Saturday, July 21, 2007

today I decided to play a little bit with chanel based saturation. And for this I decided to annoy lindsay fish 'diablo" a little bit which is by now 33 cm long.

So we put on flash to the right site of the tank, one flash on top of the tank and taking 10 - 20 picture to find the right exposure for this job.

Sadly I was not able to use autofocus, cause the water was playing havoc with the system from my D50. If you look at the picture, specially close to the Fin you can clearly see the scratch, which I still need to correct in photoshop, but this will take a little bit. The fish is fairly complex with all his scales.

now about these specific look,

this is actually very easy to accomplish you just need to reduce the saturation of each color channel. In this case it was green/yellow to remove the color from the plant and blue/aqua to remove the water color.

did I mention I love light room? It is so simple todo these kinds of things. And like always we have trouble with the blown highlights. Because the scales are so reflective. I tried to compensate for it, but it doesn't always work as i want and these where the only usable shots out of 100 pictures or so.

oh last, but not least use a circular polarizer to remove reflections from the fishtank. This can be even improved if you turn off all lights in the room. The used aperture was around F/8 and the used shutter speed around 500 to get rid of the ambient light. The flash's where triggered over pc cord or an optical trigger. And the pccord is just frustrating, you need to check the connections all 2 minutes

ok now after trying a couple of hours to remove the 'scratch' in the picture I gave up. i'm just not able to remove it and all what happens is that the picture looks fake. i tried dodging and cloning.




ok these two pictures are the same. The left is before "photoshop repair" the right is after repair. It took roughly 20 minutes to fix these simple picture up and tommorrow I going to shoot some birds to see how hard it is to fix these up. And afterwards I will figure out what next.
At least I learned for the future dust cleaning is easy, but I wont do a wet cleaning again.

Just to dangerous...

http://www.nikonians.org/nikon/d80/nikon_d80_2.html

here we can see an overview off all camera systems. The D50 and D70s are not longer produced and only used available for around 400 - 600$. Which means it makes not really sens to fix my D50 because it is already close too 2 years old, has a third of its lifetime down (15k releases, rated arround 30 - 45k releases before shutter needs to be replaced) and the flash is dead.

So it will be most likley the D80 or if they announce the new model i will prob with this. The 1500$ for the D200 is just way to much for a hobby. And the main difference is shooting speed (would love to have 5fps) and all controls are accessible over buttons instead of a menu.

And 869$ vs 1500$ is quite a difference...

So I read a little bit more about the idea to replace to scratched sensor element with an infrared/new element and this element cost around 95$, but the problem is you need to take the camera apart in all little pieces which scares the hell out of me for obvious reason. The instructions are here

http://www.lifepixel.com/IR.htm

I could do it except the soldering part, where I'm missing the tools and the practice. So it seems like I have to pay the fee for it, if i go this way.

Ok this is the result after a simple test series of some stepuprings on a white cutting board.



And as we can see the scratch becomes clearly visible at f/5.6 and barley visible at F/4.0. Which tells us we can use the camera for portraets, but nothing else. So I need to find a solution for this problem.

The pictures are at aperatures of f/1.8, f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6 and I used a sb-600 on ttl settings for this pictures.

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ok the first test of making a realistic picture with a scratch sensor as we can see we can't see anything because the aperature is to large. We used 6.3/7.1 and one flash in the top picture. As you can see you got some very hard shadows on the right side and all over the 'teddy'. For this reason we fire the second flash bounced of the the ceiling. It takes care of removing most of the unwanted shadows.

The setup was a sb-600 from the left connected over a standard pc cord and set too manual. The second flash was triggered over an optical trigger. Sadly the trigger works only once out of 5 times. Now the question is, is it related to the cheap vivatar flash or is it related to the trigger. The trigger also wont fire on my sb-600.

The main problem was that the flash both where to powerfull. Specially the vivatar, cause I can only set it to 1/16th output. The sb-600 can be set to 1/64th and can be adjusted in 1/3 ev.

So the vivitar flash does what it is supossed to be, but I could need 45 feet of pc-cord and a y-adapter so I can trigger both flash over the synccords. Which is more reliable, than the optical trigger. Basically I need to adjust the trigger so that its show directly to the sb-600 or it wont fire.

Time to make a test series at which aperature the scratch in the sensor becomes visible. I still don't understand how it happend, it makes no sense. That the specialiced cotton pads are able to scratch the sensor. Maybe it is just residue, but it certainly does not seems so. I tried to remove it with several sensor cleaning solutions, but nothing works.

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after I spend now some time with the scratched sensor it is possible to fix it in post processing but it takes arround 5 - 10 minutes to fix the scratch in simple pictures like to the left.

Time to grab the flashs and a lens and do some real world tests to see how well it works.

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after I received my wet cleaning kit it happened that it scratched my sensor or in other words I can throw my camera now away.

life sucks :(

Now I try to figure out what my options are.

1. I send the camera in to get it fixed and pay 300$ for it
2. i send the camera in and get it converted to IR which includes a new filter (which replace the scratched) and it cost 300$ + I need a new camera
3. I buy a nikon D80 which cost 900$ - need to save money a month
4. I buy a nikon D200 which cost 1500$ - need to save money 3 month

for the moment I wait till the new Nikon products are released and decide than what I gonna do, but it truly sucks. It also makes no sense to buy a used D50 which cost 500$ and the Nikon D80 is better, but i would prefer the D200 which is a truly better than the D50.

time to save money...

the big question is can I justify spending 1500$ for a camera body. And the D80 just is missing a couple of features i really want to have. For example the 5fps or that you can set everything with a button on the camera instead of browsing the menus.

So basically what is different:

- 5fps vs 3fps
- weather sealed vs non sealed
- metal vs plastic body
- can meter with all lenses instead only with newer AF lenses
- d200 has no problems with metering vs the buggy matrix meter of the D80
- D80 feels wrong in my hands and needs battery grip to feel right

But for the 1500$ instead of 900$ I could also get my D50 converted, which would allow me than to shoot infrared and a nice lens. I also could afford the D80 in august/september compared to the D200 which I could not afford before Christmas. And I would hate to have a vacation and having no camera...

So most likely I do the smart thing and get a D80 or the new model which is supposed to be released next week. And send the D50 in to get converted to RI and use it in this mode or sell it over ebay. Maybe I can recover 200$...