Medium format/large format film, now that is a good idea!
Check e-bay. My Ziess Ikonta commands a walloping $50!!! Its NOT an expensive place to have a play.
Some of the MF cameras are still silly money, but many many more, are an absolute steal, like the Ikonta.
For the tiny money the cost... why not give it a go?
I was reading about a high end large format film setup on Ken Rockwell's site but his set up was kind of expensive.
I think you have to be peculiarly masochistic to want to mess with cut-sheet large-format cameras... if you check out Film & Conventional, though, it needn't be 'so' expensive... (but is rather relative!)
There's a few people who make their own cameras, as pioneers of old did, and there used to be, and probably still are, some DIY 'Kit' cameras, to make from ply-wood, or even cheaper 'plans' if you get the wood from local hardware store, that are incredibly cheap... you just have to add a lens... which probably isn't!
But, those folk into that sort of thing HAVE found ways to keep costs some-what sensible, re-purposing reletively cheap and available lenses from 'junk-shop' cameras on e-bay; so it is do-able if you get a bit clued up on the topic.
But cut sheet film is never particularly cheap, and it's not something yo can drop into your local mini-lab like a roll of 35mm! So, it does beg a LOT of getting clued up.
Now I have a cool little film camera, other then disposable I have never shot film, my dad had a ~20mm built in lens camera that I never used and my mom had a 'NICE' 35mm she never let me touch, so maybe I will buy a roll of film.
That would be a good, and very cheap way to start!
I have a flat bed scanner ~4000dpi if memory serves. Not going to be the best conversion, I may have to just pay Walmart or the like to digitize it.
Depends on the scanner and the scanner software, and the film format.
My Daughter, when she was starting to do Photography at school, found my old Zenit on top of the wardrobe and nagged me to teach her how to use it.... I loaded up some out-of-date Kodak, and took her out to a 'quaint' little village nearby to snap away at the duck-pond and cricket club etc; and to give her some comparison shots, took the Electric-Picture-Maker...
Which is a little quirk... stopped at ASDA (Walmart!) on the way home to get some bits for dinner; dropped her film in at the kiosk, and she was looking at her snaps in the car before we got home, and I could get my digi-pics off the dang SD-Card!
Anyhow... ASDA did a 1hour develop, and print and scan, onto CD.. I think it cost about £10, which was mostly for the prints. I tend not to get either prints or scans, and DIY. Cost me only £1 for a straight develop only on a roll of 35mm. Dev plus scan, ISTR was something like £1 per film developed, plus £1 for the CD, and then £1 per film (as long as they developed it) for the three or five films they could fit on one CD.
Salient point was I was not overly impressed by the ASDA scans, but? For the cost and the effort, they were pretty acceptable.
Give or take, using a 'cheap' e-bay web-cam type scanner, I 'think' I got slightly better images, for the faff it took to make them, and with slightly better pixel count, but not much in it.
Neither compared to what I could achieve using dedicated 35mm Film scanner, even a 20year old one, and modern software, but both were a heck of a lot less faff and far FAR quicker, and either were more than adequate for web-display and hand-sized prints.
You say you have a scanner; how wonderful your results might be would be very very dependent, and it's quoted DPi means very little.
My Digital SLR claims 24Mpix sensor.... that is the number of pixels it will create in an image file; that is NOT the number of receptors on its sensor. It probably has close to 24million receptors, but they will be arranged in a honey-comb pattern not a grid, and 1/3 will be filtered green, 1/3 red, and 1/3 blue... computery stuff takes the brightness value from each receptor and then does some guess work to paint by numbers what it best guesses chould be in each of the 24million image pixels, from the values it gets from over-lapping RGB receptors... its known as 'interpolation', and almost all digital imaging devices use some, and cheaper ones an awful lot!
I think that my little Web-Cam scanner has an actual image 'eye' that has only something like 1.3 Mpix resolution (if that!), and like the Digi-SLR, takes 3 receptors to get the colour data for one image pixel; yet it boasts something like 14Mpix 'resolution' because that's how many pixels are in the image file it creates... using an awful lot more 'interpolation'... or in the vernacular, simple guess work! To sub-divide the squares!
