Cameras and Whatnot

So I recently came into possession of a bajillion 35mm slides.  They were my Grandads and are a chronicle of his time as a photography enthusiast.

Unfortunately, no one looks at slides anymore and the only way for me to check them out would be to find, or fashion, a projector.  This would happen exactly once in my lifetime, then the pictures would be stored away, never to be seen again.

The solution is to digitise them.  This presents problems, all relating to money.

If I send them away to a company to digitise, it will cost a fortune and the quality will likely be pants.  If I send them away to a company to do them properly it will cost more than buying my own studio in the Bahamas full of photography equipment, yachts and supermodels.

Clearly, these are infeasible.

The second solution was to buy a scanner and scan them in myself.  My time is worth nothing to anyone, so I win on that front.  Unfortunately I don't win on the buying a scanner front.  For the kind of scanner I would want (top of the line of course) it would be just shy of one thousand dollars.

Clearly this is also unfeasible.

To make scanning matters worse, in order to get the best quality scans possible, you have to employ a wet scanning process.  Once you've invested in the 1,000 USD scanner you behoove yourself to go the whole hog, buy the fluid and gloves, and scan everything in properly.

This is terrible and I would hate myself every time I squirted a tenners worth of mineral oil all over my scanner.

For psychological reasons, then, scanning is less than ideal.

The final alternative is something Grandad unwittingly provided for me.

Back in the good old days, the easiest way to reproduce a slide, enlarging areas or changing the shot, was to buy a big tube with a slide holder on the end, which twisted and turned every which way to line the slide up correctly.  You could then twist the cheap, plasticky barrel to zoom in and rearrange the shot.  Hold this monstrosity up to the light and presto, you have a new negative or slide of your original photo.

Grandad had one of these, which I didn't think anything of (I'm not reproducing his pictures, enlarging or cropping them with film) until it came time to wonder as to how to commit his slides to digital.

I wondered how to best go about the process, and while mulling it over came to the realisation that a lot of people use their digital cameras to commit prints, negatives and slides to their computers.

Clearly, I was onto a winner.

So without delay I found a Beschoi adapter for C/Y to EOS mounts (this adapter has no way of releasing the C/Y half of the setup without long nails and/or 3 sets of hands, so I cannot recommend it) and hooked it up to my camera.

This is a sample shot.  You'll notice it's on the piss.  That's fine, I can fix that with a rulers or a level.

One of the great things with this system is that once it's set up I can slide the slides in and out quickly, take a ton of simple pictures at this decent level of quality (this picture was taken with 10 seconds of setup pointing at a lamp) and then pick out the ones I want to do properly.  To do them 'properly,' is then a case of bracketing however many shots, shoving them into photoshop and asking it to do the rest.  This will give a nice dynamic range, ensuring as much of the subtlety of film is captured as possible.

Another bonus with this bizarre setup is that I can zoom in 2.4x the original size, so I could go absolutely overboard and capture however many shots zoomed in, then recomposite the final image in photoshop to ensure the maximum quality.  (each of those images would have to be bracketed, so dozens of images.  Clearly something I might only consider for the single best photograph in his entire collection).

So I think this will do.

It's not as good as wet scanning with an Epson V850 or whatever the hell - but it is a lot cheaper.

Lensageddon

So I bought my camera a few years ago, which means it's nearly time for the new models to come out.  Nikon have already produced their camera in my range, or are very close to doing so.  Canon are going to release their stuff in a few months.  Obviously, this camera was a once in a lifetime purchase, I'll never be able to afford something as expensive or frivolous again so I've been looking at the lenses that currently make up their lineup.

I really want a big lens.  One of the 400mm pro lenses that get you shot in america because they think you're carrying a bazooka.  The kind of lens that comes with an aluminium case for lugging it around because it's too big for a normal bag.

Alas, two things stop me.  Firstly and least importantly, I wouldn't use the lenses that much.  Wicked interesting animal pictures, strange portraits and occasional oddities aside, I'd probably only ever haul it out a few times a year.  Then again having one of those in the wardrobe would probably get me out more frequently.

The second and more important reason is obvious.  They cost, even second hand, as much as a car.  The cheaper versions would suffice for me, probably anything above f4 (if you don't know what an f number is, it basically means that, should I have this lens, my penis is bigger than someone with an f5.6, but smaller than someone with an f2.8).  Second hand price doesn't drop that much once you get to a certain echelon of gear, so all of these are thousands of wonga, even if used.

