Teflon-Mike
Suspended / Banned
- Messages
- 1,076
- Name
- Mike
- Edit My Images
- Yes
OK, well, a link brought me here; I have just bought my first ever brand new Digital SLR. But far from new to photography.... I have just been more used to stuff that uses film.
Photo-bio starts about the time of 'Punk', when I was given my first camera, a 110 instamatic for Christmas. Aparently I was very enthusiastic and pointed it at everything and anything I came accross... they never TOLD me it needed FILM!
A few years later, my Dad, who's Canadian, bought me an Olympus XA2 compact for my birthday, as I was about to become a transatlintic child, and he expected would have a lot of oportunity to take a lot of more interesting pictures.
He was right. And that little camera has traveled moon and back mileages over 20 years almost constant service, going wherever I did.
In 1989, I entered the realms of SLR photography, when I started university, and my Dad, gave me an old Olympus OM10. I have no idea how long that camera lasted. It wasn't long! But I had a couple of reletively good lenses for it, but OM10's were cheap to replace.
When I left uni... I had notions of treating myself to a motorbike. I ended up buying a washing machine and making do, treating myself to an OM4 body. If it ent broke, dont fix it... so I spent my money on film. Well, film and batteries....
About five years later, marriage loomed. This curtailed an awful lot, and photography was something significantly quelled. I had been used to a three bedroom house, ALL to myself, and exclusive use of the bathroom. No More! The enlarger was ejected to the attic, and a large array of unspecified ointments, preparations and other assorted 'beuty' products replaced the processing chemicals!
Slowly, a tub of un-processed 35mm film canisters started accumulating in the fridge, as 'Well, we need..." [whatever] started consuming my disposeable income, and flower pots, cusions, curtain, started appearing! Curtains! WHAT was wrong with my 'Black-Out' sheeting?!?!? Which, after I moaned about preserving the latent image in reduced temperature conditions; resulted in an 'ultimatum'.. no more FILM until them is all developed! And I suppose marks the end of my 'Hay-(lide)-Days'.
I started investigating 'Digital'. Conclusion. Unless I bought a Hassablad and scan-back... for some utterly rediculouse figure, more than my mortgage.... I had the choice of still incredibly expensive early Digital SLR's, that had wonderful optics, but pretty low resolution sensors.... or moderately expensive Digital-Compacts, with incredibly poor optics... and even lower resolution sensors!
Then I was made redundant. So I bought this:-
The idea seemed pretty sound, and 'she' sort of agreed to it. Rather than buy a pretty poor digital camera; If it ent broke dont fix it..... Olly kit was still 'good'... only problem was buying film, and processing it..... without a dark-room. SO, pull my dev-tanks back out the attic, get a slide kit from Jessops; take pics on film, process in the kitchen, then scan to the computer, and 'print'.
Conveniently, oooh.... about 1995 I had bought one of these wondeful all singing all dancing new 'Multi-Media PC's... a PENTIUM 90! with 4megs of RAM.
Err... yeah. The Jessops kit came with three rolls of film..... I could STILL be waiting for that old steam driven computer to finish scanning the last frame, fourteen years later! I suspect that it may be quite a 'good' bit of kit; only its so old, every time I try and connect it to a more modern computer it chucks out 32bit application errors at me! Connected to that P90, with 4Mb ram and 80Mb hdd ..... it was rather SLOW. And this was the 'SCSI' version! I hate to think how slow the budget 'Parallel-Port' version was!
So the experiment didn't go quite to plan, sitting up all night to scan just four frames! AND, 'notion' that it would save printing costs, was soon spoiled when I had to replace the printer... becouse budget 'refil' inks wrecked the heads! Oh... and blank CD's for the novel two-speed CD burner were, £5 a piece.... and you could JUST about get one roll of films worth of scans onto it!
So for a couple of years, ruefully the couple of years my kids were toddlers, few photo's were taken. But by late 2002, technology was pushing ahead, and costs crashing. MegaPixel compacts were starting to fall under the £100 threshold, and ASDA had this "on offer"; I think £70.
Miraculousely, she allowed me to buy it, becouse it was 'such' a bargain.... and she'd be able to see my photo's STRAIT AWAY! curtecy of the postage stamp size screen on the back!
