DDoug

Hi Regis, I'm just a couple hours up the road from Fuji's facility in Germany, but still it would be a real bother to have to send the camera to them to get the sensor cleaned. Perhaps it's worth it to hold out for the X100V. One of the things that appeals to me about the X100 series is the unlimited synch speeds, making fill flash in bright daylight a snap.

Good point. Probably a good used X100F would be the most bang for the buck and the earlier models wouldn't work for me. As to pockets, I usually have a vest in summer and jacket with large pockets in winter, so my idea of "pocketable" is fairly lax.

I've also been considering getting a small, inconspicuous camera at some point. My main kit consists of Fuji XT bodies, generally at least two since I don't change lenses in the field. One thing I don't want is to pack along a different charger and set of batteries that would largely defeat the “small and light” benefit. I have an X-A5 I could use for the purpose if I could stand arm's-length photography, squinting at an LCD in bright daylight. For a pocketable camera with an EVF, I think something in the X100 series would be ideal.

Desaturating magenta gets rid of the purple look without changing the red leaf much. Sometimes in resurrecting old images, one of the channels, often red, will be very muddy. Replacing it with one of the other channels will clear up the image, but the colors will be off. If they are selectively corrected (such as for skin tones), then an unusable image becomes at least passable.

As some contributors are East Asian, it's probably a good policy to skip from three to five.

Five. I have a low CTR, so-so sales and don't upload as much as I should, so it's probably just the absence of QC fails.

To solve a problem such as Steve described, or to change the overall appearance of an image, I sometimes use channel substitution. For example: select and copy the green channel; convert to LAB color; select Lightness channel and paste the green channel; convert back to RGB color. This yields an image which has the same colors as before, but with the tones such as they would be on a black and white photo shot with a green filter. Similarly, a sky can be made more dramatic by using the red channel. Sometimes this works well and sometimes it's awful. Fun to experiment with in any case. edit: Coincidentally there was bright sunlight on a yellow Johanniskraut flower in the back yard this afternoon, so I made a sample including the basic shot, modified with the green channel and also with a mix of green and blue channels.

I'm in much the same situation, glad to have something to keep me busy while sequestered but somewhat daunted by the scope of the project. As well as the time to digitize the images, there is the fact that a lot of them are in cardboard mounts with rounded corners and, upon examination, raggedy edges. So I'm removing those and snapping the film into plastic mounts, marking the dates with indelible pens. Such fiddly hand work was never my thing. Anyway, in the process it's being handed off to my son and between us we decided that the best solution for us is to put them on the Web server we share for our sites, since the allowable storage is gigabytes more than we actually use. For backup, images are stored on BluRay M-discs. Cheers, Don

Two P.U. sales netting almost enough to pay my monthly Photoshop bill.

I tried again and it sort of worked. I have a K&F Concept adapter for Minolta and it isn't bad. Not able to find one at the time I was looking for Nikon, I settled for a cheapie which goes by the brand name "Massa". It's wobbly and the f/stops come out on the bottom of the lens instead of the top for some reason. However, I can focus on the slide it takes up most of the frame so I'd have to say it works.

I have a cheap, generic Nikon AI TO Fuji FX adapter that's on the short side, so it focuses beyond infinity (a term that makes sense only to photographers and Buzz Lightyear). To that I added the shortest of my several Nikon extension tubes. Shown side-by-side with the Kipon NIK-FX M at its maximum extension, it looks like it's about 5mm taller and thus focuses closer than the Kipon. There is probably something equally inexpensive that would work better than what I have. But basically, I'm sure you're right. If the purpose is only slide duplication, something a lot less expensive than the Kipon would no doubt work. About the 52mm extension tubes: I bought mine from someone who sells odds and ends on eBay and no longer has them on offer. There's something similar to the one you referenced if you search “Photo Plus 52mm Diameter Extension Tube” on Amazon. Several lengths are offered.

There's definitely more than one way to accomplish the task. I used to have an old, bordering on ancient, Novoflex bellows with a Fuji X mount adapter, slide copy attachment and an APO-Rodagon lens. It did a good job of copying slides. I would still have it, except that I also wanted a macro lens for general close-up photography and got the Micro-Nikkor. Then I figured, “Why have both?” The current kit does double duty. I tried a combination of extensions, but, unlike you, I couldn't get it right so I got the Kipon. If I were starting from scratch today and didn't have the Micro-Nikkor, I'd look at something which wasn't on the market before, the Laowa 65mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO.

After some trial and error, I settled on this set to get the full 35mm frame focused on the Fuji APS-C chip:

Today I received a Nikon ES-2 film digitizing adapter, purchased because the ES-1 with FH-2 film holder was too much bother. A less ham-fisted and more patient person might find it not so difficult to work with. By contrast, the plastic holder for film strips that comes with the ES-2 is easy to use. The ES-2 holder for mounted slides doesn't accommodate thick mounts, but the ES-1 doesn't have a problem with them. Thin mounts work well in either. I was reluctant to spend more money on the project, but the obvious answer was to have both the ES-1 and ES-2. My Fuji kit with Kipon helical adapter and Micro-Nikkor 55mm lens also required around 45mm of extension tubes (52mm screw-in thread) in order to fill the frame with the entire film image area.

There's another approach I've tried for MF film, but it's a work in progress and I'm not sure it will be successful. I built a simple box to go over the Viltrox LED light with a matte board on top with cut-outs for various film sizes. Unlike a scanner, the camera can be set for f/11 or so if there is a problem with film flatness. In doing that, I found that I could see the individual LEDs in the grid that makes up the light, so I covered it with a 13x18cm acetate film sleeve that is frosted on one side. My last efforts with this were when I was still trying to make it work with my X-T2. I expect results with the X-A5 will be better but haven't tried it yet. I have some images that were scanned on Nikon LS 9000 and Flextight X5 scanners, so there's something to compare results against.