D Cox

I think people vary. My experience from using 30 or 40 cameras over the years is that you can adapt to most of them in a week or two. But others seem to find it more difficult and demand a camera ...

A bit of corroded brass that I found. View this at 100% -- lots of colour.

Human contrast sensitivity reaches a peak before decreasing. That peak is likely to influence our judgement of sharpness or microcontrast. It can't directly relate to frequencies in an image, ...

I would say it is high frequency, but below the frequencies used in lens tests (such as "MTF 50").

"Donald B" did not post that image. There is bound to be some loss of quality when a TIF is converted to a JPG, even at the highest quality setting. But we are on the web, and we have to make do ...

The question is not how much contrast there is out there, but how well a given camera can record it. In particular, how well it can record the contrast of small details in a scene, such as leaves ...

The raw file in my example was processed in SPP, from which a TIF file was exported.. ACR was used only to quickly convert the TIF to JPG for posting here, as browsers can't display TIFs. The ...

What exactly do you mean by "optical power" ? I agree that "lens element thickness" is a nonsense.

Another desirable thing is to have a geared head on your tripod, to be sure that the sensor is accurately vertical.

You would certainly not use 35mm film. If you had to use film, you would use medium or preferably large format. But a medium format digital camera would be better -- a Hasselblad or similar. If in ...

Yes, that shows the typical Piccure+ crisping up. I find it works best on images that are sharp already. An out-of-focus edge can sometimes get a stripe or ribbon replacing the blur. Bad Foveon ...

The main downside is that the larger amount of data will take longer to process and save to card. So the frames per second will go down. Not a problem for landscapes, but could be for sports. Event ...

A high resolution sensor will bring out all the quality the old lens can give. I think you will find that the better old lenses look fine. Those that were poor when they were introduced will not ...

Perhaps it may be convenient to have an example of an image that does (in my opinion) have good microcontrast. I think DPR resamples the JPG files to a lower quality, but it may not be too badly ...

Their first image is unsharp and has no microcontrast. The last shows what you expect when applying a Gaussian blur. I don't see what this has to do with microcontrast, however elegant the maths ...

Yes, I think flatbeds come into their own for 6x7cm and upward. 35mm is definitely better with a camera. 6x6cm I am undecided -- it really needs stitching if done with a camera.

They can be, but the Marumi and Raynox products are good. Generally, a better bet than extension tubes for basic close up photography.

It is an amazing photo. He's still on the trip, so presumably will do some PP when he gets home.

Could you record this as an Action ?

Better to move them to glassless mounts. The ones I use are made by Hama. However, some were in Agfa mounts which are glued together, so it isn't practical to remove them. And mounts for half ...