1.3MPix... it was.... it was... my entry into digital. sort of. It was frankly... rather more than mediocre.... but it was convenient. And SOME photo, was better than NO photo! And it did sort of get me taking pictures again.
Pictures of what, though? I did snap a few shots of my kids... but? Well, getting out and about and taking pictures? I had rather limited oportunity.... if I wasn't at work.... I was supposed to give HER a 'day off' and mind the babies.
Enter 'Free-Serve'. The milenium marked the point at which we were all encouraged to get with the wired world and go on line. I had been there a while. Remember that Multi-Media Pentium computer? Well I had bought it to do a course in IT. And working in an electronics factory, I was connected to the 'web' via a portal I found lurking in the mainframe that was supposed to give me access to the MOD defense standards data-base! I had discovered 'Bulatin Boards', and been chatting away about BIKES for a few years with... mostly americans. Bulatin boards were, at that point, by and large text only, but with drive for people to become 'Milenium Complient' they were upgrading thier software, and the modern 'Interest Forum' cwas evolving. I had also joned a Land-Rover forum; as I had bought an old delapidated Series III with the idea of renovating it.
Now, back in 1995... I had had access to an early scanner.... this had encouraged my later film scanner, but picture the scene; On my IT course I had had to attend a weeks residential school. I had taken my cameras, and had taken plenty of pictures. I then spent a DAY scanning them on this novel device, and saving each one to 1.44 floppy! Seriousely, one disc, one pic. CD burners were still in the future! Worse, turning a scan through 90 degrees on a 486 with 2meg of ram.... well? That was the limit of post-processing! Just re-orientating a pic took a bludy hour! BUT... I took them all home, and one by one loaded them to the OU bulatin board, for other students to have a laugh at... though most moaned about how long they had to be 'on' their dial up conection to down-load them!
That I guess was the start of 'web-publishing'; and from the bike-board, had discovered I was being asked more and more often for technical detail on my aged Montesa trials bike, and e-mailing scans of the rare owners manual . So, at some point, around 1998, utilising a 'bit' of web-space that came free with my dial up account, I had started a 'web-site'... in as much as there was a page, and linked off it, GIFs of black and white scans of the manual... maybe a couple of scans of old prints of the bike itself.
Anyway; that little Jenopik 'cheapie', really did expand my photo-taking; AND the net gave a purpose and an audience to them.
Before; I took photo's. I got the films processed, or printed the B&W at home. If I'd taken pics of a works outing or a family 'do'... they got looked at.... briefly, usually in the packets, by people that had been there.. then were forgotten about. Holiday snaps? Well, my mum may be mildly interested. Arty pics? Gained mild interests, if they were looked at.
But all of a sudden, I found I was taking pictures I would never have even thought of taking with my Halide cameras. Renovating this Land-Rover, people were discussing thier own 'projects' and I'd pop out and take a snap to illustrate something....... well, it was 'instant', and cost nothing!
Well, almost.... Them AAA Duracells for this DigiCam, didn't come cheap! And I discovered a 'flaw' in the design... it would not take 1.2v rechargeables! Pics were not amazing resolution, and I struggled to get good clear close ups, or nadgery lighting, say under a car, but I was taking pictures. LOTS of pictures... and more... people WANTED to see them!
Around 2006, I was in the middle of a divorse. Phew. Relived, but broke like I had never been broke before! And attempting to patch up an old range-rover, and discussing drop-arm ball-joints with a fellow on the Land-Rover Forum, I needed to take a picture..... but.... I had run out of AAA batteries.
And I had one of those 'ideas'. A BAD one as it turned out. Good in picnciple, but.... it went like this. 4x1.5v=6v what the camera wants. 4x1.2 = 4.8v... what four rechargeable ni-cads provide. BUT... 5x1.2v=6v.... all I needed to be able to do was cram ONE extra ni-cad in the camera... and it ought to be 'happy'..... an experiment with some bell-wire and some insulation tape, proved the theory correct... so I drilled a hole through the battery compartment and put two bits of bell-wire on the battery terminals, and threaded them outside the camera, to where I could tape five ni-cads.... then I got carried away... pilaging a battery tray for AA batteries from a broken kids toy.... I thought AAA's good.... AA's better! And they were.... UNTIL I managed to connect the batteries the wrong way round! One fried digital!
