aerius

They pretty much lost me with "Reveal" and I haven't bought any of their newer albums, though I always went to their concerts when they came by my area. R.E.M. was the first band I really got into, I still have a couple of their albums in the original LP release, "Reckoning" on vinyl absolutely kills the CD version. It's been a long trip with a ton of amazing & influencial music along the way, I think they made the right choice. It was time.

Ok, now this is freakin' weird. For whatever reason, Fujicolor 100 scans like a dream while Fujicolor 200 absolutely refuses to play nice with my scanner. The all came from the same B&H order and were shoved in the fridge as soon as they arrived. The prints from both rolls look great, but negative scans from the 200 roll look like crap, the colours are way off and the contrast looks rather poor. A scan from the good roll. Straight from the scanner, all I did was crop it.

Brightness seems to be fine, I have to set brightness & contrast on the higher end of the range to get a good picture but there's still some room left for adjustment if it fades some more. I have a couple LCD monitors setup at my trading computer, they're great for web browsing, reading text, and doing trades but pictures & movies just never looked quite right on them. So I've been hunting down all the large cheap & free CRT monitors people are posting in the local classifieds and cherry picking the best ones.

Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2040U. I can't say I notice any real difference between this and my 21" Dell Trinitron monitors, there seems to be just as much difference between the 2 Dells I have as there is between the Dells and this one.

They even have a version for micro 4/3 cameras, I'm waiting for someone to stick one on a GF3.

I don't know, I think he should've gone for the compact prime instead. I saw one mounted on a 5D2 at the photo show and it looked pretty funny.

Proving once again, that mountain bikers rule.

Problem #1 as Jon L noted is that you're using a manual focus lens on a camera which was never designed for it. It does not have a viewfinder, nevermind one with the old school focusing screens which had microprisms, split image rings and other focusing aids so that you can really dial in the focus. You're dependent on an LCD screen with its limited resolution & sharpness plus its view magnifier function to judge focus, it can be made to work but it's a PITA. I've tried it on a micro 4/3 camera and it's a hell of a lot slower and less consistent than my Olympus OM-1 film camera (not exactly fair since the OM series had one of the best viewfinders ever made). With regards to noise, yeah, looks like underexposure. I loaded up the sample in Photoshop and the histogram is squashed up on the left with a sizable gap on the right. Here's what you do, pick a few typical scenes of stuff that you'd photograph and take a series of pictures of each scene, using the exposure compensation function to dial up the exposure a bit in each one until you start blowing out the highlights. Then back it off a notch. Then note how much you had to dial it up and remember that number or save it into the settings. Use the standard jpg output to get this part dialed in, open them up without any editing in Photoshop or whatever you use and confirm that the highlights and everything else is good using the histograms. Only after you've got the compensation dialed in should you start dicking around with raw. You want the images to come out of the camera as good as they can so that you don't have to dick around with them too much in raw processing & Photoshop.

And now my OM camera system is complete.

I had an E-P1 for a week or so before I returned it when it first came out. The lack of a built-in viewfinder killed it for me, yeah you can get an add-on but I'm a bit forgetful so I'd likely leave it at home half the time when I need it. The controls weren't that great either for what I like to do, I'm used to film SLRs and want direct control for shutter speed & aperture at all times which the camera didn't let me do, I had to play with too many buttons & menus to set the things that I wanted to set. I've handled the E-P2 at a camera show and the controls on that one are a lot better for me. As for other mirrorless systems, the Samsung NX series gives you a viewfinder, it's built-in on the larger NX10 & NX11 while the NX100 uses a clip-on EVF. The NX100 is smallest & lightest of the 3, it's about the size of the E-P2 and feels a bit lighter though I'm not sure if it actually is. I also like Samsung's controls the best since I can just stick it in manual mode and use the dual control wheels to dial in aperture and shutter speed, it works just like a film camera. I find their menus are simpler and easier to use as well, the important stuff like white balance and ISO are right up front or have their own buttons, no digging through menu trees. Now if they could just stuff the Fuji X-100 viewfinder into the NX100 body or make an interchangeable lens version of the X-100, I'd jump right in on the pre-order line.

A variety pack of black & white film from B&H Photo. Got some Neopan Acros, Fomapan and Tmax 100, HP5+, Plus-X and Tri-X.

And they traded away Richards and Carter for that goalie. It's like they're trying to make their team suck so they can pickup a good draft pick next year.

http://blog.naver.com/cleanday82?Redirect=Log&logNo=60124228527 No idea when it's coming out though, but probably sooner rather than later with the way product cycles are going these days.

A 1/2.3 inch interchangeable lens camera? I can't say it makes sense to me and I really gotta wonder what the market is for this thing.

Another B&W from my Pen-FT

If it's a P1110, you can do the resistor mod if the monitor looks washed out and the color return function doesn't fix it. I had to swap resistors on one of mine to get the blacks to be black instead of grey. Apparently it's a common defect with these monitors.

There's some photography work but it's mostly for video editing. My riding group is shooting a ton of footage for our mountain bike videos so I needed a new monitor to do the editing. As for why, well, I have the space, 2 for $20, and electricity is pretty darn cheap where I live.

A few more years and they probably will pay me to take'em.

Gotta love how people are practically giving away 21" CRT monitors these days. Picked up 2 of them for $20.

Old railroad bridge, now a road bridge

Man, I thought for sure that he was going to lose it Hulk style and snap those headphones in half!

According to this chart, all your A-series lenses will work just fine on the K-5 in all manual and automatic modes. You'll still need a macro lens for your work but at least you won't have to get a complete new set of lenses for the camera.

Definitely. If there's a trade show, larger camera store, or even a photographer's group meetup near your area, go and use the opportunity to try out everything you can get your hands on. Bring some memory cards & lenses and give the cameras a full workout.