Thunderer

I had the same problem at work but in strangely I found large groups are easier than small groups to give a talk to. With large groups I didn't bother about individual responses but with small groups I could follow the reactions of individuals which could be unsettling. Other than that Ihave no explanation but it was true. Also given that you know the subject inside out you will be able to deal with any questions. I would say go ahead and do it. At the least it wouldbe a change from all those travelogue/holiday snap talks I get to see! Jeff

Serious question. Can someone point me in the direction of one of these aggressive forums please? I am interested to see if the problem is hostility, point scoring, oneupmanship etc rather than blunt but honest critiques. I have been on forums where every image was "awesome" which was not true or useful. I would have no problem with robust exchanges of view as long as there was no agenda behind comments. I am reluctant to offer critiques in case I upset people although critical comments ( on other forums ) about my work are usually ok and helpful. Jeff

Blimey. You have been stalking me! I had a Lubitel. Lens was mostly good but had a soft area. The camera disintegrated on me. After the Mamiya I got a Bronica 645 format SLR with three prime lenses. An excellent camera. Then I was persuaded, with a bit of financial help, to sell my Bronica and darkroom stuff and get an Alpha 100 to use with my Minolta lenses. With 20/20 hindsight I should have stayed with film and got a digi bridge camera for convenience and holiday snaps. Ah well upwards and onwards with technology?? Jeff

Yes. a TLR. A very strong but light simple construction with fixed lens. I don't remember there were zoom lenses in those days but the first zoom lens seemed to sacrifice everything for convenience. Photographers pretty well accepted fixed lenses and worked around the limitations and with the benefits. The daft thing Idid was sell it. It would have been a good investment. I returned many years later to a Mamiya TLR. A much heavier machine but it had interchangeable lenses. But also a good tool. I had necessarily to work slowly so my photos were much more considered. Jeff

My mother got a 1b after I got the 1a. The great advances were indeed the built in meter with match needle exposure settings plus expanding shutter speeds to 1/15 and 1/500 and an f2.8 lens. Agfa slide film ..... Hmm. Lurid greens and fading within a couple of years. Strange how the German cameras were regarded as superior eg Retinettes to Leicas but colour films were very inferior. Kodak K10 and 25 were superb and indeed my interest in photography was attending in about 1958 a slide show of an RAF Himalayan mountain expedition taken on Kodachrome. I moved on to medium format by saving my wages from working in a market garden ( my back still aches with the thoughts of picking French beans all morning ) for 12.5 pence per hour and buying a Rolleiflex Auto for not much money and selling it on because it didn't have flash synchro. What an idiot I was ( still am ) Jeff

You talk about K25. Us old folk remember when K25 replaced K10 and being a bit surprised that saturation seemed to have been toned down. The assumption was that quality had been sacrificed for speed ! Sad to say my pictures are no better now than when I was in my early teens shooting K10 on my Retinette 1a ( f3.5 50mm fixed lens and shutter speeds 1/30 to 1/250 ) and exposure calculated by reference to month, time of day, quality of light, film speed, direction of light and subject, but now technical quality is better and there are far more shooting options. Tonality and smoothness seem as important as sharpness in assessing technical quality but those are two qualities difficult to assess on most screens. Jeff

The laws of physics and optics have not changed. Digital images need sharpening which may well be done by the camera when processing raw files into jogs. If you use raw files then sharpening is a normal processing action by the photographer/printer. Why would it be a question of needing to admit anything? After all techniques were used in film days to enhance apparent sharpness eg dilute ID11 1+3 to enhance acutance rather than use stock or 1+1 For what it is worth my view is that very sharp A3 prints can be routinely made from digital files whereas it was difficult from 35mm and MF film but OK from 4" x 5" negs. But tonality is another matter. Jeff

Sorry for late reply. Actually, actually going to meetings does not mean you will not be ignored. I joined one a few months ago and I go most weeks. The most meaningful conversation I have had was about sitting in the wrong ie someone else's, place. Even winning both the print and DPI beginners' monthly comp. has not made me worthy of inclusion. But on reflection they possibly didn't connect my name with anyone they recognise. But I have paid my subs and shall keep on attending. A couple of lectures were OK. The last one was about how to improve your photography to which the answeres are to have a go at PAGB accreditations and use photoshop layers creatively! As an aside I was surprised, when the successful accreditation collections were shown that at least two photos were in all three collections ( I can't say panels of pictures because there was no theme or thread running through them but rather collections of unconnected images.) Jeff

Sorry folks. Ignore the question. I confused a VGA cable with an HDMI cable ----- dohhhh Jeff

A long shot question. I have a 3 metre HDMI cable to connect my non Internet PC to my TV. Today I bought an Apple lightning to HDMI connector to connect my IPad to TVS BUT the HDMI connector on the lightning connector is much smaller than my cable HDMI. Question is what connector do I now have to buy to connect them? I presume some sort of mini HDMI male to big size female HDMI connector. Any advice gratefully received on how to spend yet more money! Jeff

Statins for high cholesterol. No side effects.

