This debate is getting turned on its head here. I don’t think any of the digital lobby were arguing that film was wrong. We were simply reacting against RudeBoy’s assertions that film is the “One True Way” and dijical can’t teach you anything and using it is cheating. I have no problem with people using film and I can see the appeal, but I don’t agree that it is the only way to learn “true” photography. Both seem entirely valid to me.

Avdave2: I’m using a D80, which is really pretty far from the top end. It’s probably mid-to-low end. And I don’t find the manual controls at all difficult. Two dials: one does aperture, the other shutter speed. Not sure how that could be any simpler?
And yes the kit lenses don’t have great aperture range but were they really much better on film-era cameras? Only if they gave you a prime which just wouldn’t sell in today’s populist market: “how many times zoom is it?”, “err… 1x”

“I should take your licence of you now you fuKKcing idiot and take it back to the office. Now fcck off”

The correct response would be: “Swear at me again and I will arrest you under Section 5 of the Public Disorder Act. You’ve been warned.”

Also, distinguish between read and un-read threads so I can see at a glance if any of the threads have been updated – since ‘freshness’ has replaced ‘time of last post’ I find it difficult to keep track, especially at work when I’m jumping onto threads when time allows.

If you look at your User Profile you’ll see all the threads you have replied on and whether anyone has replied since – not quite the same but still useful.

The “New” thing on the old forum never seemed to work properly for me and caused problems when the requests started getting too big which meant you had to delete your cookies every now and then to get it to work.

Agree with the link back to the forum at the bottom of the page. I usually always open threads in a new tab so I just close them when I’m done. But it would be a nice feature when using browsers without tabs (like on mobiles).

My wife has accused me of being “a bit of a cock” for some of my postings on this very forum. So presumably I’m slightly more of a cock online. Sorry about that – but to be honest, arguing is much more fun than agreeing.

One big email? Possibly containing pictures or a movie?
Can you view the sizes of individual emails?

My father-in-law is always trying to send me all 100 pics he took on holiday as attachments to a single email.

Regarding the old bug-bear of the ads: perhaps you could consider a subscribers-only version of the forum with less-flashy adverts? Much like the subscriber-version of the magazine with less words on the cover?

Just a thought. I actually don’t mind the ads that much. They are nicely segregated from the main content. But I should tell you that a good number of them, expecially the YouTube/Vimeo ones, get blocked by my work firewall (nothing to do with me!) so in those cases plain-text ads like Google Ad Words might actually be more effective.

Features I’d like to see:
– mobile/iPhone friendly version (it is usable on an iPhone/iPod Touch but could be better)
– a return of the multiple styles (including the “Worksafe WideBoy” style.
– more details on the user profiles. e.g. if people gave their location in a standard form, maybe the first part of their postcode, then we could have a forum readers map and people could opt to be part of a “Find Sociable Riders Near You” thing. This could also tie into the trail guide: “Find Rides Near You”

I guess if I ran on locally produced bitter rather than imported lager I’d be greener

Yep. Put it down as “Bio Fuel” on your tax return and see if you get a rebate.

Actually it’s better than that because, unless you’re eating coal, the carbon that you release doesn’t come from “stored” carbon. It comes from carbon that is already part of the system. So arguably breathing is carbon neutral.

Stoner: interesting – so do any of the bike shop employees on here actually have such a licence?

Yeah that makes sense when you don’t have a hi-fi to put it into, but mothballing a good hi-fi seems mad. I just have a wall charger and phono lead next to my hi-fi and I hook my iPod up to both of them when I want to play music from it.

iPod wall charger is £5 and I already had a phono cable. Bose Sounddock is £150.

Pushing/pulling relates more to development of film, than exposure. IE, pushing the dev of a film to take it from 400 to 1600ASA. Factors such as contrast, tonal range and grain size are involved.

Yes, I know. And it has parallels in the digital world, where we might expose to the left or right and then push/pull the exposure during development by adjusting the exposure on the RAW file to gain extra detail in the highlights/shadows and altering the contrast, tonal range and noise/grain.

A technique practiced by Cartier-Bresson.

Wasn’t Cartier-Bresson was one of the first great photographers to ditch traditional medium-format in favour of the new 35mm film? He wasn’t afraid of new technology and I suspect if he were alive today he would be shooting digital.

Yep! It’s not actually that complex, really.