There's also the small issue, that negatives are transparencies and expected to be 'projected'; so lit from behind where they are viewed. Most desk scanners are designed to scan paper-work, and its lit from the side its viewed by the scanner. This tends to make very bad scans of transparency media; and if a flat-bed scanner can scan transparency media, usually begs a transparency adapter to light them from behind and give a neural back-ground where they are 'transparent'.
So, a bit more to that suggestion, but your scanner may not even give you a scan, let alone a good one; but, it could deliver fantastic ones, depending.
Just as a point of note; that 20year old dedicated film scanner of mine, has a resolution of 2700 Dpi.. that comes out at just a noggin under 10Mpix for a 35mm frame.. which was better than most DSLR's for half its life! And still not to be sniffed at... as mentioned its still 10x bigger than I can upload to most web photo-hosts, and far more than I need for most practical purposes.
More pertinent thing is the colour depth and contrast. Using modern software with multi-pass over sampling, I can get fantastically well detailed scans, but it has little or nothing to do with the number of pixels in them!
Is there a simple formula for using my D7500 to meter light to make manually setting the 35mm easy, despite the 1.5 size difference? (Less film size, less light, need lower shutter speed)
An F-Stop is an F-Stop!
Depends how you try and meter with the Electric-Picture-Maker; but if it tells you 1/100s shutter, at f16 aperture at ISO 100... thems your settings, and you should be able to copy them across to any other camera you point at that same scene....
You dont actually NEED to meter to take a photo.
Once upon a time, cameras didn;'t have meters in them.. check whether the one you are trying to use does. And if it does, is it 'coupled' to the aperture and shutter settings?
In a meter-coupled-AE camera, it will take a meter reading and decide for you what aperture and shutter speeds to use. ISO is the film speed, and in some, later "DX-Coded" cameras, the camera uses electrical contacts to make a circuit or not, through the metal or paint on the film canister to tell it what the film speed is; if not; you need to tell it via a dial or similar on the camera.
On some cameras, there may be some more 'manual' control, where you can manually select the shutter speed or more likely the aperture, and then the AE will set the other, again to the ASA of the film its read of the can or you have set on its dial.
Then there are coupled NON Auto-Exposure cameras; like my Sigma, that still has a TTL or 'Through the Lens' meter; just has a hi/lo swing needle in the view-finder, and it will go up or down if you change the shutter speed or aperture, or ASA.. you pick the settings you want, and adjust them to get the needle centered..
And then there are meter-less cameras like my Zenit... there's no meter in it at all, you make the settings of aperture and shutter you think best... and that's it...
Like I said you dont actually HAVE to meter... used to be a little pictorial guide on the inside of film boxes to whats known as the f16-Sunny rule; basically says that on a good sunny day, the shutter speed should be 'about' one over the films ASA, at f16... if its a bit cloudy, open up a stop, if its very cloudy, open up two, if dark... use flash! NOT particularly scientific... but curiously, it works! More actually works rather well! even on digital... try it!
Its the simple version of metering by eye; which is basically looking at your scene and assessing how close or not it is to f16-Sunny and what range of contrast you have in the scene and how close to center you want your exposure... which is where a bit of experience and practice comes in.
Using a hand-held meter? Bit more convoluted way about, and introduces some different metering schemes... you can meter by 'incident' or 'refected' light. Incident is how much light is falling on your subject; reflected is how much light is bounced off your subject. Either way, the meter will give you an 'Exposure Value' that tells you how much or little light it senses; which if you have a very dark or very bright subject, could be very far off what you 'see'. And you would generally have to translate an Exposure Value off the meter scale into possible camera settings, by way of ISO/Shutter/Aperture.
I have a rather nice 'selenium cell' (No batteries required!) Russian Leningrad meter, to go with the old meterless Zenit. Like most meters of this type it will take either reflected meter readings taken from next to the camera, or 'incident' readings taken next to the subject, using an 'invercone' or diffuser over the sensor eye. Swing needle then points at scale marked in EV's, and there's a 'computer dial' underneath, I twist to line up the film-speed in a window, then turn the dial to the EV shown on the scale and the two perspex wheels rotate to give me aperture f-numbers next to shutter speeds, so for the EV I have metered and film speed I have set, I get a number of possible shutter speed and aperture combinations I can pick from to make my exposure.
More modern electronic and digital meters do much the same thing, but they can save some messing with the dial, and give you a direct read-out of the f-number or shutter speed it suggests you use, on an LED bar or LCD display, depending how you have programmed them.... Personally, I find this more of a faff than twisting the dial on an old fashioned meter, and a pain when the batteries are flat, but that's abother matter.