I don't think that has been mentioned because it was not part of the question which was entirely about technical matters. The point you make seems entirely correct but is for a different thread. Jeff

FZ28 I think. One really good aspect was the available full manual control in RAW. The lens had a remarkable range. I got it secondhand with known provenance after I got fed up changing DSLR lenses as I climbed a hill on Eigg on a windy day and kept getting left behind and worrying about dirt on the sensor. It was good for on screen pictures but prints bigger than 8" x 10" were somewhat lacking. I subsequently got a second DSLR body and was able to readily change between bodies with different lenses but witha weight penalty. Jeff

I had a Panasonic FZ with an enormous range lens. Within it's limitations it was good but that tiny sensor's 10mp produced noticeably poorer prints than Sony a100 10mp. But on a laptop screen for which 10mp seems overkill there seemed little difference. Jeff

Thanks for your real life observations. It is print quality that matters to me so your info. is relevant to my question. And I rarely do action shots and usually shoot at ISO 100 - although if low light capture was very good I would probably use higher ISOs more often. Jeff

Indeed yes. I guess I am asking for a comparison of old full frame lenses on a Sony 16mp sensor forced to be further from the sensor by the mirror with a new design lens optimised for digital capture ( light not striking sensor at a fairly acute angle) placed closer to the newer Sony 16mp sensor. And the aspect ratio of 4:3 is closer to my usual print size - usually about 12" x 16" so fewer pixels are thrown away. Jeff

Or a Sony A6000?

Thanks for reply. I agree with what you say. Ie it is the quality of pixels and their carefull use that counts.

Thanks for reply I have done similar research. It was real life experience I was after. Possibly someone who has changed from APS-C to MFT. I don't think there is a fundamental difference in sensors of the two sizes. I think the main difference is that the camera designer can put the rear element of the MFT closer to the sensor because there is no flipping mirror or mirror box to work around. My Canon Pro9000 is my printer! So what matters is the quality of a 12" x 16" print emerging from that printer. My comments about film referred to the pictorial quality difference between say 35mm and 60 x 60mm negatives but recognising that, for example, 35mm lenses were designed to resolve more detail than a MF lens and with meticulous attention to technique much of the theoretical difference could be overcome so far as sharpness is concerned and maybe tonality. I asked the original question because two of my three lenses are full frame lenses and large and heavy and my A580 is heavy and when lugging them plus tripod etc about last week over Jeffrey Hill I got talking to a man who had just bought an Olympus MFT camera and he let me have a play with it. It felt like a lightweight toy If I could satisfy myself that I could match current print quality with that from MFT Iwould be very strongly consider changing systems. Also the availability of relatively cheap prime lenses is a pull to MFT. Jeff

My mind is turning to thinking a 4/3 camera system would be much easier to carry and use than my SonyDSLR system. But is image quality from a new 16mp 4/3 Olympus sensor in an EM5 or 10 capable of matching my 16mp APS-C sensor in my A580 when printed to A3 on my Canon Pro 9000? Any real world experience that you could share that would help in answering the question would be much appreciated. I am interested in sharpness, tonality, noise and dynamic range. I have searched web sites but information about printed output seems scarce. Being an old former film user I always assumed that bigger film was noticeably better than smaller film but does that also apply to digital. And I should also say that real world performance is what I would like to know about rather than theoretical limits. Jeff

I understand the interest of the whole business/politics/showbiz and even the bit of sport involved. The same applies to premiership football and test cricket as examples. Strangely enough the person I have met most absorbed by premiership football was an Iraqi academic turned barrister who returned to academia on retirement to do a doctorate at Oxford University. Is all press garbage? Is press bad but Internet forums good for getting information? Do you have privileged access to information about motor sport not reported in the press? If tactical means cars following each other around, say, Monte Carlo, with no chance of overtaking then tactical can indeed be tedious. What sportsmanship is demonstrated in F1 ? As an detached casual observer there seems little sportsmanship but there seems lots of ego and temperament involved. I guess the huge amounts of publicity and cash sloshing around gives F1 far more exposure than other sports, except footy, so no doubt that will play a part in deterring who is the sports personality of 2014. Anyhow I shall not watch the programme. Seeing the non personality Queen's granddaughter ( I think that is the correct royalness) win the comp. cured me of wasting my time with it. Anyhow Match of the Day will be worth watching tonight :-)) Jeff

I have done that with 35mm colour slides using a Sigma 105mm macro lens on Sony DSLR. I used a small slide viewer light-box but the Iluminations was uneven. Howeve I have some of the plastic sheet used to make illuminated advertising signs which I guess is quite neutral and should work OK for even lighting if placed a few inches above the slide viewer. I have a copier stand ( adapted from an enlarger ) and digital files processed in LR could well Print OK. Thanks for the suggestion/reminder. Jeff

Three files but each is way to big to load here, and to make them small I will need to adjust them on my PC then use ITunes to get them on my IPad then somehow adjust the size to make them fit here. - a task that was beyond me last week. But given there is no standard way to do the job a one off solution would not be what I need so I'll not pursue the offer. Thanks for the offer which is appreciated. Jeff

I am trying to squeeze out the best possible quality from some 35mm monochrome negatives with an old Epson 4180 flatbed scanner using the supplied negative holder and software. Lack of good Dmax seems the major problem so I have tried a sort of hdr technique using levels to get the different exposures then merging in PSE photo merge. Question is does anyone have experience of doing this or similar and have any suggestions to make the idea work eg use curves or brightness settings and how many exposures to make? I have tried using HDR merge in CS5 but can't work out how many times over and under the standard exposure is used. Any advice gratefully received - but please no suggestions about spending money on a different scanner or on expensive professional services. Jeff

Not doubting skill, bravery etc etc. Only trouble is that it is about as exciting as Scalextric racing. Much prefer bikes where you can see ( on TV ) the skills, daring etc. Anyhow eulogising the skills of drivers is well off topic. Jeff