However, I came accross a cheap copy of a Vivitar 5MPix thingie that took two AA's and I was assured would run on rechargeables, and THAT wee beastie has served me until this Christmas!
It was still less than wonderful, but, its amazing how much you CAN do with such rudimentary equipment.... and a LOT of post-processing! Though it was rather embarassing, that my kids, aged 8 & 9 had 'better' cameras than I did! (They had a pair of Kodak 12MPix zoom compacts!)
ANYWAY, bringing us right up to date; we went on a Day-Trip to Bosworth Battle-Feild re-enactment this summer.... remarkeably it was one of the few sunny days we had... and using that little camera I couldn't see a darn THING! Seriousely the screen is actually SMALLER than the exposed area of a 35mm negative!
It was, a last straw. Strong sun on the postage stamp, meant I had little idea what I was pointing the thing at, and I was getting increasingly frustrated by 'shutter-lag' trying to predict when 'knights' jousting were about to strike, to get the critical moment! I actually moarned that poor old Jenopik, becouse at least that had had an optical view-finder!
Still impoverished and dissabled, cost of a digital SLR still baulked, regardless of the prices dropping and technology improving; BUT conveniently selling an old motor-bike I renovated, provided some readies, and I decided to bite the bullet, and in the January Sales, bought this in Curys.
Which in some ways, fills me with enthusiasm; but in others frustration.... like looking back at old Halide pictures, wishing I had not used such cheap film, looking back on fourteen years snaps of my kids growing up, thinking, "If only....... I could have had SO much better pics!" Well, at least I have SOME pics!
Actually rather more than 'some'. Working my way through a rather large folder of photo's recovered from a corrupt hard drive; trying to identify whats what and put it in some kind of order, whilst at the same time, scan my old archive of halide pics into the 'puter..... a task I set for myself about four years ago, when I invested £50 in a new film scanner....
Probably not as good as the old one... but it was cheap, it takes less than a day to get a picture from it, and it sort of does the job! Still taking a while though! Been at it three years, and, I'm probably only about half way through getting them all in the 'puter, and barely scratched the surface of making them presentable to upload to face-book or anywhere! And now trying to fathom the intricasies of DSLR!
So that's about it, really; a life-time of photo-taking....
Now.... to find out how to get these ruddy Raw images out of the chuffing camera and into Photo-Shop!
Photo-bio starts about the time of 'Punk', when I was given my first camera, a 110 instamatic for Christmas. Aparently I was very enthusiastic and pointed it at everything and anything I came accross... they never TOLD me it needed FILM!
A few years later, my Dad, who's Canadian, bought me an Olympus XA2 compact for my birthday, as I was about to become a transatlintic child, and he expected would have a lot of oportunity to take a lot of more interesting pictures.
He was right. And that little camera has traveled moon and back mileages over 20 years almost constant service, going wherever I did.
In 1989, I entered the realms of SLR photography, when I started university, and my Dad, gave me an old Olympus OM10. I have no idea how long that camera lasted. It wasn't long! But I had a couple of reletively good lenses for it, but OM10's were cheap to replace.
When I left uni... I had notions of treating myself to a motorbike. I ended up buying a washing machine and making do, treating myself to an OM4 body. If it ent broke, dont fix it... so I spent my money on film. Well, film and batteries....
About five years later, marriage loomed. This curtailed an awful lot, and photography was something significantly quelled. I had been used to a three bedroom house, ALL to myself, and exclusive use of the bathroom. No More! The enlarger was ejected to the attic, and a large array of unspecified ointments, preparations and other assorted 'beuty' products replaced the processing chemicals!
Slowly, a tub of un-processed 35mm film canisters started accumulating in the fridge, as 'Well, we need..." [whatever] started consuming my disposeable income, and flower pots, cusions, curtain, started appearing! Curtains! WHAT was wrong with my 'Black-Out' sheeting?!?!? Which, after I moaned about preserving the latent image in reduced temperature conditions; resulted in an 'ultimatum'.. no more FILM until them is all developed! And I suppose marks the end of my 'Hay-(lide)-Days'.
I started investigating 'Digital'. Conclusion. Unless I bought a Hassablad and scan-back... for some utterly rediculouse figure, more than my mortgage.... I had the choice of still incredibly expensive early Digital SLR's, that had wonderful optics, but pretty low resolution sensors.... or moderately expensive Digital-Compacts, with incredibly poor optics... and even lower resolution sensors!
