They will help a lot when i set up some stuff.

Looking forward to whatever you come up with, smithz.

Okay Nelson here is an image of a Penny.

I love that old penny. Good color too.

I just noticed my OLD digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 4500) has a 2cm Macro feature, and back in the day got rave reviews for its macro. Now it seems like a stone knife, though, with a mere 4 megapixels.

I sent it into the shop, just for shits and giggles. If they can fix it cheaply, I'll have bang around camera, maybe for fishing trips (though it is kind of bulky compared to the Lumix) or just a spare... or one to hand down to my sister or something. I have this cool macro light (a ring of LEDs that fits around the lens)... which still works, though the frosted plastic over the LEDs got cracked somehow. I wish it fit on the Luthor. Something like that would be perfect for that camera.

Oh, and it's so funny, the memory cards back then (compact flash) were 16-128MB. And twice the size of a SDHC card. I'm already so spoiled.

Here's my dime:



It's just a handheld shot, auto focus, with the dime laying on my desk. I'm pretty sure I could do better if I spent more time on it, but I kinda liked the colors in this one, and I think it does justice to FDRs portrait, which on the dime I think is one of the best coin portraits we have.

Yes, I do think you caught the shadows on the portrait of FDR, thalo. Remember when those used to be silver? Ah, now THAT was money. Sometimes you can still run across them. I'm not sure when they stopped making them in silver, but certainly when I was a kid they were much more predominant. And maybe it was only the Mercury Head ones that were silver. Not sure if the FDR ones were ever widely circulated in silver.

I dipped into my small coin collection and found this:



I scanned this with a scanner. Look familiar to anyone?

I really don't remember where I acquired these. This one has a date of 1971 on the back.

Jeez, who needs a camera? The scanner does better macro for coins.

I think I will call that first image.

"Ford's Theater"

The next image was taken with the Digilux 1 using a Hoya R72 filter to take advantage of the high IR sensitivity for this camera. This covers both clouds and IR.



Title: "This Was a Corn Field"

A beautiful picture, Rico.

Here's a still life by me.

Very interesting photo, Rico. Looks like an alien world.

quote:

Look familiar to anyone?

My guess: 50 german pfennig ? ... Looks so familiar to me.
Now we have these clunky euro-coins, at least double thickness, no elegance.

Rico, excellent picture. I would like to see some more infrared-shots. Surreal!

Ja. Fünfzig Pfennig -- von der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

Thalo did you use the digital zoom or crop yours? Mine was hand held as well cropped from a RAW file in ACR. Used the 3:2 aspect ratio so I cropped at 3:2 aspect ratio which Adobe camera raws crop tools allows. The digital zoom was to much to hand hold. To get the sharpness with the digital zoom I would have needed to set up a tripod. Digital zoom limits you to a fine quality JPG.

If you have CS3 or I think even CS2 you can open JPG or TIFF files right in ACR. You can fiddle with all the controls you can with a normal RAW file. This allows you to take an old photo from the Coolpix 4500 and make it better than you ever could have in the past. I would work with a copy of a file. "This was a Corn Field" was not cropped but run through ACR to fine tune it.

Scanning 3D objects is fun.

Damn yabor that is some warning on the tobacco. If I am reading it correctly over here they usually emphasis against Pregnant women not scaring the men into impotence. Is there a reason why the book pages are indented like that at the bottom? As a bookmark?



Title: "Soy"

Brother Rico, I cropped it... the original photo had much more of my grey desktop around the dime. I still haven't gotten the 4500 back, or word on it. I think they must have sent it out. It just kept going black, even when the battery was full charge. At all weird times, in the middle of shooting it would cut out like there was a short.

I figured I had just used it up, as I did put a lot of miles on that camera. I was never crazy about the rotating-body design (the design of the Lumix LX2 is WAY more up my alley)... but it did take pretty good pictures for what I needed. Again, most of what I did was take product shots for online catalogs... always silo-ing the images and adding my own shadows. I do entirely too much of that. The worst problem I had to deal with was flash glare... I tried all these workarounds to diminish/soften that effect. The best thing, of course was to photograph outside in natural light, but I couldn't always do that.

I think the cutouts in brother yabor's book are pretty much the same as what happens here in discount book stores where they shoot holes through paperbacks or rip off the cover. They can't discount off the cover price unless they damage the book.

That does sound like it could be a short or something loose in the 4500. It is nice to have a back up. We had one of those early swivel Nikons in the office second Gen maybe 990?. It functioned but did have an odd sense to it like it wasn't really a camera. The swivel form factor might become the next generation video/still camera. Canon has one now. Compact flash was good and stable with wide support but SD is the future. Even Canon phased out CF on there P&S. DSLR still use CF. One reason I went with Pentax was the use of SD cards.

Here is an example of what PSCS3 can do with an older file. I used smithz night shot. Using the original would obviously have garnered better results but it still gives you the idea of the potential.



This image has lost some of the details of the trees in the foreground. Even in my copy that is from smithz's already downsized image reveals some great stuff. It looks like the trees have snow on them.

Re: Soy. I've always like high key photos. And I guess those infrared photos are sort of a "middle key."

Damn yabor that is some warning on the tobacco. If I am reading it correctly over here they usually emphasis against Pregnant women not scaring the men into impotence. Is there a reason why the book pages are indented like that at the bottom? As a bookmark?

More kinky warnings.

"Roken kan leiden tot een langzame, pijnlijke dood" This one is my favorite. It means: "Smoking can lead to a slow, painful death."

"Tabaksrook bevat, etc." = "Tobacco smoke contains, etc"

"Roken veroudert uw huid" = "Smoking ages your skin"

"Roken kan het sperma beschadigen en vermindert de vruchtbaarheid" = "Smoking can damage sperm and diminishes fertility"

The book, Caesar's De Bello Gallico, is my old school book. I made those cutouts myself in the classroom when I was 15 years old, adding one or two cutouts every lesson, to mark the pages already translated.

Smoking has got to be one of the most politically incorrect things a person can do. It's almost as bad as using the n-word or demanding that illegal aliens be stopped at the border. There has been such success, especially here in America, of demonizing tobacco companies. And these companies are due little sympathy because they have in the past spent millions of dollars trying to deny that tobacco was a harmful or addictive substance. That's like trying to defend the idea that water is not wet.

But if you want to really stick it to the control freaks and nanny-staters, then just light up and enjoy it. Yes, it is true that it is a most unhealthy thing to do. And I do hope someday that someone comes up with a harmless cigarette. But in the meantime, it's your life. How about a warning on those packs that says: "Smoking may cause you to momentarily reduce stress, grab a small moment of enjoyment in this otherwise hectic life, and it's a way to stick it to the man."

I wish a long and happy life to you brother Yabor. And maybe one day you will kick the habit if you want to.

BN, Adorama has the Ricoh Smithplio R6 in stock.

Get'um while their hot.