Slides from EOS-300D?

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

I'm wondering about "going digital" for photographing my iron and mixed media bowl sculptures. They're up to 18" in depth, so depth of field is a big concern. I'd sometimes need to have slides made from the image files. I'm wondering about the depth of field on the 300d. I use tungsten lighting and with a film camera, stop down as much as I can for depth of field. But of course then I lose some sharpness overall. Seems as if I'd have the same problem with the 300d.

Maybe I'd be better off with a different digital?
--
Catherine Jo Morgan

 

[johnfarrar]

Whether you are digital or film makes no difference as far as depth of field is concerned. Its all down to the lens, focal length, aperture and how far you are from the subject that dictates the dof.

Why do you say you "stop down as much as I can for depth of field. But of course then I lose some sharpness overall" Stopping down should make the image sharper not worse.

With the 300D, or any other digital camera, you could set the ISO to 800, have a small aperture, and by altering the zoom and camera position arrive at the dof you need. Do you really need the whole object sharp front to back? It would have more depth if part of the object were out of focus.

IMO
John

I'm wondering about "going digital" for photographing my iron and
mixed media bowl sculptures. They're up to 18" in depth, so depth
of field is a big concern. I'd sometimes need to have slides made
from the image files. I'm wondering about the depth of field on the
300d. I use tungsten lighting and with a film camera, stop down as
much as I can for depth of field. But of course then I lose some
sharpness overall. Seems as if I'd have the same problem with the
300d.

Maybe I'd be better off with a different digital?
--
Catherine Jo Morgan

 

[gartnl]

don't expect a digital sensor to outperform a good chrome ...

--
nice cam .. but what's that stupid colour doing there?

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

It's my understanding that most digital cameras have much better depth of field than a film SLR, at any given focal length. I think it's something about the difference in size of the sensor vs 35mm film. http://www.photo.net/learn/optics/dofdigital/

Also, aren't most lenses sharpest stopped down about 2 stops from the widest? At F16-F32, most lens tests I've seen, show a lot more softness.

Re soft focus at rear of bowl - you're right, it might make a more artistic photo. But galleries and juries want sharpness all the way back. If I need slides, they'll be competing with slides by professionals using 64ASA slide film.

Why do you say you "stop down as much as I can for depth of field.
But of course then I lose some sharpness overall" Stopping down
should make the image sharper not worse.

With the 300D, or any other digital camera, you could set the ISO
to 800, have a small aperture, and by altering the zoom and camera
position arrive at the dof you need. Do you really need the whole
object sharp front to back? It would have more depth if part of the
object were out of focus.

IMO
John

I'm wondering about "going digital" for photographing my iron and
mixed media bowl sculptures. They're up to 18" in depth, so depth
of field is a big concern. I'd sometimes need to have slides made
from the image files. I'm wondering about the depth of field on the
300d. I use tungsten lighting and with a film camera, stop down as
much as I can for depth of field. But of course then I lose some
sharpness overall. Seems as if I'd have the same problem with the
300d.

Maybe I'd be better off with a different digital?
--
Catherine Jo Morgan

--
Catherine Jo Morgan

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

Why do you say you "stop down as much as I can for depth of field.
But of course then I lose some sharpness overall" Stopping down
should make the image sharper not worse.

Here's the link to the article I mentioned:
http://www.photodo.com/nav/artindex.html

It's the article on "Improved Sharpness." The tests show that maxiumum sharpness is usually at about F8, because of diffraction increasing as the lens is closed down beyond that. For overall sense of "rightness" in a photo of a bowl, the depth of field is more important so it's still better to stop down to F16 or more. But the sharpest part of the the photo won't be as sharp as if it were taken at F8.

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

My slide lab recommended a particular digital lab so I called them. The woman there said I'd need at least an 18mb file to get a good slide. She also pointed out that after I edited the file on my monitor, the slide would not necessarily look the way I expected. I had thought that a kodak color card (filmed at the same time under the same lights) might take care of that gap, but apparently not. So I guess for slides I'll stay with film for a while.

For website photos and my own printing, a better digital camera than what I have (canon s110 and nikon 900s) might be worthwhile, though.

I'm wondering about "going digital" for photographing my iron and
mixed media bowl sculptures. They're up to 18" in depth, so depth
of field is a big concern. I'd sometimes need to have slides made
from the image files. I'm wondering about the depth of field on the
300d. I use tungsten lighting and with a film camera, stop down as
much as I can for depth of field. But of course then I lose some
sharpness overall. Seems as if I'd have the same problem with the
300d.

Maybe I'd be better off with a different digital?
--
Catherine Jo Morgan

--
Catherine Jo Morgan

 

[Zapped]

Catherine --

You can use this site to calculate exact depth of field for the 300D or any other camera:
http://www.dofmaster.com
Also:
http://dfleming.ameranet.com/dofjs.html

Let's say that you're worried about softness from the kit lens, so you want to stay in the middle of the zoom range, and with a middle-aperture. According to that site, using a zoom of 35mm at f/11, if you were 6 feet away from your subject, anything from 4.6 ft to 8.8ft (4.2ft DOF) would be in sharp focus. Your 18" desired depth is well-covered.

Regarding the 18MB filesize that was recommended --- the person was probably talking about a PSD (photoshop) or TIFF file. That is, in fact, the size of the image you'll get from the 300D. However, even at high-quality compression levels the corresponding JPG will be around 5-6MBytes.

