Posts by homedoc

Fantastic article, John!!

You really know your stuff! It’s nice to know I’m not the only fool out there who is making his own gear. Incidentally, which Credo are you using – the 40, 60 or 80?

I took a somewhat less elegant, but considerably cheaper, approach. I picked up a used Schneider-Kreuznach 75-150 f-4.5 zoom lens originally designed for Bronica 6000 bodies, and adapted it to my Nikon D800E (36.3 MPix). The lens, machinist and a used Nikon tilt-swing bellows cost about $1000.

The Schneider-Kreuznach glass certainly lives up to its legendary reputation. The colors are rich and free of all haze, and the definition is spectacular. In addition, the use of a medium format lens on an AF sensor means that the sensor is only seeing the sweet spot in the center of the lens image. Since most of the distortions and aberrations occur near the edges, I can get prime lens quality from a zoom lens.

The Nikon D800E is a fantastic camera – it’s resolution is almost as good as a Hasselblad H4D-40, Leica S2, or the Credo 40 Mpix back. So I am guessing that with the sweet spot effect, I am pretty much in medium format quality range. The image prints up to 16” x 24” at 300 DPI. If I want to achieve bigger prints or higher resolution images, I can stitch together two or more images taken with either a long mounting plate or a panorama setup to position the iris over the center of the tripod.

On the location vs. non-location debate, I definitely fall on the non-location side. I believe that when Universal Design manifests itself in nature, the result is beauty. There are a hundred great photographs in every rose or rock. Beauty is everywhere, and if you cannot see it, then a trip to Africa isn’t going to solve your problem. It’s about finding and recording the extra-ordinary in the “ordinary”, whether you are here or in some far away exotic land.

Of course, the operative word is “recording”. I strive to control every aspect of the process so that I can faithfully reproduce the beauty I see. But great technique is a mechanical prerequisite to a fine art photograph. The art comes in adapting the technique to better express the subject. That and composition. Everyone always talks about composition but there are no hard and fast rules. I recommend using the camera handheld for starters and observing the subject from different angles, perhaps rotating the subject if possible, to get its best face in the best light. Then switch over to the tripod when you get the image that best captures the beauty you see.

Having started out in the ‘50s, I am of course totally familiar with the smell of the darkroom. But I don’t miss it a bit! There may be some die-hards out there who are still authoring illuminated manuscripts with goose quills and paint brushes, but IMHO digital has so many advantages that choosing it is a no-brainer. First, the pictures cost nothing to shoot, and the more you shoot, the better you get. Second, the results are instantaneously visible so the learning curve is greatly accelerated by eliminating all delay from the shoot-view-refine feedback loop. The same principle applies to post-processing. It is so much better when you can tweak the color or apply an effect and see the results in real-time. This is a second instantaneous feedback loop.

The software is essentially an extension of the camera, so a good photographer will come to know how the final image will turn out AFTER post-processing. If you shoot raw and flat, the image you capture will be relatively low in contrast and vibrance and will not in general look much like the final outcome you’d like to achieve. So it helps a lot to know before you snap the shutter what you will do with the image in post-processing.

A final thought on technique: if I need more light, I prefer to increase the ISO rather than using a sub-optimal shutter speed and/or f-stop. There is some fantastic software to remove any noise created by a higher ISO, but de-blurring an image in post-processing that was shot with too low a shutter speed is a lot harder and always leaves image processing artifacts. Finally, if the subject is static, you can use a fast shutter with high ISO to eliminate vibration blur, and then use ten or more multiple exposures to average out sensor noise, which is random.

I think your analysis is a bit too skewed toward costs and away from effectiveness. Ask yourself "What is the potential cost to me in man hours and possibly financial cost related to hiring a pro to clean up an infected network, and (heaven forbid) identity theft"?

Believe me, after you spend three days trying to fix an infected and/or bricked machine, you'll be a lot more prone to chose the most effective system you can afford. If you do a search on "review compare antivirus software 2014", you'll find articles on highly respected websites such as CNET and PCMagazine. They usually conduct in depth tests and will tell you which software had the highest success rate with a bunch of test malwares.

I have been using Kaspersky for three years now and it has worked flawlessly - at least as far as I know, none of my machines has ever been infected. I also like its supplemental features like super-secure online financial transactions, immediate look-up of suspicious code on their real-time server, etc.

Before that I tried Bitdefender, Eset and Symantec, all of which let crap through.

There are also some specialized solutions, many of them free, that do things like giving you a super-secure VPN when you are using public WIFI.

The other issue is who is listening to your traffic. It makes my skin crawl to think that I may be spied on by tracking cookies and other snooping technologies. If this is a concern to you, there are good solutions out there, again many of them free, that you can search for. For example, the TOR proxy network which comes packaged with a secure browser that is a branch of Firefox. SWare Iron is a branch of Chrome with all the tracking features removed.

Good luck! And let us know what you decide on.