Batteries - to replace the cells, the best would be talking to people who repair power tools.

I loved this chat! Like being a fly on the wall, just hearing two passionate people talking about what they enjoy!

The pentax k1000 was the camera most of us learned on in high school, it was the camera I chose to teach kids at summer camp with because they were simple and durable. They could take and took many drops and bumps from kids. It should always be cheap used, I would never pay more then $100. Anything more is robbery 😂. We also had a yashica mat that no one but me used. My teacher ended up just gifting it to me for graduation. 😂

it's so interesting to watch your vids, James! always waiting the digicam contents you make ^^ kudos to you!

The issue with batteries and chargers for older digital cameras is one of the reasons I like older digital bridge cameras as they generally operate on AA batteries that are super easy to get even though you may no longer be able to get the batteries that the manufacturer recommend you can still get high quality ones like energizer or Duracell who still do make the same size rechargeable batteries with chargers

Thank you always its a pleasure to watch your videos

The yellowing on the side panels on your Pentax is from the acid/salt residue from the hand from the previous owner/owners. And yes UV will speed up the yellowing process of the clear plastic, but it's not just the UV light that is the culprit.

@snappiness

Ай бұрын

Oh interesting

Shame there is no more official support for the Olympus Air. It was a great product. Bit slow to use, but lots of good lenses and quality was excellent. The fact that Sony's IEM works with the QX is wonderful. And that the batteries are common is a bonus. Was thinking of collecting the whole QX line. I have the 100, there's a few QX1s and QX10s for sale nearby, but the QX30 with the ultralong zoom might just be the holy grail in this lineup... they're very uncommon. The QX1s are rather expensive, though, and a big commitment for something that will only ever be an occassional toy.

The Pentax MX was my second SLR after starting out with Zenit E.

The thing was back in the early 2000s Digital cameras were considered to be a novelty like the disc camera so a lot of well known camera maker's didn't adapt and by the time they realised that Digital cameras were going to replace normal film cameras it was to late for those companies and they just either disappeared all together or just licensed out their name to no name companies who are mostly the only ones left making digital cameras as all the big players have pulled out of the market because of mobile phones

Pretty sure they make a UV resistant Spray, you could occasionally spray and wipe it down, to prolong the clarity of the plastic.