Really? I had in mind that the chemistry of photography was fairly involved. Specific wavelengths of light striking AgBr to produce Ag+Br- + hv => Ag+ + Br + e- then using monomethylpariminophenol developer, mixing up halide and ammoniacal silver nitrate and a fixing bath of AgBr + S2O3-2 ==> AgS2O3- + Br-

If you do understand all that then great. But how exactly does that chemistry improve your photography? Answer: it doesn’t. And neither would understanding the fast-Fourier transforms, matrix maths and calculus involved in digital image manipulation software.

WPOTY is full of amazing shots, because they are all taken by photographers with amazing talent. wouldn’t matter if they had film or dijical…

E.X.A.C.T.L.Y!!

But I bet most of them have learned their craft, using film.

Possibly, but only because they had to. It didn’t imbibe them with magical powers and they’ve all happily moved onto digital to produce outstanding results. The photographers in the “Junior” categories may never have even touched a film camera.

Indeed it must mean motorcycles, mopeds and scooters. I was confused as it refers earlier to “motorcycles” as a distinct group. I naturally assumed “bicycles” meant, well, bicycles – but I forget that HM Gov doesn’t speak the same language as the rest of us – particularly regarding tax.

Panic over. :oops:

Thread may now devolve into a general slagging of VED.

As this debate has gone on, all your dijical cams are now obsolete. Their megapixelage has just been outstripped by the newest, shiny models.

And this is bad?

Damn, I’m stuck on a new technology that is still rapidly developing and getting better every six months. No one is forcing me to upgrade. But at least I have the option.

students today aren’t interested in learning about how to use shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, hyperfocal distance, pushing/pulling development, and many other little idiosyncracies of film based tography.

That may speak more for art students and “nu-media” than it does for digital photography. None of those thing you mention are peculiar idiosyncrasies of film. Even push/pull has an equivalent (expose right/left).

I teach Photoshop, and I see only too clearly, how it is used to try and elevate weak images to good ones. When I use film, I know how to get a good shot, with one click. with an understanding and skill of controlling the processes involved, you don’t need to mess around correcting things afterwards.

When you use film you develop it yourself, yes? Do you never crop it in the darkroom? Maybe a bit of dodge and burn? Cross-process it? Choose different stock for certain colours and effects? Why are these things valid, but setting the colour balance and levels when I “develop” a RAW file is “cheating”?

With Photoshop, I have little understanding of the complex mathematical algorithms that the software applies to an image.

And do you understand the complex chemistry and physics involved in film capture and development?

There are probably loads of decent photographers who’ve never used film.

As I said before, consider this/last years Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Almost exclusively digital and every image is amazing.

But there are sh1t loads of snappers as well…

Of course. Because it is easier. You said earlier that was a good thing.

I’m pretty sure that even the cheapest Nikons use metal lens mounts and all but the budget ones have a metal body under the polycarbonite shell (from memory my D80 is magnesium). And manual focus/manual aperture lens will work just fine on it. Sure the Field Of View will be different than on a 35mm, but so what? It’s a different format. A 50mm would have a very different FOV on a medium format camera – does that make medium format better or worse than 35mm?

I do understand the “magic” of developing your own prints. It’s like making your own bread – even if it comes out tasting like crap it’s still something you made and can be proud of. But I don’t see how going through that process intrinsically means you will be a better photographer.

Hmm wonder if I have enough film in my fridge, and enough fixer, and drying space – silly me…

To the OP: yep fine way to learn and I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun with it. Just don’t start thinking you have magical powers because you use cellulose instead of silicon. :wink:

Y’know you can use those existing lenses on a Nikon APS-C sized sensor like a D80/D90.
And you still haven’t explained what magical thing you can set on a film camera that you can’t on a digital.

Digital doesn’t prevent anyone from learning proper technique though. Every digital-slr still has a fully manual mode. Just because it might also offer “scene modes” for the less geeky doesn’t make it somehow invalid.

If digital was uninvented and everyone was still shooting onto film you’d still be complaining that the modern film cameras with face-detection, subject recognition, anti-shake, auto-exposure and autofocus were “cheating”. So the difference has nothing to do with film versus digital. It’s just old versus new.

I agree that too much reliance on automated bits does stifle creativity and leads to pictures that all look the same, but that is a failing of those automated bits and the people who are slaves to them. It has nothing to do with the medium used to capture the image.

As I said to you before Fred, look at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. I think it is almost exclusively digital now and every image in that book makes me say “Wow!”

Re: charging with your speaker system. Just buy a wall charger? You can buy car chargers too.

Out of intetest, why is the lack of Java an issue? Personally I’d rather see better Flash support.

