Cleaning the Focusing Screen on a D200

In short, this operation requires a large amount of manual dexterity, wearing latex gloves, being very, very, very careful not to scratch the focusing screen during removal or putting it back in, and the patience of a saint.

For educational purposes, here's an excerpt from the manual showing the trickiest step (click to enlarge):



So I noticed there was a bit of dirt that wasn't on the lens, nor the mirror, nor the glass side of the viewfinder that faces me. So it was on the focusing screen. Taking a look inside, I realized that a bit of dust had gotten on the *back* side of the focusing screen. The only way to get to it would be to remove said focusing screen.

I'd heard that the D200 had a removable focusing screen, and I did a bit of googling for instructions on removing it. There was very little out there, and what there was ended up being completely useless. Often there were no pictures, and for a manual operation that requires moving bits around, a diagram or picture is a must have.

Anyway, there's a company that sells focusing screens for the D200 (Katz Eye) and they have instructions on how to swap it out. It's in a PDF file here.

In short, there's a small retaining wire holding the screen in place. With a very small flat screw driver, you can pull the retaining wire away from the tab holding it in place and use tweezers to grab the tab on the focusing screen and pull it out. Then you can clean out the area.

Sadly, getting it back in is a bit of a bitch, and I ended up scratching the screen and making it look worse than before I took it out frankly. Oh well, another lesson for experience.

The retaining wire is tough to put back in place. The Katz Eye manual said 'don't force it, if it doesn't click in place, chill out, sit back, and try again and push on the wire from a different direction'. Very good advice, as it turns out. After 40 or so tries to put the wire catch in place by pulling it down, I tried pushing it down from a slightly different direction and it caught!

To top it off, in my earlier tries to get the retaining clip / wire in place, it sprung out of the hinges holding it in place. Putting the wire back in place was fairly frustrating, but I eventually got it. Latex gloves made putting pressure on the wire and moving it around in tiny increments a lot easier.

Jen

Mamiya C330, f/2.8 at 1/30th of a second with Fuji ISO 400 color negative film.


Taken with a Mamiya C330 TLR (medium format film camera), this looks slightly different than the normal sharp and clear results this camera is known for. Visually, it has more in common with a cheap Holga camera. Why?

The simple answer is 'It's a digital photograph of a negative'. Rather than trundle over to the university and spend 20 minutes waiting for the flatbed film scanner to do its job, I simply put a strobe with a shoot-through umbrella on a stand (the umbrella was used to diffuse the strobe, otherwise there'd be un-even lighting on the negative), held the negative up and took a picture. Then imported into Photoshop, and used curves to render the negative as a positive, with a few other adjustment layers for color balance and vibrance.

The fact that the negative wasn't perfectly flat when photographed makes the lower left corner darker than it should be, and the strobe probably made it more grainy looking than a flatbed light would have.

All in all though, it works.

Self Portrait In CTO

A rather interesting technique I blatantly borrowed from the Strobist blog takes advantage of a fun feature oft overlooked in digital cameras - white balance. Most of the time, all people care about is that what is white in front of them comes out white in the picture, rather than shades of orange or blue.

Why not take the mid-day sun, and turn it into what looks mid-night? So I set the camera white balance set to 2,500 Kelvin (very blue), then aperture dialed down to f16 to make noon sunlight look like late evening (a small aperture makes things dimmer).

Then I grabbed my strobe (a SB-800 at 1/2), put it on a stand, pointed down at my face. The strobe was fitted with a full CTO (color to orange) gel, which given the white balance, came out as the equivalent of white light.

A little selective desaturation in photoshop and wham! Spiffy new self portrait.

Getting creative with Depth of Field

Lanterns

With a prime lens at its widest aperture setting, like a 50mm f/1.8, only a very narrow slice of what is in front of you is in focus. The farther away from the subject you're focused on, the thicker that slice gets. If you're focusing on something 3 feet in front of you, the slice might only be 1 inch thick. Focus on something 8 feet away, it becomes a slice 10 inches thick. The numbers aren't perfect, just examples used to illustrate the principle.

The important aspect of this is that you can have one thing in your picture perfectly in focus, and have everything else in the picture out of focus. This technique can be used to awesome effect :D

Notice how only the middle lantern is in focus?

Why Expensive Cameras Are Useful

So as I've clawed my way up the photography ladder, I've had a few thoughts along the way. A few years back, one of them was "Why in the world should a camera cost $1,500 dollars?!" (and now I'm of the opinion that $8,000 for a camera isn't half bad. Oh how the times change)

Coming from the world where a 35mm Point and Shoot was $15, and a new digital camera might be $150, a digital SLR costing $1,500 seemed... Well, insane!

