There’s nothing like just apple picking in the Fall, the first cold New York weather hitting you, the fashion sense steaming up, and the fresh apple cider and donuts.
I recently joined a photography group on meetup.com, after a friend suggested i "get out and meet people". i joined a photo group cause hey i do photography.
One of the meetups in this group was on how to calibrate your lens and camera for focus. in a guys studio. you pay the organizer 35 dollars. you get in pairs to check your lens and camera combo. 10 dollars for each additional lens. 15 for a sensor cleaning.
how about no.
the problem i see is the guy is using a commercial off the shelf camera "calibration tool", essentially a flat test target with a graduated scale set at 45 degrees. the thing cost 70 dollars... or you can use a machinists scale set at an angle with a flat plate on a major division. which is how i do it.
true lens/sensor/film plane calibration involves more than just a test target. it usually involves shimming each lens to your particular cameras mount or in the case of mf digital backs, shimming the sensor.
sensor cleaning is trivial if you do it carefully and follow the proper precautions.
finally, i gather to think most people wont event actually see the focus/sharpness difference before and after its done. never mind the fact that it dosent really matter anyway.
I generally steer clear of general interest photo groups since a lot of the time they feel more like business networking circle jerks than they are about the craft of photography. or the deluded stringing along some people who may or may not know better. now granted i havent gone to any of the meetups as of yet, but now i feel like i wont even bother starting.
to quote chris weeks: "You especially don't need a workshop taught by the deluded."
Some of you might have seen the Luxi, a 30 dollar iphone accessory that sticks on to your iphone so you can use it as a meter:
Luxi light dome attachment, with slr meter reading for comparison. (from kickstarter site)
This attachable light sphere and its counterparts (see the Lumu, which is a fully fledged meter that plugs into the iphone audio jack) really intrigued me since i need a light meter. 4x5 cameras have zero automation except maybe the mechanical timer for the shutter.....
up until now, ive been using my dslr and the pocket iphone app as light meters. they work, but theyre slow and frustrating to use.
before i saw these guys i was thinking about dropping some serious coin on a sekonic l-758 which has everything youll ever need in a light meter.
On paper these iphone based meters work as well as the sekonic incident light meters and meters inside slr cameras (maybe even better than the centre weighted average meter in my M6TTL...). Add to that i usually have my phone with me, i dont have to carry an extra meter with me. These things are cheap and work, should be awesome right?
But.
shoot enough landscapes and outdoor scenes with extreme lighting differences and you find you have to bias the exposure most of the time for what you want to render. Ansel Adams based his zone system on this kind of thinking. he also used a spot meter extensively for his work.
the biggest downside of the Luxi and Lumu are they are incident meters meaning they meter the light falling directly on the subject. when your subject is a building a few hundred meters away or a mountain range off in the distance... it becomes impractical to directly meter the subject.
too far, too far...
reflective meters are a little bit better as they can meter light reflected off the subject toward the sensor medium. but they are an "average" reading at best, measuring random light levels at worse.
what it comes down to, for this kind of work, is a spot meter.
i suppose a spot meter is like a reflective meter, but it only meters whatever its pointed at. it does mean you have to point it at several places in the scene and decide how you want to expose. theres some thinking involved... but if you put in the time the result is more exact.
unfortunately, there are no spot meter attachments for the Lumu and Luxi light meters. these tools are suited more for the casual analog shooter, or someone who needs a back up meter. or just curious.
the other downside to an iphone meter is that if the iphone goes, you have no meter. the sekonic l-758 has been in production for like 10 or whatever years and people still swear by it; id like to see an iphone last that long.
would i get a iphone meter if there was spot metering capability? it depends. stand alone meters have a lot of functionality other than metering alone. the l-758 has flash triggering and different values for different film and sensor profiles.
i suppose the other alternative is to build my own, somehow...
janainaart
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