Re: Digital camera blues

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Silver Plated wrote:
> > Don't fall into that "I'll never have to buy another roll of film"
> logic....you won't be buying film, you'll be buying ink cartridges and
> media to print on. It basically costs $40-$50 in cartridges for either
> of my Epson printers.

Oh there are so many traps a girl can fall into that one more or less
hardly makes a difference... but for the record, I use $4 per cartridge
ink for my epson 1160, from extracartridges.com and have tested these
every way I could think of -- including light and waterfastness,
densitometer, ink creep etc.... In fact I and others who use them conclude
that they're THE SAME. I mean would you be shocked, SHOCKED to learn that
the Epson inks were put up in the same factory in china? That's at least
my working hypothesis. Meanwhile, Epson has plugged this leak by chipping
newer cartridges, tho there are ways around that I understand which is of
course another story.

But equally important, I NEVER print every shot on a roll, or in this case
on a whatever it is. I'll probably seek some way to make a contact sheet
in hard copy for a file, but either way I'm only interested in negatives
not prints, so I'll be using photoshop & the printer in any event. In
fact, the whole song & dance is in the interest of digital negatives. The
photography I do is usually hand-held grab shot (which is the only kind
I'm any good at -- the minute I SEE something that looks great that's
standing still, eg, inanimate, and take a *picture* of it, it dies or
anyway disappoints.)

These grab shots can be pretty sloppy -- that's part of their charm often
as not, but a bath in Photoshop makes a world of improvement OF MY CHOICE.
For instance, if there's back of a head in foreground with insufficient
hair texture to hold the lower quadrant, BAM !, I can CRANK that hair
detail up in photoshop as I never could analogically. And so forth.

I'll add also that my experience is that digital to digital is, all other
things being equal, better finally than analog to digital, that is,
scanned. I've been astonished at how an e-mailed jpeg comes out better
than a really good print in Post-Factory.... true, the low level offset
may not be a fair comparison, but I have so far no reason to valorize
scanning.

I'm not throwing out the Nikon -- it's sitting next to the kodak 8x10 and
the Diana as part of the living room still life, but at the moment I don't
even like holding it. It's got a 105 mm lens on it now, which skews the
balance forward, uncomfortable to carry & hold. The irony is that the
camera I'm leaning to at the moment (thanks Thom & all!) is the Canon G5,
which with the batteries will weigh about a pound -- but pick up a pound
of butter & see how much easier it is to "pack" than that front-loaded
Nikon....

More about that PLUS questions shortly, but meanwhile it's not about the
money. None of it is. It's about time, brain cells, and dealing with
satanic equipment, both analog & digital.

cheers,

Judy
Received on Wed Nov 12 16:21:59 2003