So what's different between a $150 digital camera and a $1,500 one? Do you even *need* $1,350 dollars worth of improved gadgetry? In fact, why not just shoot everything with a $25 dollar Holga (a notoriously bad (yet desirable because of that) medium format film camera)

Another photographer posed this same question. He was at a photoshoot, and when he pulled out a Holga, the other photographers looked at him 'like he'd just killed a kitten'. He was curious as to why the disdain, and another photographer had a particularly good answer:

"The idea behind "photoshoots" is control. The common idea of a "good" photographer, is having control over the majority of the elements affecting the image (even if it looks spontaneous). Therefore, pulling out a Holga at a photoshoot is like saying "whatever happens happens"....that's why I'd look at another photographer funny..."
-JGraham

What you're paying for in that extra $1,350 dollars is having control over all the elements in a photograph that are under the possible control of the camera. Needless to say, a $1,500 DSLR can do a lot of things a $150 P&S camera can't.

A specific example would be spot metering. Proper exposure is tough. Usually the digital camera takes its best guess as to what should be the brightest and darkest areas in a photo, and tries to make everything in the image visible. Some times, as a photographer, you don't care if the background is visible or not, you're concerned that every bit of the model is properly exposed and don't give a fig for the rest of the picture. With a DSLR, you can select a small spot (say the model's face) that should be properly exposed and to ignore the rest of the picture. This is useful when you have someone in front of a really bright window. Or a strobe. Or any number of strong back lights. Spot metering is a $500 option, it seems (if you count the number of dollars between cameras where it's available and those where it's not).

There's quite a few controls like that. While costly, they are very useful. Telling the camera how to focus is also another expensive option. Etc, etc, etc.

What it adds up to is 'yes, there's a good reason for a camera to cost $1,500, or $8,000, or even $38,000'. It all adds up to the photographer having more control over his images. Being able to get things exactly like need them to be is worth a lot of money, as it turns out.

Film Only or Film Mostly Photographers

It's kind of interesting to observe the transition from film to digital. It truly is the end of an era. What's really interesting is how people react to it.

In some of the places I frequent, a subject that comes up on a regular basis is 'film vs digital' or 'who still shoots with film only?'. The topic is posted on the assumption that people who shoot entirely with film, or still shoot anything at all with film are in some way better at photography than their foolish peers who have entirely embraced digital photography.

Film certainly has its advantages, but when you look at all the people that make a living from photography, 99% of them shoot in digital now. That's very, very telling.

I look at the work of people who proudly state that the use 'only film' or 'mostly film'. Without exception, their work is sub-par compared to their peers who are at the same point in their career.

Interesting.

To conjecture as to why the vast majority of film users are sub-par photographers leads to even more questions, none of them with happy answers I fear.

There are exceptions, art photographers and photographers for whom digital isn't an option for their particular subject. But they're the exceptions.

It's tiring to read posts trumpeting the value of film photography when the work of those who do so speaks to the opposite.

Magnum Photos and Crappy Photography

With fine art over a certain age, it's fairly easy to decide what's crap and what's good art. A hundred years, or a few hundred years allows for perspective and distance that are impossible to achieve at the time.

Photography is a funny thing. It's a new art form. Historically speaking, that doesn't happen too often. Being new means that it's harder to say with any authority as to what is good and what is crap.

Coming from a fine art background and years of studying art history, it's pretty easy to distinguish why Michelangelo was a far better sculptor than many of his contemporaries who created very respectable sculpture in their own right.

If you met Michelangelo today, not knowing who he was, only able to judge him by the quality of his work, what would you write about him? "There's this Michelangelo guy who makes some pretty impressive sculpture, but will he be anything but a footnote in history?" Until history happens, so to speak, you really can't say. Time bears out the quality of our judgments.

I look at the various photographers represented by the Magnum Photos collective, and I read their website and wonder "Are they really all that and a bag of chips? Or is the collective opinion about those photographers a bit over-rated?" Truthfully speaking, quite a bit of the work shown *is* impressive.

Whether they've set the highest bar in the field of photography or not is a much harder thing to say. Two hundred years from now, how will their photos be viewed? Will Henri Cartier-Bresson be viewed as the equivalent of the Monet of his time, or as the equivalent of Sisley? In other words, you ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Monet" before and most people will say "Yeah!". You ask the common person on the street if they've heard of a painter called "Sisley" and most people will say "Who?"

Perhaps it stems from my skeptical nature, but when I see many of my contemporaries in the photography world saying that the Magnum Photographers are the end-all be all of people photography, I hesitate to jump on the idealogical bandwagon. They're good, and some shots can easily be declared as excellent, but... It's hard to say whether collectively, they're "really all that and a bag of chips". I hesitate to make any judgment from anything less than a highly informed position.

Of course a lot of people at the time Impressionism became popular thought that the movement was complete crap and the lesson that denotes is quickly obvious. People at the time were wrong and Impressionism is most certainly not complete crap. In fact, as art movements go, it was pretty damn good.

But for every equivalent of the Impressionist movement, there's ten Rococo's or worse.

Where do the Magnum photographers fall between those two lines? To one side, or somewhere in-between?

Someone with a time machine get back to me on this.