Semi-Pro Photography

[Flibb]

I use Nikon digital (smallish) for every day use and a Pentax slr (35mm) for when I go out and want to do some proper photography. But the ace up my sleeve is my minolta dimage dedicted neg scanner. Gives great results and allows me to print my own stuff, picked it up on ebay for £65. I would like to go fully digital but the cost of lenses would be prohibitive, I tend to use large lenses (500mm) for wildlife shots, my Pentax is able to use some rather old lenses but the optical quality is great. Get my film from 7dayshop.

[shiato storm]

Right, I'm back - so now where was I? having read a bit of whats going on I'll add a bit more.
Fuji do something weird with their ccd's - they state a megapixel count double that capable of the optical capture device, and this can reduce the image quality when you push it up to its maximum 'size'.
The XD cards are becoming standard - they ditched media cards I believe they were called. I'd say the CF and CF2 cards (CF = compact flash) used in canon camera are the type you want as they seem to be quite robust and go up to 2gb...so no problems running out there!

Discussion on Film - you can markedly affect the image quality by the type of film you buy, that doesn’t mean spending a fortune each time you get the stuff but then again with digital – its free (apart from the batteries…needs weighing up the cost on that point)
With a film camera – as I have – it makes you really think about the picture you’re about to take instead of firing off hundreds of digital images you later need to sift through, having ‘only’ 36 or 24 frames available makes you compose and set up a shot before you snap away. This has certainly made a difference in the way I approach a scene I’m to photograph, rather than rush in and pray I get something, I now adjust settings accordingly as I’m getting to a scene so I’m ready (it’s a fully manual SLR, old school but excellent quality, is technically my dad’s but he won the odd compo. with it so its pretty good) and you get to have a feel for what settings are likely to be depending on the ambient light etc. so on that front film definitely sharpens you up. I would urge anyone serious about it starting up to get a film camera to understand the processes involved rather than blindly shoot away with a fully automated digital – you might get lucky but you’ll learn bugger all.
Fuji film, as people have mentioned, is a very good stable make right down to the cheaper types allowing for some slight over/under exposure. The more expensive films of the fuji range are slightly less forgiving and don't like serious over/under speeding so just be aware of that...Fuji also do a very nice black and white if you're into that.
Whether its conventional [negative] film or slide film: Fuji is better for scenery and outdoor shots and handles excessive light and tonal mixes reasonably well. Kodak is better for portraits as it tends to give better skin tones. Store brands I tend to stay away from as they are often very unpredictable and the colour tones can be pretty bland.
Slide film will invariably give you far superior quality and can be blown up to very large sizes with little grain or distortion going on. Again they have been mentioned here but I’ll add my 2p. If you look at various publications on different subject matter you will see what each different slide film handles best – wildlife, scenery, sports/action [though mostly digital today]. It must be said; an advantage with slide film is that – often – the processing is paid for when you buy the film [sort of all at once], the kick in the teeth is that it costs loads to go from slide to print…but still, slide film is the medium of choice for top notch photographers who need top notch photographs. Good slide films are Fuji Velvia range, Kodak ‘Chrome series (kodachrome, ektachrome, Elitechrome etc.), though once again different makes come out differently in different situations.

- Black and whites are, sadly starting to diminish thanks to the force of digital demand, Ilford – a solid b&w film producer is currently under a major rethink of its film making factory due to lack of demand. Kodak, I think, have altered their films in the past few years away from one of their standard stocks for the past 50yrs that saw action from Vietnam reporter to your regular wedding photographer’s kit. Agfa are going too I believe... But with black and white there is far more you can do yourself to affect a picture, such as contrasting filters or softening filters; yellow, orange and red increase contrast from low to high respectively, you can also reduce facial blemishes/skin tone alterations by using greens, and blues soften the image. There is also the Infrared films, Kodak do the best high speed infrared but there are lots out there, konika do a reasonably good one., Ilford’s SFX200 is not a true infrared but with the right filter you can get a similar effect. Infrared film required an infrared filer on the lens [assuming you use an SLR], if you put it up to your eye you’d see pretty much nothing – eyes can’t see in IR, but when you print from and IR film the effects can be staggeringly brilliant.
You can’t create a true infrared picture with a digital camera, only after playing around in photoshop can you do this as the photosensor – if you used an IR filter – might get ‘confused’ and not reproduce the image as you’d expect.
Large format cameras – obviously the larger the surface you record an image the closer it is to the original and hence the better the quality becomes but the lens lengths, due to greater lens diameter, are longer than 35mm cameras. Medium format cameras produce squarer negatives/slides in a variety of sizes but most usually around 6cm squared. I would add that I don’t know a huge deal on medium format cameras other than they are much more expensive than your regular 35mm’s, also film for a medium format camera is harder to come by – so bear that in mind if you’re going away to the middle of no where to photograph a scene. Also medium format film is slower in general and is better suited to scenery rather than every day snaps [you’d be either a fool, or a very rich fool, to take every day snaps on medium format!].