I don’t see the point of these docks. If you have a nice hi-fi setup then why not just plug your iPod into that (e.g. Via headphone jack to phono cables) rather than wasting money on something that gives inferior sound?

Another digital user here that resents the snobbery of the film “purists”.
Both seem like perfectly valid ways to take a picture to me. To develop your own film you need to learn a bit of chemistry. To get the most from digital images you need to learn a few computer skills. I’m not sure why the latter is less acceptable?

It seems to me that digital has made photography much more accessible. Once you needed strange archaic devices and bottles of magical fluids. Now you just need a computer.

In the end I think this is what the film purists dislike. They’re magic has been stolen.

I’m writing this from my iPhone that my lovely missus bought me for chrimbo (mainly to stop me nicking her touch all the time).

Both devices are ace, though I have to say that I rarely use either for actually listening to music. The whole handheld instant-on Internet is great, as is being able to send email from the bog and watch iPlayer in bed. (not too mention the benefits of handheld filth…)

I’m sitting here on a three year and a half year old PC, but it still flies along because it has 4GB of memory in it.

I reckon more memory is about the best and cheapest upgrade you can put in any PC.

Can’t see any reason that a Mac would be any different (I’m sure some Mac-head will bleat about OSX using less memory than Vista or something, but at the end of the day more memory is a generally a good thing).

http://www.getpaint.net/ – Paint.Net is more numpty-proof than Gimp and has similar features to Photoshop.

http://picasa.google.com/ – Picasa is even more numpty-proof than Paint.net but not nearly as flexible.

Yes.

Umm yeah thanks snakebite, I did say my wife doesn’t like having a seperate login and that doesn’t answer the other questions. Muppet. Try posting again when you’re sober.

Our new kitchen is pretty small so we put in a Belling slimline dishwasher

(the kitchen company that fitted our kitchen had good prices on Belling gear!)

Yeah emailed them this morning.

Turns out it’s not the same tool as the Specialized shoes. They use a two-prong thing whereas this looks like a very small allen key or similar thing (smaller than the smallest one I have)

Chances are they check the cookies so that if you’ve been on their site you get the right stuff and if not you get whatever nasty pictures they have lying around. So rudeboy would never see it unless he cleared out his cookies and tried again.

Nope.

They check the Referer field in the request from the browser. If it is their own site they serve up the normal image, if it is a different site that is hotlinking to their image then they can serve up a warning image (or something less palatable!)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking#Prevention_on_the_server_side

RudeBoy wouldn’t see it because by that point he already has the “normal” picture in his browser cache.

You get a free 10 image trial with PTLens[/url]

me too :mrgreen:

Nice – good shots.
Like the sea one and better use of the selective colouring effect than most pics I see.

Apology accepted here in my corner (thank god!!!) of the office.
here’s hoping for the preview button!

A Preview button would NOT have helped as he would still have seen the image that was in his cache, not the one that everyone else would see.

Edit: Bah miketually beat me to it

This is how Nazi Germany started!

I’m no historian, but I don’t remember Christian Voice starting Nazi Germany.
Wasn’t it some guy with a dodgy tache?

stevemorg2 – yeah I know it can handle more than one, but how do you control which music/videos/etc gets put on each device and do you have multiple iTunes accounts or do you just pay for it all via one credit card?

I have:

Hood: CHIM90
Hob: GHU60C
Oven: XOU70FP

Agreed Mark – BUT.. there is currently no way to check that the image that appears is the one that you intend without posting it first (as there is currently no Preview function) and even then it requires knowledge of how to flush or bypass the browser cache (Ctrl+F5 in Firefox).

And as for hotlinking: ALL the images on this thread are hotlinks and are held on websites that the posters do not own. So even if they do look okay right now, those websites could decide to change them tomorrow and we’d end up with a page of filth.

Incidentally that’s why it is a good idea to put a link to the original site when you link to its images – they get much less upset if you’re actually generating visits for them, rather than just stealing their bandwidth

e.g.

Unknown Surfist from http://www.surfersvillage.com

To be fair to RudeBoy:

If he went to a website, saw a perfectly “decent” image and decided to link to it then that is the image he would see here (even in a Preview), because it is already in his cache.

Now if that site doesn’t like people hotlinking to its images and actually serves up an “indecent” image to anyone that does, then RudeBoy has no way of knowing that. (Unless he clears his cache or forces a full page refresh with ctrl+F5)

Yeah same on a PC. But she finds it confusing. :roll:

Yeah, my wife isn’t very keen on having multiple logins for our PC. She likes to just come in and use it regardless of who is logged in, so we just have one user account.