness is not necessarily a
good thing. For one, slight lack of it hides skin blemishes. It also softens
the edge transition between hair and body. A lack of sharpness or use of
'soft focus' lenses often produces a more pleasing result when people are in
the scene that critically sharp lenses cannot equal.

Recently I photographed some paintings for the artist in readiness for a
limited edition canvas print run. He commented on how he liked the canvas
prints better than the original because the sharp brush marks he made were
softer in the canvas prints. I used a Leica lens on my 5D for the exercise.
So if Bret has joined the cult of edge sharpness and continued to worship
the God of EOS, he's probably not ever going to become a great people
shooter but he might get some recognition as an illustrative shooter if he
continues his hobby.

 

Another reason to shoot exclusively in RAW mode.

Now there you go thinking again! Didn't the doc tell you to hold back
on that until he swelling on your butt goes down?

One of my pet peeves is the oversharpening of the edges that you
mentioned.
Grossly oversharpened digital photos are easy to spot as they usually
have the ringing effect around the edges. That's why I usually sharpen
only in selective areas. My method is similar to yours as I sharpen
the whole image and then go back and mask out (undo) the sharpening
around the oversharp edges.

So on a pic like this ( http://www.pbase.com/bret/image/60096044 ) only
the bird will be sharpened and not the blurred background. Sometimes
I'll miss some spots, however. Spiders are a real challenge as they
have all sorts of diagonal lines that give digital fits.
It's like I always say, shooting arachnids is one area where film
really has it over digital.
OK, so that's the first time I've said that.

 

Yep, I do this too, especially high ISO shots, even adding gaussian blur
to the background sometimes. It can be a lot of work though!

 

The pic you point to is a fine example of edge definition in the extreme. It
looks like the bird has been cut out of another image and pasted on the
background. This is most definitely not the sort of thing I want to see in a
Portrait. The 'ringing effect' you speak of is just the over use of
enhancement tools but it is a side effect of sensor flooding which with some
very sharp lenses and under some (read most) lighting produces transparent
fringing similar to the quasi chromatic aberration or purple fringe effect.
Presumably you understand that issue so I won't go into it here.

Even on an unsharpened RAW image, the step between a mid contrast object
(like the red bird) and a lower contrast background is like the toe or
shoulder cut off of digital. Instead of a infinite transition from one to
the other, it is finite and predictable. It's also why digitals "blow" their
highlights early when film will have a total transition to white where
detail exists right up to the extreme of 254 254 254.

It is this total transition between contrast variables with fine grained
film which separates a digital photo from a film print. I believe the
atmosphere between the lens and the photo paper during a conventional
enlargement further contributes to the 'look' and softness of a traditional
portrait.

Digital anything is a mathematically predictable thing. It must have a point
at which it begins and ends. Predicting anything with infinite variables is
something the world will need to develop sooner or later because only by
this form of prediction can we hope to use to navigate the universe... And
make portraits as good as our father's could!

 

but where people are concerned, sharpness is not necessarily a

But I eliminate skin blemishes with Photoshop 7........:^)