Digital - many digital cameras allow you to adjust the film speed equivelant e.g. 200, 400 ASA but on the cheaper models this is not an option or if it is it will only be a limited choce of say 100 [slow], 200 [slow/average], 400 [average/everyday inside or out]. It is typical to find on the higher end models [SLRs] for the ASA to be very high, 3200, which can be used in low light levels and sports.
The images produced by digital cameras can of course be edited to your preferences in photoshop [or any other program] to appear as any other sort of film might produce an image e.g. fuji, kodak b&w etc...even infra red effect - both colour and black&white - so as far as that goes its up to personal preference and trial and error.
As you can guess I’m a fan of SLR’s – be they digital or film. Compact cameras are good, lets not forget they can still do loads and are much less cumbersome, no need to change lenses etc. but there in their weaknesses lie – the lenses may be limited due to demand for light-weight optics (especially in the ‘super-zoom’ compacts, some go from a decent wide angle right up to 400mm equivalent) and hence image quality suffers due to poor lens materials. SLR’s, on the whole, use better optics as they are dedicated to one or a short range of focal lengths

Digital photographs though do require printing. This - due to the sheer volume produced by your trigger happy self - may be very expensive. Ok, so there's no complication of negatives and all the rest of it but you have to select the ones you want and need either a good printer up to the task (£hundreds...) or a good photo-processing shop near by. neither are out of the question and its up to you as to how the images will be used, of course any serious big sizes needed mean a professional service - and there are lots out there so it can be a bit of trial and error.

Black and White - I thought I'd add a special section on this as I'm quite a fan of slightly traditional looking photos. In many ways b&w photography teaches you how to take a good photo, a good one can be very eye catching but a bad one can teach you where you went wrong so you can correct it in future. its also quite fun to process the films and print them yourself - sure its a bit more time consuming but you get the ideas behind the processes much better than simply wandering around with your digital 'takes billions of pictures' camera and hoping you simply get lucky. I personally have a darkroom set up at home and really enjoy getting huge pictures myself right from the taking to printing…although this is a bit of a side note I’d be happy to chat away about printing and all that fun stuff you can do in a darkroom. You think photoshop is rewarding? Wait till you do stuff in a darkroom!


now, if you are thinking semi-pro but need to brush up on skills I'd suggest a decent yet budget SLR that you can use the same lenses on a more capable model. personaly I prefer canon's because their lense system is probably the best of its kind, yes sorry folks it is better than nikkor/nikon system. so you could, for example get the v300 film slr and then, if you like, go up to the eos5...one heck of a camera. or, if you so chose, you can go digital with their capable 300D - the exact replica of the film eos300 only a digital capture device instead, all the controls are pretty much identical. There is also the eos20D which I would strongly recommend - it's new out but it surpasses its predecessor in ability and functions and i think its cheaper.
Be warned that if you go for the higher end cameras don't expect to get a lens included in the price...

oh and watch out for the magnification effect of the digital cameras compared to film cameras - i'm not fully clued up on this to explain completely but basically you get a focal length magnification effect, beyond that with conventional film - so what you see is still what you get but it'll be magnified a bit. some high end SLR's eliminate this but lower end models dont...

right, well I hope that helped a little. I'll try and dig out that link to my pictures...

[shiato storm]

p.s. pentax are soon to release a 'budget' SLR at around £700 like the canon and nikon...though being a later release it's learnt from others and I think it may be a bit better, we'll have to wait and see.

