Mike, it’s you talking about a professional cam, that even didn’t hit the market yet.
– Just relax, enjoy your holiday and don’t write so much for now. 
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…do use what gear you have…because a new camera will add confusion instead of photographer capability. If you have money that gets on your nerves, donate some to a veterans home, hospital, or homeless kitchen… Read your own words:
for “confusabobbled”
But I wade through all these pages just to find another instance of his word “Confusabobbled”!
Seriously these threads that Mike is active in and many of you help him are great teaching lessons for me and I’m sure many others. So please keep on writing Mike. Oh yes, take some images too!
I agree.
That is my plan (but it’s enjoyable to dream…)
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well, I dream in bed – not online 
(not sarcastic !)
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Mike, if you want to go down another rabbit hole that will occupy months of your life and put more grey in your hair, your can change some things that will make visible improvements to some of your pictures.
Your digital cameras are already giving you raw files that have smoother color and a more extended tonal range than you have seen up to now. However, the sRGB color space at the end of your workflow (in your jpg files and your monitor) literally cuts out and throws away a significant amount of the visible color spectrum information that is recorded in your raw files. The result is subtle but visible damage to the fidelity of colors, especially in the pastels, and their overall smoothness.
A more extended color space that isn’t too difficult to implement throughout your workflow is Adobe98. This, too, is a near-ancient color space but it’s a good bit more extended than sRGB and much more closely approaches what can be displayed with modern non-professional technology that isn’t too financially punishing if you’re careful in your choices. And when your eyes get used to the change you will probably appreciate the differences in pictures where the improvements are visible.
The biggest $$ factor for such a change is probably the monitor; most are sRGB and cheap but there are numerous Adobe98 monitors out there that cost only a few hundred dollars more than a decent sRGB monitor (not talking about the real cheapies that are hopelessly bad on ANY kind of content). A good example is my old Dell UP2516D.
A downside is that most people can’t view Adobe98 pictures, but for sharing the files can be easily saved in 8-bit sRGB JPG with a click or two of the mouse.
Just a thought. It’s a whole other bucket of worms but if you ever get bored this is an interesting side journey.
I dream al the time.
That i am rich,
That i don’t work but spent time on a hobby. (probably the reason i need to dream i am rich…
)
The i am married with a beauti… 
That i am good looking as a filmstar,
That i have skills and talents…
At night all the solutions are popping up in my head and i wake up and it’s morning… Wile my memory has bin rebooted so, back to dreaming…
- Applies
- does not apply
- Applies
- Applies for me
- does not apply
- applies for many themes
- applies not every day but …
Thanks for the whole thread
Naw, I’m tired of rabbit holes, and I don’t have enough hair left to lose even more. I do have a high-tech ASUS monitor that cost $400 maybe eight years ago but right now I’m just using my 2015 MacBook Pro 15" laptop.
Me too! If I go to sleep while trying to solve a problem, I often solve it while I’m dreaming. Or, like last night, I am off on bizarre adventures. I guess I have strange dreams. (When I was younger, I kept a pad near my bed, and the first thing I did when I woke up was to write down what my dream was about!)
The thread has left me thoroughly confused about things, and my solution for right now is to do nothing. I can easily see myself buying a Leica M11, and it will be 99% the same as my M10, but with better hardware and software. I don’t see myself as buying any new Nikon yet, as my D750 and Df I feel are “good enough”. No point in even thinking about “mirrorless” Nikons until I actually have one in my hands to evaluate. Bottom line - I’m not going to make any changes in the near future, although I hope PL5 will be coming along soon!
You’re welcome! …I expected the thread title to get replies like “you don’t know what you’re talking about, what does one have to do with the other???”
I do that rather often, but in some countries getting stamps can become an adventure.
Meaning “but I’m not average”? 
Even non-average people don’t die immediately after they looked through an EVF 
. On the plus side, you can get blind by looking through an OVF into the sun. An EVF is just not as powerful as focused sunlight on your retina.