Like finding the Mamyia ZD that did promise to give another test / review

Thanks for sharing. I love shooting Bokeramas. I find the best focal lengths to be 50mm to 200mm but caution should be considered that the longer the focal length the bigger the difference between each element in the background and behind your subject because of the increased parallax effect. The longer the focal length will give you the strongest overall "wideness" effect but it needs to be balanced with what kind of result you would like. A good balance is 85 to 100mm. Bokeramas do basically add (increase the angle of view) bokeh around your subject with each row of images you make (vertical, horizontal or both). There is one limitation that is not often discussed is the Flat Field of Focus and the out of focus rendering of lenses. Not all lenses are great for Bokeramas because if you have a curved field of focus (be it towards your or away from you or a wavey pattern) your images will have significantly out of focus rendering on the 1/3rd to 1/2 of the image for each image you make (older lenses tend to be worse at this then modern ones) and when you stitch the images together you will have strange out of focus transitions that look unnatural (soft, then sharper, then softer again) or worse, you can get elements out of focus that bend in one way and the next few pixels they bend the opposite way because you have mixed 2 different curvature of the focus field that are in opposite directions. It will ruin an image completely unless the output is meant only for very small screens like phone size. Also lenses that have swirly bokeh (like the Russian legen Helios M42 lenses) can be difficult to make a Bokehrama because the more images you increase for larger angle of view the more swirls will overlap and render the background odd like half cut bokeh balls or double/tripple overlap of bokeh balls. The better lenses for bokehramas are those who render a neutral background like little or less swirling, round(er) bokeh balls up to the edges, and have exceptionally flat field of focus (you will have the same look to each image from corner to corner so when you do blend them together you don't get distortions. But with macro lenses you do sacrifice some potential of shallow DoF because f 2.8 is as fast as most of them go (and some f 2 lenses out there). To counter that you will need to add a few more rows of images to increase the angle of view (ex. instead of shooting just 9 images around the central image you will have to shoot another 18 for square aspect ratio. If you shoot mainly horizontal one you will need to add one top or bottom row extra). Another aspect with the difficulty of shooting Bokeramas is the resource cost to render them. You need a very powerful PC, with heavy emphasis on RAM and disk storage, because you are trying to make not a tens of megapixel image but hundreds of megapixel (if not giga pixel if you go crazy). The higher the MP count on your camera you have the larger file and Bokerama will be. even with just 1/4th overlap between each image you can still get a 500 MP image out of 24 images Bokehrama with a 24 MP camera (and 216 MP one with 12 images) approximately. You will need 64 to 256 GB of RAM to render very large Bokehramas unless you are willing to wait literal days for your computer to finish rendering one (I know, I have a 16GB RAM laptop and if I try to make a Bokehrama of more then 200 MP it will take more then 12 hours until it is done and that's on a 2019 model laptop). Trying to blend this many images will require a lot of temporary storage to work on overlapping and blending the colours and the information seamesly. The final image can also take up to GB in size and some software won't even be able to open them because they have a software limit of how many pixels they can accept in a file or the file size. (I use mainly Lightroom and Photoshot to render Bokehramas) The last difficulty with making Bokehramas is practice and perseverance. The result is absolutely never reproducible every time because even the smallest change can affect the final result, your subject must be still or extremely slow moving, you should try at least 2 times if not 3 times to make sure you get one good result, try to envision the result in your mind to have an idea of how many additional shots you need to make to get there because adding more images after your initial try will not work, you need to think about the aspect ratio you want to do and orientation (square, landscape, portrait), you need to choose the right lens for the job, you absolutely need to shoot everything fixed as in Manual mode with the exact exposure for each image, fixed ISO (or else you get different type of noise from one image to another), fixed aperture to have the same Dof, fixed shutter speed so no movement recorded is rendered to differently from one image to another, fixed White Balance (because you don't want to have even a slight change of tint in the colours from one image to another), DO NOT SHIFT YOURSELF BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS as you really need to mentain the same field of focus as much as possible so the only movements you should to is up\down and left ight, count your shots in your head to make sure you get the same amount on each side of the central start (or else you end up with gaps or empty spaces in the final render), try to overlap between each image at least 1/4 or better 1/3 so when the software does blend the images it has enough date to be able to align them properly, shoot more images then you need so you have enough space to crop (be it to cover stitching errors or gaps you may accidentally make or you need a slightly different aspect ratio or want to remove something unwanted from the image ), shoot in manual focus only (not even Single AF mode) because you don't want to have a focus change at all (even a minor one will ruin the final image). But after all that hardship it is worth it every single time because it renders a unique image, be it a 24mm f 0.5 or 50mm f 0.2 effective look or it makes the subject and the environment dreamy, or you can achieve results of more expensive lenses and larger formats at a lower budget at the cost of extra time and effort (you can get similar results out of Micro Four Thirds with a f 1.8 lens to a Medium Format with an f 2.8 lens with 16 extra images overlapped and about half an hour work in post).

@edwardnoble9897

Ай бұрын

Thanks for watching and writing so much about your thoughts on Bokeramas! I would be curious what you think of my guide for them on my website. I don't think I can put links in here, but the main one is listed in the video description (above) and then you should be able to easily find it from there. One thing I feel the need to mention here is your need for lots of RAM is likely because you're doing them in Adobe. Their software it not well optimized for processing panos. I tend to shoot RAW, downsample to 6mp in Adobe and then feed those saved JPGs to Microsoft ICE. This is very fast and is good with less RAM. I used to use it with a laptop that had 16GB of RAM and it could go up to a Gigapixel ok and process it in a few minutes. The software is only for Windows, but it's free, has a nice simple interface and has much nicer projection options, especially for perspective correction. Hope that helps.

@w0lfyovi294

Ай бұрын

I wanted to write a guide for a few years but I never took the time to put my thoughts down to make a more cohesive process. It's a very fascinating subject for me and in my mind the whole process because it can be so methodical. Yes, working with RAW and Adobe is more resource taxing. I have used Microsoft's ICE in the past but at that time I was shooting with Panasonic camera and the RAW support wasn't great (the final render would have a magenta tint for some reason) but ICE works very well for different types perspective renderings and up to 1 GIgapixel in size. I have also tried the Kolor's Autopano years ago and it was very good though it had a few more stitching errors the Photoshop at time but their RAW support was great, unfortunately the company went under in 2018 and they no longer update or sell the software, they were my favourite for huge panoramas because they could handle data up to 10 Gigapixels. I have tried briefly PTGui and Hugin but their UI is a bit less intuitive and more difficult to get use to it. I stuck with Lightroom for ease of use and convenience and with Photoshop if I needed more heavy workload or if Lightroom didn't work. In the last 7 years the performance has improved and I can stitch 500 Megapixels or less in less than 15 minutes on a M1 Mac Mini. I would be more than happy to write a guide for you.