Right, anything I've missed? any gaping holes needed filling in? let me know

[itsanobscureid]

not much time to post atm - as am at work
none the less if you are looking at buying urself a new digicam i can highly recommend these 2 websites, which both contain superbly detailed reviews of most of the cams available over the last 3yrs...

http://www.dpreview.com/
http://www.steves-digicams.com/

i bought a canon d60 (6mp DSLR) recently and absolutley love the control & image quality it offers over a PAS (point and shoot) - altho i still think one of my best shots was taken with my first crappy £50 digicam so who knows ...

anyhow there's a lot of reasding to be done on those 2 sites ... good luck .... if u wanna check some of my pix which were predominantly taken with my d60 go to www.thumperproductions.com/flashgallery

hope that helps
d

[joshwa]

altho i still think one of my best shots was taken with my first crappy £50 digicam so who knows ...

can i see it?

you might want to look at these as well:
www.dcresource.com
www.photographyblog.com
http://www.livingroom.org.au/photolog/
http://www.photo.net/ (good mix of film and digital)

[Allen]

shiato, thanks very much. Your information is very helpful and I hope I've taken most of it onboard. I think thinking about semi-pro is a bit too much at the moment so will hopefully try and get into this as a hobby first of all, see how it goes.

Do you think it will be better to teach myself or do a course to help then?

[shiato storm]

by all means read around - i use my dad books - from the 60's! - but the principles never change, and they really do help. a more upto date book only includes bits about photosho etc which can be gleaned off any webpage. A course will certainly get you pointing the camera in the right direction but be aware that who ever teaches you will have their own idea of 'how to take a good picture'...so in my mind its best to get used to all the settings yourself and, following a book perhaps/information on the web (god knows theres enough of it out there), see your results change with reference to what you did.
Of course there is only so far a book can go so if you are essentialy looking for a 'from the bottom up' type explaination then a beginners course might be the best thing [assuming you have the time and money].
weigh it up: book/guide/internet =£not too much
Course = £could be quite a bit, especially some pro ones...near £300-400 for a weekend!!!

I'm just taking it slow at the mo, there 's always tomorrow to get a good shot and then publish it/sel to an agency.

[Tom]

right, if you are taking this seriously dont mess about with ok ish quality fixed lens digicams when you can pick up the Canon EOS-300D including lens for £500 (ebuyer + print off £100 cashback voucher).

This body should last u a few years whilst you learn it all, and by the time you outgrow it a new model should be there for you Build quality is not as good as the comepetition but it has a £300 price advantage lol.

Im personally getting the 20D asap, but thats £1100. I'm hoping to take this beyond semi-pro and make a living solely off of photography, so i see this as an investment.

[turkster]

Whoa thats one big post Shiato .

I'm a bit busy at the mo so cant read/post much now but I'll just say I have a Canon EOS 300D which use mainly for archaeological work (building survey/industrial etc) and it is pretty amazing. For me digital is a godsend I can take 100s of photos cheaply and have them on my computer the same day or even on site. The 300D is just so much better than other digital cameras I have tried (Canon Powershot A75 G2, G3, G5) so even though I paid through the nose for it here in Ireland (soon after it was launched) I still reckon it was a good buy.

Saying that I dont know if I could have justified the expense if I wasnt using it for work .

[Lee H]

I'm a n00b too when it comes to photography and about 3 months ago I won a DSC-T1

I have to say this is pretty damn awesome for a digital camera and has quite a bit of "ooooooooooh" appeal. I found the following guide recently and this has helped improve the quality of the shots I have taken so I can now take a good photo

Its a pretty big read - and some of the images on here are great quality as well ;

http://www.anandtech.com/digitalcame...oc.aspx?i=2280

Hope this helps you digital folks out there

[shiato storm]

canon's new 20D is the updated version of the 10, but with a few tweaks, and its much much better...and since its not long since the 10 came out it makes you wonder how annoyed those poeple are that splashed out on the earlier model feel!
p.s. I'm quite tempted by the fact that I can get the 300D for £500 [using £100 cashback] - as a film user I'd like to move to digital but without breaking the bank, 300d is a good start for pretty much everyone. then its 20d - or what ever replaces it as its successor