Everything? Your letters, too? My computer only transfers what I want it to become transferred. And sometimes not even that… Why did you scan your negatives? Why didn’t you buy big packs of photographic paper, some gallons of chemicals and enlarge them, the old optical way? Why didn’t you buy a scanner with OVF? Oh, there are none? Hmm, makes one think… 
@mikemyers what you in my opinion keep forgetting: photography itself is nothing what happens naturally, technical and chemical stuff was always involved and there’s no single rule existing I know of which tells you “now you learn it and once you learnt it you never do it any other way!” The “old ways” are not better because they are old, but because you had to learn a lot and do a lot of mistakes we tend to stick with it. Just because you learn how do dance Viennese waltz doesn’t mean you can just change shoes and go on with Salsa. Just because we learnt how to get a picture the chemical way, we should still invest sometimes a bit of learning time for the electrical way. Instead of defending the old ways and look for differences from old to new. Over the years I found this OVF/EVF threads becoming very boring. Why wasting the time to debate, why not just go and try out?
That’s what I’ve asking me all the time – or was it just click bait?
The fact that you’re actively involved in this photographic forum already means you’re not “average”. I think most “average” people forgot all about their cameras, now that their phones do it all, and the idea of sharing photographs now means sharing on social media…
What I meant, was digital was taking over. Do you still watch an analog TV, or digital? Do they still even make analog TV’s? For many people, digital phones have taken over everything - newspapers are going away, music went digital, photography went digital, email and messaging replaced hand written stuff, and social media is attempting to “own” each of us.
I used to enjoy reading my issues of Popular Photograph and Modern Photography, but now all of it is digitized. I used to enjoy skimming through the advertisements, but with digital, there is no need - the ads actually find me! I used to tune my motorcycles and cars, but now I need a specialized computer to do that.
I enjoy saying “phooey” to everything, and go out for a walk with my 70-year old Leica M3 film camera! Most of my analog “stuff” little by little got tossed out. I used to make “real food”, but nowadays my microwave is so tempting - but usually I do things the old way.
I’m 77 for another month or so, and I have fond memories of the past. I also wonder what would happen to our lives, if a giant solar flare wiped out the world’s electronics in one big flash.
This, I agree with, and I’m along for the ride.
I mostly agree with you, but I am filled with “inertia”, and mostly continue on with things, although this forum and these discussions have made a huge difference in my life - for the better.
No TV. This YouTube stuff on some occasions… (and between us, on more occasions than I would be willing to admit 
) I lost track with what’s going on on TV in the 90s. Boring, loud, irrelevant and a bad replacement for the good old open fireplaces. I found to be buried under a lot of mostly useless information while I thought it’s better to do something than to sit and watch and complain.
I still have my old records and CDs, DVDs as well - but I prefer going to the movies, it’s more special to me. Oh, and I keep my 135 cameras and probably would drill a hole in this “no more gear, until you throw out some stuff you never use” policy for a nice Rolleiflex. Depends very much on it’s condition. Decades ago, when I was starting photography, I always like to have a Contax RTS. That did happen a couple of months ago, a near mint condition RTS III came from Japan around the world to me. Cool, still working although the OVF display’s dead. So, if I’m very upset with the dull devs over at Capture One, I just grab the Contax or the no-battery needed Yashica FX3 and do some time traveling.
Working for +30 years with computers now, I do feel exhausted from all this “unfinished apps quickly to the market, we need the money” attitude of some, if not the most software companies. I mean if you work as a plumber, mechanic, tailor or carpenter and something goes wrong, your client can suit you if you don’t fix it, at no additional costs. Software companies? 
I so much agree with you! I do watch a show as I eat breakfast, and I watch the evening news, and I watch movies.
As to free time, for a long time it was learning “Bullseye Shooting”, but my range is closed for a while still, so I have endless hours to work on photography. I love the old cameras, and my old cameras, and I’m tempted to put a roll of film in my own Contax and see how well it does.
Now of course there is PL4, with no excuses. You can all see what I did, or didn’t did, and I realize how much more there is to have “did”, which I never really understood before, and have been learning.
Personally, I don’t care much for all this technology - I’ve learned how important it can be, but the most important thing for me is “seeing”, and capturing what I have “seen” in a way to share it with others. For better or worse, the technology comes along for the ride, and it’s obvious to me now how much learning the technology has helped me post an image that others may like just as much as I did/do.