If you have a friend with a 300D or 10D, you can try this site for your slides. It's only US$2 per slide so you've got nothing to lose:
http://www.expressdigitalimages.com/prod02.htm

• Zapped

More random EOS300D pics -
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=4289085949

 

[Thomas Niemann]

Not to quell your enthusiasm, but have you seen this?

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/pressReleases/pr20030926-01.shtml

--
Thomas Niemann
http://epaperpress.com

 

[Bob the Printer88467]

Whether you are digital or film makes no difference as far as depth
of field is concerned. Its all down to the lens, focal length,
aperture and how far you are from the subject that dictates the dof.

Why do you say you "stop down as much as I can for depth of field.
But of course then I lose some sharpness overall" Stopping down
should make the image sharper not worse.

He says that because when you stop a lens down quite a bit, the effects of diffraction come into play and the image is not as sharp as it might be at bigger lens openings. Usually f/11 to f16 is about as small as one can go before running into such diffraction effects.

Regards

Bob the Printer

 

[wburychka]

You can get slides from your digital images! I recently had a project for a photography class. It was for 35mm SLRs only, because the instructor doesn't consider digital to be real cameras. I did the pix in RAW, converted to TIFF, USM and levels in PSE--OK some cropping of one or two also.

I FTPd the PSD files to expressdigitalimages.com. For $1.95 per slide plus shipping, I received back 35mm slides that looked really good. The projects were shown in class on the instructor's Kodak Carousel projector. No one had a clue that these slides started life as digital images from the DRebel. After class, I had to "come clean" with the instructor. He was visibly shocked--not that I had bent the rules, but that the sharp, saturated, non-grainy pictures were digital.

Depth of field. It is always greater with a small sensor (and consequently short focal length lenses) digicam. The key question is "How big do the pictures need to be?" If we're only talking computer displays and desktop slide viewers, you could get by with one of the small P&S digicams. A small image will not be a problem. And remember, it isn't just megapixels that make the difference--the Drebel is 6.3 vs the Nikon CP5700 5 MP, but the sensor size of the Drebel is 2.6 times the size of the CP5700, so you get virtually noise-free images compared to the relatively noisy images--especially at 200 or 400 ISO--with the Nikon.

Lots of info...not much help, eh?
--
Bill
300D - It's a great camera, even if it isn't black

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

Thanks for the DOF links. With a film camera and a 50mm lens, I can frame up a slide shot (so the bowl fills the frame nicely) at a distance of about 3 to 3.5 feet. If I'm any further away, the bowl is too small.

Of course it's possible to mask a slide, or crop a digital file, but then I've lost some of the size impact for the slide, or pixels for the digital.

According to that site, using a zoom of 35mm at
f/11, if you were 6 feet away from your subject, anything from 4.6
ft to 8.8ft (4.2ft DOF) would be in sharp focus. Your 18" desired
depth is well-covered.

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

How can the 300d create an 18MB file when the RAW file size is only 6? What am I missing?

Regarding the 18MB filesize that was recommended --- the person was

probably talking about a PSD (photoshop) or TIFF file. That is, in
fact, the size of the image you'll get from the 300D. However, even
at high-quality compression levels the corresponding JPG will be
around 5-6MBytes.

 

[Zapped]

With a film camera and a 50mm lens, I can
frame up a slide shot (so the bowl fills the frame nicely) at a
distance of about 3 to 3.5 feet. If I'm any further away, the bowl
is too small.

The 300D has a smaller sensor so every lens with a given focal length "acts like" a lens with a 1.6x large focal length on a traditional film camera. So the 18mm-55mm zoom behaves like a 28-90 zoom would on a film camera. This means that you could step back to 7 or 8 feet, zoom into your bowl, and have it fill the frame without losing resolution to a subsequent crop.

• Zapped

More random EOS300D pics -
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=4289085949

 

[Zapped]

How can the 300d create an 18MB file when the RAW file size is only
6? What am I missing?

JPG is a compressed & lossy format. Any 5-6Mpixel JPG that containing a 3072x2048 image would expand to about an 18MB TIFF.

There are 8bits per color (one byte), three colors per pixel (RGB), times the number of pixels.

3072 x 2048 x 3 (bytes/pixel) = 18.87 million bytes

18.87 million bytes / 1024 1024 = 18Mbytes, exactly.

• Zapped

More random EOS300D pics -
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=4289085949

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

That's encouraging. I guess what I need to do is continue with film slides and overlap that with some experiments with digital images and slides. If other people are getting good slides from digital, I think my chances are pretty good too. Altho I don't have a monitor callibration thing - spyder or whatever. I could always try it and see.

How can the 300d create an 18MB file when the RAW file size is only
6? What am I missing?

JPG is a compressed & lossy format. Any 5-6Mpixel JPG that
containing a 3072x2048 image would expand to about an 18MB TIFF.

There are 8bits per color (one byte), three colors per pixel (RGB),
times the number of pixels.

3072 x 2048 x 3 (bytes/pixel) = 18.87 million bytes

18.87 million bytes / 1024 1024 = 18Mbytes, exactly.

• Zapped

More random EOS300D pics -
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=4289085949

--
Catherine Jo Morgan

 

[Catherine Jo Morgan]

Not to quell your enthusiasm, but have you seen this?

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/pressReleases/pr20030926-01.shtml

--
Thomas Niemann
http://epaperpress.com

Yes, I'd seen it. No question but that eventually most galleries will want submissions by email, and a few art juries are accepting photo files instead of slides.
--
Catherine Jo Morgan