Astbury's Adventures in Photography

Light pads are thin surfaces fitted with arrays of small LEDs and may typically be used for tracing and drawing applications. Strangely they are sometimes advertised as being suitable for viewing X-Ray images (is this a common need outside a hospital?) and this may suggest that they would also work for viewing photographic negatives. Light Pad However there is a problem, the surface is shiny and prone to specular reflections, you can see the reflection of my LED OttLite desk lamp in the image above. Even worse is that the array of LEDs shows through when trying to back light an image, so for example here is how a colour slide (positive) looks: Slide viewed directly with LED array showing Not very good but the solution is actually very simple, a layer of diffusion material is needed and this can be done with a sheet of paper. The paper should not be coloured and should be thin, I found a sheet of 41gsm tracing paper works well. To see the difference this makes here's...

Almost time to load the film and get started so I need to understand my options and have a practical approach to setting the exposures on the Nikon FE. Invariable The first thing I have to remember is that I can't change ISO . The old films I plan to use are ISO 200 so that will be my ISO value in all cases (let's ignore any options to pull and push the subsequent processing for the moment). Max Spielmann MX 200 colour print film The second thing I can't change is white balance . The film packaging doesn't appear to show any white balance recommendation so I'll assume they are daylight balanced (e.g. maybe 6000k). The traditional way of handling this would be to use warm up or cool down filters but for the more casual photographer they probably wouldn't bother. Like many (mostly) digital photographers I don't have a set of colour correction filters so won't worry. Ambient manual The simplest option is to set the camera manually. Aperture...

My first ever camera was my grandfather's, a Voigtlander VITO B, dating back to 1958. I put a number of films through this but have not used it recently. My grandfather's Voigtlander VITO B VITO B top panel and lens Note that in addition to ISO the Vito B also has a DIN setting, this refers to Standard 4512 of 1934,  by the Deutsches Institut für Normung. When I say 'setting' the camera is in fact entirely manual so really this just acts by way of a reminder. I now also have my late father's camera , a Nikon FE, it's nice to have them both. The FE dates back to 1981 and was a mid range camera of its day. Voigtlander, 1958 and Nikon, 1981 Nikon FE Nikon FE with Nikkor 50mm 1.8 lens I find a 50mm a little tight, I prefer 35mm or maybe 40mm, however I'm expecting the Nikkor 50 1.8 to be a solid performing prime lens. I can see a number of dust spots but I wouldn't expect these to impact final image quality. The Nikon needed ...