Official Luthiers Forum!

Received my new Nikon D70s digital camera. Have to read instructions,although, if it works similar to other Nikon SLRs I should be up and running soon-and you can see results if I learn how to up-load to the site. One of the main reasons I obtained the camera, other than OLF, is the ability to manipulate the picture in photoshop. I love b&w and instead of dodging and burning while printing, I will try the actual photo manipulation.

I, in now way, am an accomplished photographer but one thing I have noticed in some photos is the direct flash used to take photos of the instruments. May I humbly recomend trying bounce flash, i.e. do not shoot flash directly at the subject. Instead bounce light off neutral cardboard card or color card (to add or eleminate an amount of warmth or cold to picture. (You can also learn to 'fill' light-add light to a portion of subject. When you 'bounce'light, you so not recieve the 'flash' spots of the guitar-which of cource are more numerous do to the reflective finishes used on the gui.

QUESTION-
When you develop film, you are given the option, to have the pictures digitalized in addition to the prints.
Dig. cameras are measured in pixels/?, while film is rated, in addition to others, by the 'speed' of the film: the 'slower' the film, the closer the gain of the film, therefor the sharper the image and the larger enlargement you can make w/o the grain becoming too large.
What is the difference in quality picture if you use film, digitalized, or a digitalized photo.
If you follow this, might be time for a mental checkup.
Thanks,

Bob, that question can be answered easily. "It depends".

There's more to it then bits of information. For example, take a picture of the sun shining through the clouds. This image will have very little fine detail. If digital, you could blow that up as much as you want and still have a great image. If taken with film, it'd soon get grainy.


Then consider color depth. Film generally has greater color depth than digital.

Then consider light sensitivity. A color slide with give you 5 stops, more or less. A digital photograph will give you, I forget, 8 or 9 stops worth of useful information.



I also have a D70. Look into shooting in RAW mode. This file format records exactly what the CCD sees. Basically, your camera sees 10-11 bits of color per channel, and this is reduced down to 8 bits per channel. Why reduced? Well, the camera has to do things like set white balance, brightness, contrast, film "speed"., etc., and those extra bits are "used up" in the process. But when the camera does this itself, saving the info to a jpg, it just does what works "on average".

If you read the NEF (raw) file, you can make those determinations on a picture by picture basis, and get better prints. You can even do things like use the image twice - adjust it once to get shadow details, a second to get highlight details, and then combine the two intelligently so you have both shadow and highlight details. A lot of work, but powerful stuff.

This website has a ton of tutorials, articles, and columns that'll help you start understanding the digital medium. Yes, you can point, shoot, and treat it as a film analogue, but it really is a different medium, and to wrest everything from it you have to understand how it works.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/

rlabbe38929.3906828704

I'd like to second Bob's question about transferring film to digital disc. How does it compare to a straight digital snapshot? Does it behave differently when preparing it for web use?

I've transferred lots of film, both negatives and slides, to digital. It works great, as good as digital snapshots or better, if you find a place with good
people and equipment. Without that, it can be horrible.


I never use flash when I try to take nice pictures of guitars. I take pictures out doors on a cloudy day of if it is a sunny day, I take pictures just after the sun goes down. You might want to invest in a circular polarizing filter.

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"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." G. K. Chesterton.

A well-digitized film frame (high quality scan) will outperform a straight digital shot most days. But I'm not sure the folks who do it for 'free' will give them to you in the sizes/quality comparable. I second (third?) folks reccomending you shoot in RAW: it opens up a world of possibilities for post-processing, losslessly. Yes, big mem cards needed, slows shooting speed, but it's completely worth it.

The 'film speed' issue applies to digicams as well, although the grain per 'ISO equivalent' tends to be much, much finer, but unfornutately never really looks nice when it gets too grainy (on my now old gen Canon 300D/Original Digital Rebel, I use up to 400 without qualms, 800 and 1600 if strictly necessary; newer cams have better performance), coming out as noise rather than that pleasing film grain. Megapixels are about resolution (pixels x pixels) which more or less limits the size print you can get away with (depending, of course, on viewing distance and all that), ISO speed is just light sensitivity, just as it is with film cams. On a DSLR, the four ESSENTIAL controls, IMO, are: focus, aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It's like being able to swap film for each individual shot. Since I don't have a seperate flash, and it doesn't suit my style, I'd rather shoot at higher ISO (all of them are usable) than break out the flash. That, and using the 50/1.8 or the 100/2.8. Helps.

Have fun!Mattia Valente38929.6890625

I have directly compared film to digital prints. 400 ASA film or less has better resolution than a 3.3. megapixel resolution camera, but at print sizes less than 8X10 it is hard to tell the difference in grain/resolution. The Nikon at 6.1 should be wonderful quality, even compared to most film in resolution.

Do not bother with letting typical film development places "digitize" the output of your film camera in my experience. It will most likely be terrible quality, due to poor resolution, color and other problems. There are places or people who can do it right, but it takes more than just the typical drugstore equipment, I think.SteveCourtright38929.7248611111

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

I actually picked up a Canon 350D (Digital Rebel XT) this week. It was up between that and a D70 but I finally sided with the Canon due to lens availability (lot of local Canon users, good used market).

When you're talking about film vs digital on prints then 35mm falls somewhere between 6-14 megapixels, depending on the quality of the print. On a top quality printout of a great photo taken perfectly on pro gear, a 35mm shot is going to degrade (as a rule of thumb) if you blow it up bigger than 8x10. That's a 500dpi print. Most photos are printed closer to 300dpi and that puts it at an 8MP equivalent.

The advantages of digital over film are just too good to pass up for my uses. Changing ISO sensitivities on the fly is huuuuuge. The newer CMOS sensors also make the high ISO shots less dirty overall than film but, as mentioned, digital noise is less excusable than grain. And burst mode...the D70 has a pretty good burst mode. I think you should just always use it. You've got room for a LOT of shots on a memory card and redundancy never hurts so I take every shot as a 3-burst (only takes a second on the Rebel and the same on the D70, I believe).

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

If you don't want to get into studio flash, I've done a little shooting with a slave unit hooked up to a basic Vivitar flash unit. I taped a "reflector" on my digital point-and-shoot to bounce the camera flash away from the subject to avoid the "deer in the headlights" look. The flash ends up doing some bouncing off the wall or ceiling and providing some fill, but most important, triggers the remote slave. Took some fiddling, but produced surprisingly good results.

If you happen to have medium format stuff, you can get fantastic results from professional scans, both in terms of sharpness and color gradation.

Agreed that you can get horrible results from a 1-hour photo film-to-digital scan, but if you call a photo studio, they'd probably be happy to refer you to their favorite pro photo lab to have them do the scanning.

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now known around here as Pat Foster
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Thanks everyone. Just wondering- the film development and CD are sent to Kodak for processing. Problems still?