The Photography Thread

[DaiSuki]

I've also been gifted an SLR from my dad, and while it's only a film one, it's an Olympus OM-4 which I'm led to believe is a bit of a classic (and a bit of a classic with a plethora of cheap and well regarded lenses available on ebay, happily). So, I need to ask a couple of questions to the SLR'ers about film and developing and lenses.

First off: my digital does me fine for landscapes, and in any case I prefer people photography to landscape photography. I like exaggerated depth of field in a picture, so what lenses should I be looking at? It's got both a 50 and an 80-200, so I'm missing a bit of close- and mid-range availability. What are 35-105s useful for?

Second: it must be ten years since I loaded a film camera and when I put a new film in this one today, I just couldn't get the film as tense as I'd have liked. The sprockets were pulling it round just fine when I was winding, but there was definitely a little bit of play which I couldn't really do anything about once I'd done a couple of winds. Should I worry about that, ditch the film and try again? Or will it be OK?

And third: I was planning to use this camera mainly for B&W work, but I see that most developers these days are happy to give you a CD with 1024x768 images on, for not very much money, that I can desaturate in photoshop. Will this give me decent results with bog-standard 400 film, or should I be looking to get dedicated Ilford-type film, get the developing done properly and use a scanner for uploading stuff to work on?

Cheers for any help

[Magnakai]

Ooh.

I'm as unknowledgeable as you can get about film.
But!

As far as portraits go, the 50mm should do you fine. How fast is it? If it opens to something like F2 or wider than you should be fine. Remember that the focal length gets multiplied on digital SLRs, so it'll be significantly wider than you might be used to.

[Pavey]

Ill shoot you a pm tonight when i get home with some answers mate if you like.


@ DaiSuki.

[bangaio]

DaiSuki,

you'd be perfectly ready to go with an om, some of the best lenses ever are olympus om mount. They Zuikos (i think that's how they're spelt) simply rock from what I have seen.

There are two thoughts for people photography - stay far away or get in close. The approach I like is the closer of the two but around 35-50mm ish. You won't however get the narrow depth of field with these lenses like you would with a longer reach.

The classic lens is 50mm as it's the standard (35mm film is around 50mm diagonal so this is the "standard" view) however the wider field of view is in my mind better for street photgraphy, it is very very personal though. Using an OM, you'd be best sticking to primes (non zooms) and using your feet to zoom, this can be a discrete way to work.

The film q - 35mm b&w is dirt cheap and b&w is what i'd recomend a film camera for these days. Ilford HP5 is my old choice which is a nice film that can take pushing (making faster by develping for longer) but beware of the res you stated there, it's titchy. You could invest in a scanner and develop the film yourself, it's dead easy to do this and then scan the negs and you'll get great results.

Any q's let us know, there's plenty of poeple here to help!

[MartyG]

The shorter the focal length, the greater the depth of field, a 35mm even on quite a wide apature will see a few feet in focus. At smaller apatures even more so. The same principles still apply in film SLR.

I'd agree on the primes on the Olympus stuff, you should be able to get a 35 pretty cheap. I've got a OM10 with a 28mm prime, 50mm prime, 135mm prime, and a zoom which claims to be a 50-700, and it's a crap lens as you can imagine. I got it free. I pretty much only use that camera with a 50mm. If you want to do portrait stuff a lens in the 80-120 range will work very well. You're talking older lenses, modern zooms are far far far superior to anything you'd be looking at in the older OM era.

As for film, I've always found Ilford stuff to be superb, and also the Kodak B&W film I've used is excellent. I doubt you'll find poor B&W film anymore though.

I would highly recommend you try and sort out an enlarger and try developing for yourself - it's a great aspect of B&W film photography.

Loading film, you'll never get the film tense as you're setting it in the socket due to the way it's wound so tight in the canister, it will tense once you're winding it on.

