I have recently been scanning some old photos on an inexpensive flatbed (Canon).  Others I have been  scanning negatives using a Plustek 7200i (which I could not get working on my Mac, even using Parallels).  I didn’t take many photos before going digital, so I have almost finished scanning the negatives I care about.
I have noticed a large variation in the quality of negatives – buying cheap film in the 90s was obviously a poor bargain!   I used the default QuickScan program from plustek to perform my scanning, though I read today to get quality scans from negatives, you should use a program like Silverfast (which I have access to), which has a profile for every brand of negative.  Apparently the same is not true for transparencies and you can pretty much scan them with the same profile.  Anyway, I only really care about the quality of a few of the photos I scanned, and they look ok to me. I have some postprocessing to do before they get up to flickr.  The main edits I perform are highlight and shadow adjustments, exposure adjustments, and cropping.  I’d eliminate the highlight and shadow adjustments if I knew how to take the photos correctly in the first place.  Sometimes I tweak the white balance. Rarely I blur a background in Photoshop.
The negatives I really cared about I scanned at 3600dpi.  The pictures scanned at this resolution average 8 MBytes.  I might just edit them, reduce the size to a megabyte and toss the originals.  Or I might keep the original scans.

I have been shooting with a Canon Rebel XTi lately – I got really frustrated with shutter lag on my point and click. I use a Tamron 18mm-250mm zoom lens, shoot almost entirely on automatic mode.  Essentially, I have an expensive and heavy point and click.  But the shutter speed is instant once I press the button and I get way more shots.

I chose the Tamron lens because it gives a lot more range than buying a kit with a Canon lens.  The less I change lenses the better.

Until recently, I left the settings at the highest resolution and lowest  jpeg quality.  I think the images are taking way more space than they need, and in fact the 10 megapixel photos are probably no better than the photos taken on 6 MP or 8MP editions of the same camera.  I am not sure if taking photos at lower resolution results in downsampling after taking a full resolution picture, or simply sampling fewer of the sensors pixels.  I need to remember to take smaller size photos for snapshots.
I never shot in raw, I always thought the noise introduced by a couple JPEG conversions during editing would be minimal.  I feel vindicated by this article.
I am toying with getting a standard 50mm lens.  This would make the camera less heavy around my neck.  From a technical point of view, I am interested in trying to have the backgrounds blurred (narrower depth of field) and haven’t had much success with my zoom lens yet – possibly because the lowest f-stop is 3.5.  I still have some experimenting to do before I give up on the zoom lens for this technique.

Technorati Tags: photography

It amazes me how good a job Google does with usability. Their feed reader is near perfect – I can skim over articles without having to click on anything and they are marked as read. Their web search is great, their news search is great.

I tried Google Finance recently. Unlike almost every other service I used , you can type in the company name or the symbol – you don’t have to resort to a symbol search and three screens later actually get the information you are looking for after picking from a couple of drop down menus about what country you are searching in etc.

Technorati Tags: usability