Then I was made redundant. So I bought this:-
The idea seemed pretty sound, and 'she' sort of agreed to it. Rather than buy a pretty poor digital camera; If it ent broke dont fix it..... Olly kit was still 'good'... only problem was buying film, and processing it..... without a dark-room. SO, pull my dev-tanks back out the attic, get a slide kit from Jessops; take pics on film, process in the kitchen, then scan to the computer, and 'print'.
Conveniently, oooh.... about 1995 I had bought one of these wondeful all singing all dancing new 'Multi-Media PC's... a PENTIUM 90! with 4megs of RAM.
Err... yeah. The Jessops kit came with three rolls of film..... I could STILL be waiting for that old steam driven computer to finish scanning the last frame, fourteen years later! I suspect that it may be quite a 'good' bit of kit; only its so old, every time I try and connect it to a more modern computer it chucks out 32bit application errors at me! Connected to that P90, with 4Mb ram and 80Mb hdd ..... it was rather SLOW. And this was the 'SCSI' version! I hate to think how slow the budget 'Parallel-Port' version was!
So the experiment didn't go quite to plan, sitting up all night to scan just four frames! AND, 'notion' that it would save printing costs, was soon spoiled when I had to replace the printer... becouse budget 'refil' inks wrecked the heads! Oh... and blank CD's for the novel two-speed CD burner were, £5 a piece.... and you could JUST about get one roll of films worth of scans onto it!
So for a couple of years, ruefully the couple of years my kids were toddlers, few photo's were taken. But by late 2002, technology was pushing ahead, and costs crashing. MegaPixel compacts were starting to fall under the £100 threshold, and ASDA had this "on offer"; I think £70.
Miraculousely, she allowed me to buy it, becouse it was 'such' a bargain.... and she'd be able to see my photo's STRAIT AWAY! curtecy of the postage stamp size screen on the back!
1.3MPix... it was.... it was... my entry into digital. sort of. It was frankly... rather more than mediocre.... but it was convenient. And SOME photo, was better than NO photo! And it did sort of get me taking pictures again.
Pictures of what, though? I did snap a few shots of my kids... but? Well, getting out and about and taking pictures? I had rather limited oportunity.... if I wasn't at work.... I was supposed to give HER a 'day off' and mind the babies.
Enter 'Free-Serve'. The milenium marked the point at which we were all encouraged to get with the wired world and go on line. I had been there a while. Remember that Multi-Media Pentium computer? Well I had bought it to do a course in IT. And working in an electronics factory, I was connected to the 'web' via a portal I found lurking in the mainframe that was supposed to give me access to the MOD defense standards data-base! I had discovered 'Bulatin Boards', and been chatting away about BIKES for a few years with... mostly americans. Bulatin boards were, at that point, by and large text only, but with drive for people to become 'Milenium Complient' they were upgrading thier software, and the modern 'Interest Forum' cwas evolving. I had also joned a Land-Rover forum; as I had bought an old delapidated Series III with the idea of renovating it.
Now, back in 1995... I had had access to an early scanner.... this had encouraged my later film scanner, but picture the scene; On my IT course I had had to attend a weeks residential school. I had taken my cameras, and had taken plenty of pictures. I then spent a DAY scanning them on this novel device, and saving each one to 1.44 floppy! Seriousely, one disc, one pic. CD burners were still in the future! Worse, turning a scan through 90 degrees on a 486 with 2meg of ram.... well? That was the limit of post-processing! Just re-orientating a pic took a bludy hour! BUT... I took them all home, and one by one loaded them to the OU bulatin board, for other students to have a laugh at... though most moaned about how long they had to be 'on' their dial up conection to down-load them!
That I guess was the start of 'web-publishing'; and from the bike-board, had discovered I was being asked more and more often for technical detail on my aged Montesa trials bike, and e-mailing scans of the rare owners manual . So, at some point, around 1998, utilising a 'bit' of web-space that came free with my dial up account, I had started a 'web-site'... in as much as there was a page, and linked off it, GIFs of black and white scans of the manual... maybe a couple of scans of old prints of the bike itself.
Anyway; that little Jenopik 'cheapie', really did expand my photo-taking; AND the net gave a purpose and an audience to them.
