Funny you should say this. I've been wanting an excuse to find the courage to post a certain picture for a long time...

I was in Federation Square, in Melbourne, on a rather rainy afternoon. The lens on the camera was the 18-55 Mk 1, and I couldn't get any wider, or any further away. So I turned the camera at an angle to get everything in on the diagonal, and then when I got home, messed around a bit with backgrounds until I ended up with this:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/IMGP7263-22.jpg[/IMG]

The original is here.

What do you reckon?

Edit: be as brutal as you like, people. I can't work out whether I like it or not, so I'm not that bothered whether you like it, or tear it to shreds. I realise it's no PaulyRichard

Grand Canyon, May 1990.

This was from the light twin on the way from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/182-020.jpg[/IMG]

A couple from the South Rim:

To give you a sense of scale, the Colorado river there is 300 yards wide. The canyon is about a mile deep.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/183-011.jpg[/IMG]



This one just after sunset. The North Rim is 11 miles away.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/183-019.jpg[/IMG]



And one on the way back to Vegas:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/186-010.jpg[/IMG]


It was the most amazing scenery I'd ever seen. The photos I took didn't come anywhere near capturing the immensity of it, and nor, strangely, did just looking at it from the top. I found I had to hike down into the canyon for a few hours to really start to get my head round it. I resolved to go back there to have another go at photographing it, but it hasn't happened yet.

No decent filter would cause that.

What quality did you save the JPG at?

I'm not really sure what you're disagreeing with, unless you think I'm somehow justifying unpleasantness, which I'm not at all.

I agreed with Amin, so it presumably isn't that.

I said "spare a thought for the frustration of..."; I did not say that an unpleasant reply is justified.

I commented to the effect that we all sometimes slip from the standards of control that we'd like to maintain ourselves and receive from others. I know I have..

And I complimented Luke's mature reaction, and Peter's immediate apology.

And I agree with you that it would be nice if people didn't overreact.

All I'm saying, is that until we're all perfect, never make a hasty comment, never let our irritation get the better of us, never speak before thinking after a bad day in the office, etc, etc, occasionally we'll slip.

Being able to react to such things in a calm way, is nicer than responding with an escalation.

I can see it. I think it's just JPG artefacting.

If you grab it and edit the levels from the dark end, it's a lot more obvious.

You are looking at this one, aren't you?

The trouble with not cropping is that even at 400mm, let alone 300mm, the whole frame looks like this:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/IMGP2370-sm.jpg[/IMG]

There's simply no way of displaying the detail in the moon in only 800 pixels here, without cropping a portion of the frame. And once you crop, you end up having to show all the pixels in that crop (the more so, the shorter the focal length, since then the smaller the moon is in the frame).

This pushes you right up against the limitation of the lens, and the distance between the pixels. The lower the resolution of the sensor, the less good the result will be.

Exposure doesn't have to be as short as 1/180. You don't get appreciable motion blur (ie, blur > 1 pixel) until you're slower than (very) roughly 1/20s, dependent on focal length and sensor resolution.

Spot metering to get a reading, fair enough. Then switch to manual.

The moon moves so fast that unless you're really quick, you won't be metering on the moon any more when you come to take the picture.

Personally, I find that trial and error, and then manual once you've found a good exposure, is much more reliable than any of the auto-exposure modes.

Definitely.

I'd probably go a bit further than George regarding the first one. Each to his own, of course, and if you like it, you like it. But as George says, there's hardly anything to see, and the five second exposure has blurred even that. To be perfectly honest, I think time spent attempting to salvage something from this one is time better spent taking more pictures.

As for the moon, the exposure is good, and the cloud makes it a bit unusual.

The trouble with having only 6 megapixels and only 300mm is that there's really a limit on how big it's worth attempting to display a 100% crop like this. I think it's better to display them smaller when they're like this, so that the detail appears sharper. Try reducing it to 400px instead of 800 and see if you agree that although smaller, it looks better.

No, it's 35mm only. And that was expensive enough. The Nikon Coolscan 9000, which can handle 120 film is about £2.5k

Once I'm done with my negs, I'm going to tout for a bit of scanning business, and if that comes to nothing, I'll sell the scanner. I haven't looked at prices since I got it, but beforehand they were going for about 80% of the new price.

A couple of hundred quid, assuming I can get back 80%, will be a small price to pay for the return of more than 20 years of memories. So far there are a couple of gems, a few reasonable pictures, and there will be a few more if I crop and edit carefully.

But ironically, it's the snaps I wanted the most.

No, you misunderstand slightly - I probably haven't been clear.

I can scan Kodachrome. It's just a little more work to ensure the slide is dust free, that's all.

With tens of slides, that's of no consequence. I have thousands of negatives, though, so an extra half minute blowing the dust off would be significant.

With negs and slide films other than KC, ICE, the auto-dust-speck-cloner-outer works a treat.


Use whatever you feel like

No probs. Note the expiry date - if you want to keep it for a bit, in the fridge would probably be an idea.

I should probably declare my slight vested interest in you not using Kodachrome, of course