Exploding heads over at APUG

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Gordon Coale

Gordon Coale

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I've recently decided to get back into black and white and even plan for a darkroom thanks to the bad influence of the friendly people here. So I have been also checking out Analog Photography Users Group (APUG). There is a flame war currently going on because some people want to do hybrid analog/digital threads (which I'm also interested in) and the hard core purist analog only crowd really needs to not drink so much coffee. It's the What does traditional really mean? thread.

It's a contrast to the acceptance in this forum of things that are non-rangefinder. A little tolerance goes a long way to promoting the reason for this forum -- those cute little rangefinders. Thanks to everyone here for making this a better place. I doubt I will be going back to APUG. There are some scary people over there!
 
I think they're just upset over the fact that it's intended to be an analog site and that's pretty obvious. One or two of them have gotten real cranky over what they see as an invasion by the digital types (who actually have their own sub-forum there). I'm a member but I lurk over there and generally the tone is OK. Maybe people are getting cabin fever with this bad weather...
 
I just peeked over there. If they do not like digital anything, how do they manage to have a Gallery? Back in the early computer imaging days, I used a Nikon F3 with 80~200 F4 zoom to record the computer generated images from my Image Processors. Is that a Digital Negative? I alternated between Kodacolor and Ektachrome. Is that a Digital Slide? I have another device that takes Video Output and records it onto film using a copy camera. AHHHH!!!! How do they display their prints in the gallery without using a scanner! That takes a Lot of typing to enter a Jpeg Image Directly!!! And then you are just a human digitizer.
 
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They need a spanking. All of them. Far more than my 3 yr. old on his worst day.

Foo.

Thank you, RFF'ers, for being sane folks.

William
 
I had never seen that site before coming across this thread. Chances are high that I'll never see it again.

Fundamentalism in all of its forms is such a counter-productive drain of energy and waste of time.

I prefer to spend my time and energy on more creative endeavors. I suspect most folks here share that preference.
 
wlewisiii said:
They need a spanking. All of them. Far more than my 3 yr. old on his worst day.

Foo.

Thank you, RFF'ers, for being sane folks.

William
Click to expand...

NOW that is funny! Lucky this place is mellow so you won't get flamed about spanking....LOL!

APUG has a wealth of info from the old timers. Don't ignore it because of the hot heads....
 
If dwelving into the multifaceted world of electronic image processing is one your key interests, then APUG isn't a web site that will not cater to your wants or needs. There are other web sites that fill this need.

I agree with Ed Sukach. This really is a tempest in a tea pot.

I highly recommend reading the archives, if you are at all interested in analog printing. APUG may be the only place on the web where a answer to color RA-4 printing question will be answered accurately and quickly.
 
This one of the things i love about this site besides the great photography of it's memmbers wich IMHO i considers far superior than most of the stuff at apug (wich i am a member of) is the acceptance of different views and processes it seems that here the image is what matters, and the galleries show it.
 
i think we have developed a very tolerant mix of ideas and equipment while keeping the main focus on rf gear and allowing the occasional use of other machines, be they digital or tlr etc.
i agree that we are sane, also respectful of each other and i think we follow the 'rules' because we like coming to a place that treats us well.

i thank you all for making a moderator's job that much easier.

joe
 
I think the people who contribute to this site all have a deep love of photography and a deep respect for their fellow photographers. I find some of the other forums and sites to be truly ridiculous and pompous. Three cheers for us!!!
 
Well I checked out APUG and it seemed pretty harmless - strange how someone critizising a place makes everyone want to go there? Anyway this place (rff) is truly a gem - one of the really great things are that when you just "drop by" you almost always find something amusing, something interesting and something new - not that many forums offer that + this place seems to be a bunch of nice people (so there is 1000 - 8 = nice people in the world :) )
 
Brian APUG is OK with scanning a neg, they have a special gallery there for the scans - can't remember what it's called. But Andrew is right, apart from the B&W Photo - Printing & Finishing forum on photo.net, there is nowhere else to go for really good analog printing information. I just bought an enlarger this week and I'm anxious to learn so I visit there quite often. Yes there are photographic bigots over there but I stay clear of the wars, just like I did on the Leica forum nearly a year ago.