Before; I took photo's. I got the films processed, or printed the B&W at home. If I'd taken pics of a works outing or a family 'do'... they got looked at.... briefly, usually in the packets, by people that had been there.. then were forgotten about. Holiday snaps? Well, my mum may be mildly interested. Arty pics? Gained mild interests, if they were looked at.
But all of a sudden, I found I was taking pictures I would never have even thought of taking with my Halide cameras. Renovating this Land-Rover, people were discussing thier own 'projects' and I'd pop out and take a snap to illustrate something....... well, it was 'instant', and cost nothing!
Well, almost.... Them AAA Duracells for this DigiCam, didn't come cheap! And I discovered a 'flaw' in the design... it would not take 1.2v rechargeables! Pics were not amazing resolution, and I struggled to get good clear close ups, or nadgery lighting, say under a car, but I was taking pictures. LOTS of pictures... and more... people WANTED to see them!
Around 2006, I was in the middle of a divorse. Phew. Relived, but broke like I had never been broke before! And attempting to patch up an old range-rover, and discussing drop-arm ball-joints with a fellow on the Land-Rover Forum, I needed to take a picture..... but.... I had run out of AAA batteries.
And I had one of those 'ideas'. A BAD one as it turned out. Good in picnciple, but.... it went like this. 4x1.5v=6v what the camera wants. 4x1.2 = 4.8v... what four rechargeable ni-cads provide. BUT... 5x1.2v=6v.... all I needed to be able to do was cram ONE extra ni-cad in the camera... and it ought to be 'happy'..... an experiment with some bell-wire and some insulation tape, proved the theory correct... so I drilled a hole through the battery compartment and put two bits of bell-wire on the battery terminals, and threaded them outside the camera, to where I could tape five ni-cads.... then I got carried away... pilaging a battery tray for AA batteries from a broken kids toy.... I thought AAA's good.... AA's better! And they were.... UNTIL I managed to connect the batteries the wrong way round! One fried digital!
However, I came accross a cheap copy of a Vivitar 5MPix thingie that took two AA's and I was assured would run on rechargeables, and THAT wee beastie has served me until this Christmas!
It was still less than wonderful, but, its amazing how much you CAN do with such rudimentary equipment.... and a LOT of post-processing! Though it was rather embarassing, that my kids, aged 8 & 9 had 'better' cameras than I did! (They had a pair of Kodak 12MPix zoom compacts!)
ANYWAY, bringing us right up to date; we went on a Day-Trip to Bosworth Battle-Feild re-enactment this summer.... remarkeably it was one of the few sunny days we had... and using that little camera I couldn't see a darn THING! Seriousely the screen is actually SMALLER than the exposed area of a 35mm negative!
It was, a last straw. Strong sun on the postage stamp, meant I had little idea what I was pointing the thing at, and I was getting increasingly frustrated by 'shutter-lag' trying to predict when 'knights' jousting were about to strike, to get the critical moment! I actually moarned that poor old Jenopik, becouse at least that had had an optical view-finder!
Still impoverished and dissabled, cost of a digital SLR still baulked, regardless of the prices dropping and technology improving; BUT conveniently selling an old motor-bike I renovated, provided some readies, and I decided to bite the bullet, and in the January Sales, bought this in Curys.
Which in some ways, fills me with enthusiasm; but in others frustration.... like looking back at old Halide pictures, wishing I had not used such cheap film, looking back on fourteen years snaps of my kids growing up, thinking, "If only....... I could have had SO much better pics!" Well, at least I have SOME pics!
Actually rather more than 'some'. Working my way through a rather large folder of photo's recovered from a corrupt hard drive; trying to identify whats what and put it in some kind of order, whilst at the same time, scan my old archive of halide pics into the 'puter..... a task I set for myself about four years ago, when I invested £50 in a new film scanner....
Probably not as good as the old one... but it was cheap, it takes less than a day to get a picture from it, and it sort of does the job! Still taking a while though! Been at it three years, and, I'm probably only about half way through getting them all in the 'puter, and barely scratched the surface of making them presentable to upload to face-book or anywhere! And now trying to fathom the intricasies of DSLR!
So that's about it, really; a life-time of photo-taking....
Now.... to find out how to get these ruddy Raw images out of the chuffing camera and into Photo-Shop!
I started with a £1 camera in 1958.