This may or may not be of help to you:
https://learncamerarepair.com/product.php?product=319&category=2&secondary=4
KEH has an “excellent condition” Contax RTX III for sale, but it says “meter inoperative”.
https://www.keh.com/shop/contax-rts-iii-35mm-camera-body.html
Well, the process of photography is based on technology, like it or not. And if there was no need to “take a picture and share it with others”, we would not have the cave drawings, no performing arts and also no smartphone pictures.
This project of Erik Kessels made me think, how we “photo taking people” are working on our own insignificance:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c9cf2230cf57d7492acce1a/1555007640329-BSQUNAMKAYHDD8GIN6NJ/24hrs+in+photos_erik+kessels_1.jpg?format=2500w
Printing all pictures made within 24 hrs - what a waste of resources and energy?
My Contax RTS III is working, apparently also the metering works, it just doesn’t show you neither exposure time nor aperture (but for that we still have the good old aperture ring, don’t we?). And in case I want to dip my toe in the good old zone system (useless for rollfilm, or at least you need a couple of bodies or magazines, I know) The only regrettable thing: To be able to buy a medium format camera like the plastic fantastic Mamiya 645 Super, I sold my Zeiss lenses. All two of them, boohoo 
If I wanted to buy the same 85/1.4 and 35/1.4 today it would cost me more than the two Sigmas with the same parameters, plus AF, plus better lenshood, plus less CA, plus more sharpness. No, optical computing of lenses has evolved so much that I really don’t understand the hype for old manual focus lenses. And selling optical flaws for “3D appearance” or “optical melting of rendering” – sorry, I don’t buy it.
When the Contax arrived, I had to try it out. So I took it with some 9 year past expiration date HP5 plus and the Lumix to a city trip to Yverdon-les-bains. Yep, the B/W pictures do add something. But the water taken handheld at ½ second handheld with the Lumix and it’s amazing IBIS also has some quality…
For me, it was serious. Currently I’m working in an analog world much of the time, at least with my D750 and Df. Everything gets sent to PL4 as digital information, and PL4 is fully digital.
I was wondering what might be the difference with a Z9 where everything I see is already digital, no analog. I should expect the histogram from PL4 to be pretty much identical to the histogram I saw on the Z9.
Joanna has suggested I not pay too much attention to the on-camera histogram, but with the Z9 it, and everything else, should be the same on PL4 as it was on the Z9. …does this suggest I do things differently on the Z9 with digital viewfinder than what I might do with my D750 or Df ?
For better or worse, that was what I was trying to ask, but maybe I could have asked a little differently, if I wasn’t clear enough.
PhotoLab interprets raw data differently than the camera. Moreover, the interpretation depends on the presets we use and to where we shift sliders. Therefore, the histograms will never look the same and that’s okay.
Cameras and applications show histograms based on output rather than on input, raw data, in which case the histogram could be a real help for exposure.
Nikon histograms have long been a display of the green channel only, which means that the histogram does not show clipping correctly under all lighting conditions…
Not taking the histogram too seriously is good practice.
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Yes, very definitely the histogram is only “your” tool if one prefers to work with JPGs only. RAW do show very good shadows (and a bit more highlights, too) although the histogram indicates “far too much going on on the left side”. I don’t know exactly about the zebras (highlight and shadow warning) but I don’t expect that to be “the real thing”, meaning it also only considers JPG output.
Sorry @mikemyers but that’s lying to yourself. Only because you treat these digital cameras as if they weren’t doesn’t make your process analog – If you want to screw in a screw, you don’t take a cordless screwdriver and turn it by hand!
Also (and highly subjective 
): forget about that Z 9. There are more professional photogs waiting for it than Nikon will be a able to produce and deliver. Given the history of shifted delivery dates because they faced “production problems”, given the legions of 50 mm lenses which were apparently more necessary to bring to the market than a standard zoom set of 14-24-70-200/2.8 Nikon will probably crash-land their Z system like they did with their first mirrorless attempt, yes, the Nikon 1 series. If you have money to burn, throw it at them.
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Zebra warnings are ooc-jpeg connected same as histogram.
Some camera’s you can set limit to +10 but i am pritty sure that’s counted from jpeg colorspace.0-255 minus the zebra warning space.
Most have 2 stops headroom in raw so histogram use is push til it hit the right wall and then you know you have around 1 1/2stop left to push if needed.
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