As everyone points out, it doesn't happen here. This week I was reading a thread on a Leica forum that was congratulating itself for being so international. I started to write a post about the fact that it was nowhere near as international as RFF. I finished the post and then thought about it for a bit. There is an individual on that forum who has been an abusive pest on several photographic forums, and has been banned from almost all of them. He has mellowed a little but to be honest, I wouldn't be happy if he turned up here, and neither would any of you. So I deleted the post.
 
I had a recent PM from a new member concerning my Canon 50mm F0.95 gallery. I felt very complimented, he stated that based on the colors in my gallery that he was going to pursue buying the lens. He wanted to know if I had used Photoshop to get the colors, or if the lens rendered them that way. I offered to send him some original 5x7's. I try to match up the scans to my prints, and often lose saturation because I impose a limit on what I do in Photoshop. It is impossible to replicate even a machine print with a scanned negative, decimated image, JPEG'd to fit in a few 100K, and viewed on a Monitor, ESPECIALLY a modern FlatScreen. I had better luck taking pictures off of my old 1984 Professional Graphics Monitor (PGC) with the Nikon F3 using Ektachrome. I try to get the "flavor" of a lens when making a folder for it; at least one can view the out-of-focus areas fairly well. With cameras, people can see that the cameras WORK, useful when listing them.

But with all that said, can someone please tell me what the term "Digital Negative" means? Does it just refer to a raw scan of a film negative? I go back with Digital long enough to remember when Livermore Labs used film for a Digital Storage Medium, they wrote computer files onto good-ol chemically processed film. To me, THAT is a digital negative.
 
With this nameless-faceless digital age, one has to learn to step over written manifestations of little frustrations and bitter answers and people fighting in a childish way about something absurd or personal. Most of the forums i've seen can be useful, you eventually get those answers, you take a grain of salt with them, you say "thank you" and that's all. If you need a 100% reliable answer, you should not ask on Internet forums.
I find it especially funny when people ask advice in serious legal matters on an international photography forum on the 'net. Pretty naive expectation.
The photo.net B&W stuff related forum, e.g., is full of experienced and helpful people but everybody has his bad moments. And the experiences can also be contradictory, no matter how many years stand behind.
 
For me "digital negative" would mean the (untouched?) scanned image from a film neg, or the original (untouched) JPG or RAW file from a digital camera.

Since I got my Eos 300D I've been struggling with this matter. Do I keep the original file I shot, or not? I've decided that I will keep them. How else will I be able to make a new version for print or pblication if all I have left is an altered (cropped. adjusted, sharpened, JPG'd) file? It's not like I have a film-based neg lying around somewhere, do I? :)

I mainly shoot Large Fine JPG as I have not much use for the RAW files unless I'm shooting for a project. Am I selling myself short? Could be, but the future will have to tell.
 
I promise that I will not sue ANYBODY if there explanation of what a digital negative is not 100% correct. You guys are more reliable than most text books. The definition of commonly accepted terms keeps changing every few years. I feel like a Digital Dinosaur.

Remy, That is what I would suspect. The lossless-compressed, digital image. If it is of a negative, you need about 30MBytes to store a 24mmx36mm B&W image, and about 3x that for Color. I figure (100LP/mm*2 pixels/line*24mm)*(100LP/mm*2pixels/Line* 36mm)* 2bytes/pixel, and a typical 2.5:1 compression using lossless techniques. 3x for color because you need one image for Red, Green, and Blue. Does that make sense? I figure 100lp/mm is a good lens.
 
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Brian -- Digital negatives are big with the contact printing crowd. The image is manipulated in Photoshop, sized to the print size they want, inverted, and then printed out on a clear plastic stock. They now have a negative they can contact print. It's a hybrid process that uses the best of analog image capture on film and analog contact printing on platinum, Azo, or whatever, with the best of adjusting the image in Photoshop to give a negative that can be printed straight.
 
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