Either which way, metering is only for guidance; you dont HAVE to take the meter's word for anything, and the f16-Sunny rule does tend to be pretty reliable, and a good way to judge if your meter's telling porkies....
Using a meter-less camera like the Zenit or my Ziess Ikonta or my old Grandad's Kodak Retinette, then....
I will look at my subject... look at the sky; think about how close to f16 sunny the day is... and then... cos I am not all that confident.... get the meter out... and see how close my guess is to the meter... both by the camera using a reflected meter... then wandering over to my subject and taking an incident meter..... then I'll remember my old grandad NEVER taking any photo's.. but spending many many hours wandering around looking at his meter, and the sky and the subject, and tutting and muttering..... so walk back to my camera bag, chuck the meter in in disgust, determined to go with my gut... and then 'just' see what the Electric Picture Maker suggests.....
After that though? I will tend to grow a pair... and having made my settings for the first shot, based on the information overload of meter and other camera, and f-16 sunny rule.... and do it all by eye.... tweeking the settings maybe a stop or two either way, depending on whether I am looking at the shadows under trees or a bright sandpit or something, or whether the clouds have come out....
And with film... I probably needn't have fretted very much ANYWAY!
A digital sensor, can distinguish between perhaps eight stops difference in light; get the metering too fat off center and high-lights will easily 'blow' or shaddows 'merge'.
Film? USUALLY has a far larger 'exposure lattitude'; so much so that many many older, usually cheaper cameras didn't have any meter, and often a fixed shutter and aperture; they relied on the exposure lattitude of the film to not blow high-lights or merge shaddows if it was a bit of a bright day or a cloudy one. The film probably had something in the order of twelve stops diffeence between discernable shades.
So you probably need to be within one or two stops of 'best' exposure value, with digital, on film? You can probably be off by three or four, or more, and still get a pretty reasonable exposure....Which all makes the topic some-what academic, really... but you with film, you REALLY don't need to be 'so' critical or demanding.... there's no such thing as a 'perfect' exposure anyway... see..
Exposure - Exposed!
Back on topic; an F-Stop is an F-Stop... the whole system of f-numbers and shutter speeds, is concieved to keep things constant, and be convenient to cameras and the same between them.
Actual SI unit of light intensity is the LUX... and neither cameras nor photo-light meters are calibrated in them, so you dont have to try and work out the maths to translate to shutter-speeds and f-numbers; that entire system is conceived around f-numbers so that one stop of aperture is the equivilent of one stop of shutter, is equivalent to one stop of ISO, regardless of whether the camera is digital or uses film, or whether it uses big film or small, or whether its got a wide angle lens or a telephoto...So, if your digi-cam says ISO100, and 1/100th at F16.. thems the settings and they would work on any other camera for the same scene, regardless of how big or small it is or whether it was digital or film.
Bigger fish here is that your DSLR will be taking a through-the-lens reflected light meter reading... and trying to force the settings it thinks best on you... they may not be... use your eyes and assess scene for yourself, and remember a reflected reading will likely suggest settings to make dim a photo of a white rabbit on a ski slope, or settings to make grey, a black-cat on a coal hole. There's no such thing as a perfect scientifically calculated exposure, you ALWAYS need to assess your scene by eye, to decide if what the meter, whether coupled or not, whether hand held or in camera, what ever method of metering it is, is REASONABLE to get what you want.... and film has a LOT of tolerance or 'latitude' on exposure.
About Macro lens, It seems I have two cheap options:
1. Extension tubes with my 18-140.
2.Turn the 50/1.8 around and manually hold it to the body. (Will work indoors, but would be scared to dirty my camera)
Not really my genre; BUT...
3/ extension tubes with your 50
4/ a reversing ring for either!
A reversing ring to mount the lens back to front on the camera WOULD seem a slightly more practical and safer way than trying to hold the lens the wrong way round infront of the camera!
And extension rings in Nikon F-Mount aught work whatever Nikon F-Mount lens you choose to hang on them.
Your call... but I wouldn't be too keen on the idea of trying to hand hold lens infront of camera, or have particularlt high epectations I could hold it steady or central during exposure!
Extension tubes would probably be my preffered solution!
Have fun!
