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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/10/2023 in all areas

  1. Welcome to the forum! I've been thinking about this exact question lately. I did a LOT of amateur photography in about 1978-1985, including my own darkroom with some simple color processes. Much of my attention was on how to do the wet chemistry and using the enlarger. Polycontrast paper, which involved purple and yellow filters on the enlarger, was new, and I tried a lot with that, including burning and dodging with different filters to do local increase or decrease of the contrast. For a while I was on a sepia toning kick. On the camera side of things, I liked macrophotography including a bellows and special bellows lenses, and I worked pretty hard to make depth of field work. Generally I tried to practice better focusing technique, and had about 4 or 5 different focusing screens. I tried to practice better holding technique, too, using tips from archery to control my breath and get less blurry pictures when struggling with long shutter times. I got into Fuji X cameras within the last couple years. This was my introduction to digital cameras with interchangeable lenses. What evolved the most was that all the wet chemistry went away, including a lot of work that had nothing to do with controlling the images I made. Do I need to improve my temperature control? How fresh are all my batches of chemicals and how fresh do they need to be? Do I need to add a fan because the fumes are bothering me? Can I make a homemade vacuum easel to keep the paper from curling under the enlarger? Can I load some more cartridges today or is it so hot I will sweat inside the changing bag and ruin them all? ALL of that stuff just went away. Lots more evolved. Autofocus mostly made focusing technique go away, or reduced it to thinking about what part of the image I wanted sharp. Rather than having to decide whether to accept the grain of Tri-X or the speed of Pan-X or compromise on Plus-X, and having to stick with that for the whole session, I get sensitivity that is somewhere between better and way way better. Handheld shots can be so much slower now without shake. And the lenses are faster -- I used to have one lens that went to f/1.4, and now I have several that can do that, and one that incredibly goes to f/1.0. Not only that, I can do focus stacking now, and get what used to be flat out impossible shots. Long story short, mostly, the hard stuff went away, or at least got several stops better. I guess the downside is that now I struggle sometimes with software, installations that don't go right, needing to track updates, and camera instructions that are 10 or 100 times more complex. Before automatic exposure and other microprocessor driven stuff came along, there just weren't that many details. My favorite camera, the Canon F-1, did have a battery for the light meter, but other than the meter not functioning it was the same user experience if I left the battery out. Sunny 16 and I was good to go.
    1 point
  2. SauveGV

    Fuji Flowers

    Livèche (Levisticum officinale) au printemps Garden lovage early spring
    1 point
  3. I owned the 16f1.4 in the absence of a decent 18mm (e.g. 28mm equivalent). As soon as the 18f1.4 came out I traded the 16 in for it. Unless you are desperate for the 24mm equiv fov I can highly recommend the 18f1.4 - quite possibly the best lens in the XF mount line up and one of the lenses on the support list for the X-T5/X-H2? On the other hand, how often do you care about the corners of a photograph? If you print or display the work, no one will ever notice that a lens is only 99% good enough. LouisB
    1 point
  4. Sharpness is not everything in a picture, in fact beyond a certain point it is not important, and chasing after a small increase is pointless. Forget the stupid list and go out and enjoy what you have.
    1 point
  5. Orson

    Fuji Flowers

    XT5 with XF 200/2
    1 point
  6. Maybe this is better....
    1 point
  7. 1 point
  8. No - its possible with the X-H2S but not the X-S10 - it could be added by firmware but doubtful that it will be
    0 points
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