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Rangefinder Magazine
August 2003

Problems & Solutions

Please accompany your questions with a self-addressed stamped envelope if you wish an immediate reply. Alternatively, you can e-mail me at: bhurter@rfpublishing.com.

From: Ed Thierman,
Dresser-Rand Co.
Olean, NY
edward_c_thierman@dresser-rand.com
I have a question that someone must have experienced with lighting and digital photography. I changed over to digital photography a few years ago. I take photos of the large equipment we make at my company. The problem is with the lights in our shop. Most are high-pressure sodium and some are mercury vapor. My photos come out yellow. If I use the filters I used with my medium format camera, the photo takes the color of the filter. I use an Olympus C5050, 5 Megapixel, F1.8 camera. The quality of the photos outside are excellent but I need to do something to keep the yellow out when shooting inside our plant. When I work with the images in Adobe PhotoShop 6.0, it just does not give me the color correction quality I am looking for. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I posed your question to Claude Jodoin, our resident technical wizard, and this is what he said.

The culprit is mostly the sodium. Mercury is more like fluorescent in spectral content and a bit more tame. Sodium is the worst light on the planet for photos, as the spectrum is discontinous and lacking bandwitdth. The best you can do is key off a white card target for later corrections. The best solution is to invest in, or bring in some studio flash units to provide white light bounced from large flats and/or white celings, or walls. I don’t know what you mean by “big,” so more dimensional information would be required for a more specific recommendation.

This is a garbage-in garbage out situation. You can’t correct color that’s not being recorded. All digital cameras are designed for white light. Everything else is a compromise.—Claude Jodoin

From: Don DeRose
donderose@att.net
I’ve read the Rangefinder, and your “P&S” column for years and have enjoyed both. Keep up the good work! Recently, someone asked you for a source for an obsolete instruction manual. In addition to John Craig, a good source is Finger Lakes Photobooks. An e-mail address is: flpbks@localnet.com, and a website is: http://www.photomall.com/books.htm.

Thanks for the kind words Don and thanks for passing this on.

From: Kevin R. Cooke, Graule Studios
130 Hinds St.
Rochester, PA 15074
(724) 775-2176
kevin@graule.com
I am in the process of restoring lantern slides from our studio archives. Do you know of any supplier for the glass used to sandwich the image. Thanks for your help.

As far as I can tell, the glass used to sandwich the actual lantern slide is ordinary glass, nothing special. It was used merely to protect the lantern slide image. As to thickness, I’m not sure what is optimum or even recommended—I guess it would depend on the device. I haven’t come across that info anywhere, but maybe someone out there can answer this question. Also, maybe someone out there can tell us about a supplier. Stay tuned!

From: Megan Murillo
2611 Dahlia
Denver, CO 80207
mm@meganmurillo.com
I am doing more wedding photography, and would like to go partly digital. I’m young and have only been in business for a year. I’m looking into digital cameras and am wondering if I am going to have to upgrade my iMac, or if I could go digital and still transfer the images to my computer.

You should be able to get by with your iMac, but the iMac uses a G3 processor, which is a little anemic where big image files are concerned. You will find life a lot easier with either an e-Mac, which uses the G4 processor or the G4 tower, which is what we use here at the magazine. And now, of course, the G5 is here, which, according to early reports, is mind-blowingly fast. I will tell you, however, that I put three 140-page books together with images using an iMac, so working with digital files can certainly be done with that computer.