[DaiSuki]

Much obliged chaps. And aye Nick, the more I find out the better so PM away. It is an OM-10 I've been gifted Marty, he's keeping his OM-4. I don't understand metering anyway, so n/m

Do I need to make any manual adjustments for the different apertures of the lenses? The 50mm is goes to 1.8 but the big one is fully open at 3.9. All the camera really tells me is what it thinks the shutter speed should be at any point in time. Given that the camera's recommended shutter speed changes as I change the aperture, can I trust the light meter to give me a decent exposure irrespective of the difference in aperture between the two lenses?

I haven't explained that very well, perhaps - I'll try again. If I point the 50mm prime at my window right now, at 1.8, the camera says 1/250th. If I point the 80-200 at my window, the camera says 1/30th. Does that mean that the camera recognises the 'slowness' of the lens at 3.9 and is giving me the right information? Or will I need to make a further mental calculation to get a proper exposure with the 80-200?

[MartyG]

Yeah, that sounds about right, the bigger lens is a couple of stops slower, so the exposure will be longer by a couple stops, which it is.

You'll need to change the apature manually using the ring dial on the lens if you want to alter it. If you haven't got the manual adapter then the OM10 works in apature priority mode, I've found its metering to be accurate.

[DaiSuki]

Thank you for all the advice, chaps. With any luck, I'll be posting proper film images before too much longer. And, to be honest, I'll feel much more proud of myself than I do when posting half-decent digital images... I think there's an art to photography that, to a certain extent, the digital age has started to erode in that you can now just take as many shots as you want and hope one of them turns out OK. It's an art which I've never been particularly good at, but I think I've done enough practicing with the digital to have a crack at thinking about composition properly

However; while I'm still on digital, this is one I forgot about:

Yangtze Bridge

I should probably have downsized the big version of the picture because it pixelates quite horribly. I never really liked this, even when I uploaded it, but the first comment made me think about it again and I'm now a bit happier about it.

[Alastair]

Is anyone interested in sports photography?

I went to Goodwood on Saturday to look at the cars taking part in a track day. Took a lot of shots mainly in sports mode (as it's a fast circuit) but have found I need to alter the colours a little to brighten things up a bit on most of the shots as they all looked a little dull. I suppose that's pretty normal when shooting at very high shutter speeds though?

I'm quite keen on improving on sports stuff though so does anyone have any tips?

[DaiSuki]

I love sports photography, but opportunities (other than Newcastle warming up) are few and far between. My mate's dad is head of security at St. James' Park so I'm hoping to get an all-areas pass and an official photographer bib for the next home game

In my experience, the best you can do to improve in this field is to hope for a sunny day.

[MartyG]

And use continuous exposures - following the action. To really capture the action you need fast lenses and fast shutter speeds, which means lots of cash: 300mm prime lenses are the way to go.

The higher the shutter speed, the wider the apature needs to be for the available light, so you might be getting dull photos because you can get a decent compromise and are underexposing the shots. Try upping the ISO rating on the camera, it may already be doing this for you in sports mode mind. Put the camera into shutter priority mode and do it yourself next time you're out.

[DaiSuki]

Addicted to a new photoshop trick which makes **** old pictures look fresh and new.

Northumbrian Winter
Coast
Tower

I can't quite work out how doing this (channel mixer / monochrome / green to the top / blue to the bottom) looks so different to just plain old b&w. Strange.

[Gareth C]

Because its like adding a polariser filter (I think thats the one) to your camera.

[MartyG]

A polarizer cuts down on glare and darkens skies - I'm not quite sure what you're describing Dai, but it sounds more like colour filters, which will accentuate certain colours. Interesting page on filters in B&W photography here: http://www.fineart-photography.com/bwfilter.html

I'm a big fan of using red filters in B&W.

[DaiSuki]

Interesting stuff... it really surprises me that you can set something to monochrome (or, in the real world, use b&w film) and yet make such a difference by playing with colour sliders (and in the real world colour filters).

It's the colour-blindness, it makes all this stuff rocket science to me. I've seen this faux-infra-red effect before, but I've never known how it was done and just stumbled across it by accident tonight. Intriguing, and as I say, much more interesting than just plain black and white (although it doesn't suit everything... seems to be much more effective with blue skies and green fields).