@edwardnoble9897

Ай бұрын

@@w0lfyovi294 I encourage you to write your own guide and I would love to see it and any sample images you have to share, but don't feel the need to do it for me. I've been shooting these for a 15 years or so and can do the rotation for various lenses on muscle memory. Yeah I tend to process the stitching from JPGs for the speed (usually only 6mp too), so I process the RAWs first and save out JPGs with some fine-tuned exposure, WB and processing to get the most out of the dynamic range. I was curious how much an old laptop (16GB RAM) can do so I got my old one out of storage and put 77x 50mp images into it to see how long it would take. 3 mins to process the RAWs to JPG and then 20 mins to stitch them into a 1.5 gigapixel image. I don't think M$ ICE has any limit. I have also used the other stitching apps you mention and agree with your findings there. ICE will take RAW files, but I think it just uses the embedded JPG and won't output a RAW so I wouldn't recommend that. It was discontinued in 2015, so can be a bit tricky to get your hands on these days but not impossible. I have it on my dropbox and I think linked on the site in the guide.

I really enjoyed this chat. Some of the stuff on infra red went a little over my head, but I will look at Edwards website for more info on that. However, your comments about your level of enjoyment from using older gear really struck a chord with me. My newest DSLR is 10 years old, but I still have my first DSLR a Canon EOS20D from 2004 (20 years old!). After watching your channel in the last 12-18 months as well as others (Onemonth2Cameras, Lucy Lumen etc) I decided to get the 20D out again and try it out. With more modern lens and in RAW format only I really love the results I get from that camera. It’s easier to use in some respects. Tiny screen on the back I know, but that doesn’t matter. My photography enjoyment factor has increased considerably. I’m tempted to cover up the model make and name so people don’t see the age of the camera (Keep them guessing!) Thank you for your inspiration

@snappiness

Ай бұрын

Glad to hear you're enjoying the older cameras! Really it's just about enjoying any camera and taking pics. But it's cool to remember the cameras oft forgotten :)

@edwardnoble9897

Ай бұрын

Thank you for watching, Steve! I hope you enjoy the website. I wrote a review for the old Canon D30 on there ( from before Canon put the 'D' after the numbers), which I really enjoyed using. That was surprisingly good to use today. There is something special about using old digital cameras that I can't quite put my finger on. There was a point that I assumed they would be too old to work or be usable any more. It certainly re-contextualizes more modern cameras.

I still have your full spectrum K01 and should shoot video with it one of these days- it's easily one of the most interesting tools in my photography rig. Lately, I've been wondering if using UV and IR lighting in conjunction with proper wavelength filters, one could shoot in near complete darkness? I'm also considering getting a GPS module for it, but wondering which one to get.

@snappiness

Ай бұрын

That's so cool. With an IR light you should be able to shoot in complete darkness. That's how the Sony F717 headlights work, and it's very cool. I haven't done any UV photography, but that's always been something that I've wanted to try.

Plastic yellows through UV rays.... glass does not let through a lot of UV (barely any) so should be fine in a room for years and years and years

@snappiness

Ай бұрын

Mm, good point about my window blocking UV

why is everything lately urging me to buy the Pentax MX?! I haven't even gone through my first roll of film on Zorki 1 that I had for months now!

@snappiness

Ай бұрын

Well, you don't NEED a Pentax MX, but it is a very nice camera :) My favorite Pentax SLR

@kalinmir

Ай бұрын

@@snappiness I was planning to buy it for a while to complement my MX-1 on the shelf but I always talk myself out of it :D

I was looking at a ir converted Canon g1x. Black and white. I forget but what's the filter you can use to reverse it?

@snappiness

Ай бұрын

Usually called a hot mirror filter

@anachronismic

Ай бұрын

Think you're talking about a hot mirror filter.

@edwardnoble9897

Ай бұрын

If the camera is converted to IR (it shoots IR without an external filter) then you likely won't be able to reverse the conversion (if by "reverse" you mean being able to shooting colour again) by adding a hot mirror filter. You can only do that on a "Full Spectrum" or "Two Spectrum" converted cameras.

@unbroken1010

29 күн бұрын

@@edwardnoble9897 yes, I believe it's full spectrum, it high a number, basically converted to do only black and white. I read you can buy a filter, from kolari that puts reverse it so you can do regular picture when you want. Thank you. Check in to thr hot mirror

@unbroken1010

29 күн бұрын

@@snappiness much appreciated