So I started looking around for other types of lenses that were feasible within the next year or two, stuff that had a practical use for me.  I really like the idea of a 50mm, a prime that you can just walk around with and take some pictures.  The 50mm primes are cool because they're really fast and relatively small, which means you can hand hold them just fine and use available light, which means not toting around a flash or tripod.  As I have none of these things it's almost the ideal type of lens.  Unfortunately the good ones of this variety are pretty expensive too.

So I'm back to square one.  I came across some interesting macro options.  These are cool because they let you blow up small objects, making them fill a frame with things you might not otherwise see.  If you get a normal macro lens route you can take quite nice pictures of people, and you can get pretty darn close to small insects too.  This is a kind of photography I could get behind, and despite the relatively low prices of these lenses, you need a tripod and lighting setup, which inflates the price.  To get the really cool pictures you would look at something like this.

It magnifies everything up to five times which is great because it opens up a world of photography that you can indulge in anywhere.  Looking at everyday stuff blown up to be huge is fascinating, and with the setup required being relatively small, you'd just have a box in the corner of the room with all the gear you'd need to take a picture.  You could probably take some really interesting videos too.  I think that's my next project.  Save up for that particular lens, clear out a corner and set something like that up.

Thousands of pounds are impossible, a few hundred might not be.  Super saving powers go!

Wow, It Rained

So today was a relatively fun day.  I took a rugby ball into school, and the kids were suddenly transported into an alien world they'd never seen before.  It was fun, but also tinged with some regret that they'll never get to play properly.  I hear that there is a team here, but one team on an island this size, means that exposure is awfully low.

I broke a new personal record for squats at the gym today, and subsequently fell over a plug socket in the floor, prompting everyone to laugh; behind their hands or towels, obviously.  Koreans are generally not as polite as some other countries, but they still stifle a laugh when it's at someone else's expense.  The ways they're rude include barging you out of the way when walking, although this usually results in them on their backside, and shouting at you for no real reason.  They don't shout at each other, so this is presumably an anti-foreigner defence mechanism.

Talking of foreigners, this area is teeming with them.  The shipyards have bought in people from all around the world, and it often feels like there are more foreigners  in this particular part of Goeje, than Koreans.  When you step outside this little bubble however, it's normal (in that it's abnormal, if you catch my drift).

Every time we head past the docks in the morning, my brain explodes as to the size of the lifting machinery they use here.  They don't make the super tankers you see on these 'how do they make something so freakin' huge,' programmes, but the things they do make are pretty big in my world.

You occasionally hear them drop something colossal in the yards, and (bearing in mind they're ten minutes away) you think to yourself someone has crashed their car into a lampost.

In a similar vein, I saw construction workers outside, clambering around scaffolding (with no flooring, just great big squares, created in two dimensions) with no safety harnesses.  They were moving round ala ninja warrior, on the obstacle with two walls but no ceiling and floor - for those who don't know, you have your left hand and left foot pressed against one wall, right hand and foot pressed against another wall.  It was pretty awesome, especially considering they were high enough that a fall would be fatal, no questions asked.  And one was using an electric saw of some kind, while balancing on a single scaffolding pole.

The flip side is that they're hellishly efficient.  The road outside was dug up, down to the underlay (hardcore?  Hardcourt?  I don't know  how you spell it) and resurfaced in two days.  It's roughly 250m long, including all the odd pieces of side-street they've done.

The building outside that's being built gains a storey every week.

I recently got the opportunity to use a Nikon D90, which was tons of fun.  I'm waiting on the owner to send me the pictures, and hopefully I'll be able to upload some on here.  It was pretty handy, and the pictures looked to be of high quality (at least on the viewfinder) so maybe a couple came out  okay.  I was forced to primarily use the automatic modes, which essentially make it like a (frickin' expensive) point and shoot, but I did also manage to take a few snaps with the aperture priority mode, (to make the backgrounds all cool and blurry) only time will tell if they worked out or not.  It also had a pretty cool zoom lense, ranging from quite a strong wide-angle to a low powered telephoto.  I don't know the exact specifications, but it allowed for a varied range of shots without switching lenses, which is cool.

Anyway, we'll see if any came out.

In the meantime; bye.