Sheets on a frame would work, washable, too. That's if you need big. I've got something called "Studio In A Box" that I got cheap at a closeout sale when Compuseless went out of business. This is a collapsable lightbox about 2'x2'x2' and includes lights. Was about $20. Works for reflective stuff like glassware, the purpose for buying it. I know the company makes a slightly large version as well.
If all you need is a neutral background, sheets on a frame works for that as well. Pro portrait photographers had rolls of patterned paper they used on frames for backgrounds. If you need portable, 2x2s and some casters should make up into something either able to be knocked down or readily rolled around.
Gunner Asch fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
You're welcome.
Mine has two small holes drilled on a diameter on the shutter cocking knob, and also on the film winding knob. I modified the camera for an underwater case, so I could take pictures when I was diving.
That camera also (with a solenoid trigger) ended up being the only one of five cameras on site to catch a picture of my first big rocket, back in '67. All the others just caught a smoke trail. The Mercury was on a cut-wire trigger, and got the rocket about 25' above the launch tower.
Why not just put a curtain rod on rollaround stands, and light with halogen lamps? Put the camera on a tripod, and use the self-timer to keep your hands from causing blur.
Flash lighting is for subjects that are moving, 'product photography' doesn't usually benefit from freezing the action.
Flash lighting historically has been used ..after it became cheap and powerful....to reduce the heat in a studio and make working conditions somewhat more pleasent.
Depends on what you want from your scanner. Note that while this claims a resolution of 7200 dpi, it also states that it is an "interpolated" resolution, so I have no way to know what the actual physical resolution is.
I've been using one of the Nikon Super CoolScan 5000ED units, which gives a raw physical resolution of 4000 DPI.
It is good enough so zooming into images, I find the grain on Plus-X and Ektrachrome-X 64 to become objectionable before the pixel size does.
Note that I scan to TIFF format, not JPEG, which is a lossy format, and when the image is uncompressed, there is a loss of fine detail. Once I have what I want from the negative or slide, I re-save it as high quality setting JPEG for convenience of others, but I save the TIFF image for future needs.
It is still quite expensive, based on the ones on eBay at the present. Pretty close to what I paid new for mine.
It normally comes with two holders -- one for a single slide at a time, and one for strips of six negatives. There were other options for serious extra bucks -- a stack loader for slides (Which I skipped, because a lot of my early slides are in glass mounts which don't go through the stack loader smoothly -- if at all. Another I would have gotten earlier which handles 40 exposure strips of film without cutting, but all of mine were already cut to six-exposure strips and stored in glassine envelopes.
One extra which I did get was a six-exposure holder which was useful with seriously curled film, or film with torn ends so I could recover what I wanted from the negatives still left. That was a fairly inexpensive thing.
Warning -- Nikon no longer supports this. You can download the scanning software for either Windows or the Mac, however, you cannot run the software on anything newer than OS-X 10.4 -- which Apple no longer supports, and newer programs won't load onto that -- including current income tax software.
I don't know what versions of Windows run the latest software, but is is rather old, so maybe the latest ones will not work there either.
However, there are other programs for a lot of different OS's for not too much money -- including for Linux. I'm still using the Mac software at present.
I've so far scanned something like 170 rolls of B&W negatives, a few of color negatives, and 82 rolls of color slides --- most 36-exposure rolls.
The camera store where I got it offered to lease one to me, for something like $100.00/day -- but I thought of all which I needed to scan and decided that I would be ahead in the long run to buy it. Boy was I ever right. Figure at best three rolls per day. (And some going back to early rolls after I learned some things about it. :-)
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Hmm ... if I did not have the Nikon, I would be interested, since I still have lots of computers with SCSI interfaces.
Amen!
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With the software with the Nikon, I was able to make usable images from terribly exposed negatives -- once I learned how to use all the features.
Well ... 1 is not always the top I've got a f:0.95 lens, and Nikon had an even faster lens (f:0.85 I think it was) way back when. I never had one of those.
And the Cannon-7 rangefinder had a 50mm f:0.95 lens too -- rather soft wide open. :-)
Hmm ... Ever try "Royal-X Pan"? I think that it was ASA 800 un-pushed. Too grainy for 35mm, but I shot a roll of it in a Zeiss Ikonta 520 (used eitehr 620 or 120 film rolls, and got sixteen shots per roll -- sorf of pushing the size thing for that film. :-)
Some will. I think that my D300s will do it, but I have not needed that feature so far, so I tend to forget. Time to re-read the manual, I guess. Always good to do after using the camera for a while to pick up on things you missed earlier.
Or -- put a lens with between=the-lens shutter on the camera on a bellows, and you can do it with the F2. :-)
Ah -- the PC-Nikkor.
O.K That will do it.
Tedious -- but assured of good results.
I'll bet.
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O.K. A bit out of my price range. :-) That and the single-digit D series. :-)
Was this a single shot, or a multi-flash one like the above? For single shot, I would expect the D5000 to be very good.
Of course, with the Nikon gear, and a shooting budget, I would go with the Nikon and a cluster of SB-800 flash units. The camera can be set up to run all of those as a slave, and when you take the shot, it first fires a lower intensity pre-flash from each (triggered by the flash on the camera and metering it in the sensor), and then sends to each how long a flash duration is required from that one, so when the shutter finally opens for real, you get a properly balanced illumination. I've got *one* SB-800, but not a whole herd of them. :-)
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While I'm back into shooting for fun. For quite a while, I worked where classified stuff was common, and a camera was a no-no, so I did not take many shots during that period. Now I'm retired, and having fun with the digital SLRs from Nikon.
40 years ago when I did TV repair, most people had a definite green tint to their TV sets. They would complain about a bad picture when you replaced the CRT and did a complete setup to factory standards.
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