Thanks for all of the kind comments. Here is a slight edit - I tweaked the vertical & cropped it, to make the buildings and lampposts straight. I'm not sure I have a real preference for this one over the other though. You can take away distortion in one area, but other areas still seem distorted.

And for SX2002, I added the color version. This is pretty much original, except that I tweaked the white balance to remove most of the orange cast (the original is a raw). In my opinion, the color version is just a nice snapshot. The B&W is way nicer.

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Oh my, yes that last one is overdone, it doesn't even look like him.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. It seems like there is something about the color-shift that defies any logical approach to correcting it accurately. I am left with just tweaking things and seeing what looks relatively "normal". I agree that B&W is starting to look like the best option, or at least something where the saturation is dialed back enough to de-emphasise the shifted colors.

Yes, I love fog too, but this was the kind of fog that was more like a light haze. I have been up to the observatory on some amazing nights where it was so clear it felt like you could reach out and touch the downtown skyline. I guess I was hoping for something a bit more like that.

There's a field with radio towers around the block from me. On some mornings there is a blanket of fog on the field, but nowhere else around. I need to get my butt out of the house early (with camera in-hand) to catch that. It will make for a nice shot.

Hmm. I tried doing similar things in both PS and LR but my results never came out as well as yours - it still looked "off". Dropping Green seems to help a bit also, but unfortunately I don't remember what color his outfit really was so I am just guessing at what looks right.

Yes, I'm on the lookout for some good night spots. Venice sounds interesting - I'm not the nervous type, but my wife is. I doubt I could drag her out there at night.

We actually started out heading for the Griffith Observatory, but parking was impossible, so we kept going. Probably not a great loss though - it was a bit foggy that night, so maybe not the best night for shooting the view of the city.

This was a handheld shot, taken in manual mode, but with auto ISO. It chose 3200, and I shot at 1/30 at 5.6. I used the kit lens at 16mm, which does have image stabilization, so I felt pretty comfortable with 1/30.

In Lightroom, I applied some noise reduction followed by sharpening, but I wonder if the noise reduction was really that necessary. Having a modern camera for the first time in decades is a revelation. The noise on this shot at 3200 ISO is nothing compared to 400 ISO on film. It really opens up possibilities that were not available to me back then. I could see a difference when zooming in, but I'm not sure that it really helped overall - the bricks on the street for example, turned kind of mushy with noise reduction. I may try another with either no noise reduction or a lighter touch.

This is my first photo submission to UHH. The wife & I took a drive last night, and ended up on Rodeo Drive. The stores were all closed, but it was a nice night to just walk around. I am hoping to get a little bit of experience with night photography, but nothing much really jumped out at me as a good subject.

I snapped this one, and tweaked it a bit in Lightroom. It was nice. Then I decided to turn it into a B&W, and I think that really made the difference.

Tell me what you think.

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Hopefully this is the right section for this...

I have been scanning my old negatives. Most of them came out great, but several rolls have shifted color pretty badly. I have tried using the White Balance controls in Lightroom to correct this, but apparently this is not the right tool for the job. When I sample something that should be white, the result is something that's just as badly color-shifted, but to another color.

Here is a sample image. I'm wondering if anyone has any good ideas for how to fix this. I attached a JPG, but I have the original TIFF files, if needed.

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Unfortunately, your photos may simply be gone. If you had a hard drive issue, Windows will do a file-system check at boot time. Often it will come across files that it can't reconstruct, or can't identify. Windows will put them in a folder somewhere, but I have never had any luck getting anything usable out of the recovered files.

I had the same thing happen to me. Lightroom couldn't find the photos, because I lost them when my hard drive crashed. Almost everything made it, but several folders went missing. Fortunately they were all scanned from negatives, so I am just re-scanning them. My file naming scheme told me which roll/photo each one was, and Lightroom told me the filename, so it was easy to identify what was missing. If you have a backup, then you should be able to do the same - figure out what's missing from Lightroom and get them off the backup.

So a6k, it sounds like you are telling me that my original assumption is in fact correct - that the main difference between an APS-C and 35mm sensor is mainly due to the sensor itself.

Well, that's a relief!

I guess I am just trying to understand how my new camera compares with what I am used to from my film days. It's good to know that 1.7 is still 1.7 when I am using my 50mm Minolta lens, though the resolution of the Sony is so much better than film that I am now seeing the limitations of the old lenses better than ever before.

I suppose that what I really need is to get out there with the camera and see for myself how all of this theory translates in the real world.

Thanks for the great explanation - no need to tiptoe around when pointing out my errors. I am still trying to get my head around all of these concepts, and there is a lot to learn.

Thank you a6k & Reinaldokool. I do appreciate the information, and no, it's not TMI.

I guess the thing that's bothering me is that when I was doing my research, there was a lot of information on how an APS-C sensor will give you a zoom or crop effect, such that a lens that was normal on my Minolta is now a mild telephoto on the Sony. No problem there, as I knew what I was going to get. Where I guess I am disappointed is that it seems that I am also paying a penalty in terms of exposure. I know people always talk about how full-frame sensors are better for low light, but what I assumed was that the main reason was lower noise given that the pixels are more spread out on a full-frame (assuming the same number of pixels overall). What I did not understand previously is that there is simply less light hitting my sensor than a full-frame. Therefore, all other things being equal, I will need a wider aperture or longer exposure to capture the same image as a full-frame.

Obviously I will just learn to deal with it, but it does seem as though some things that would be practical to shoot with a full-frame will not be possible with an APS-C sensor. After watching an excellent video course on Lynda.com about low-light photography, I was all ready to go out & shoot street scenes at night. I still plan to do that, but I may need to adjust my expectations somewhat.

Brian

I guess what I am really looking for is a cheap way to get something faster than the kit lenses, without sacrificing (much) image quality. I am willing to deal with manual focusing and aperture priority mode to get this.

It sounds like there may be a place for the old lenses, but they aren't really a substitute for a good modern lens.

Case in point - I put my old 75-205 Vivitar together with a 2x teleconverter on the Sony and took some shots of the moon last night. I was rather impressed with the results, as compared with the kit telephoto. The longer reach really helped, and the sharpness was still quite decent. When cropped to similar size, the shots taken with the Vivitar were better to my eye.

At least I have a variety of combinations to play with. It will be fun figuring out the niche that each combination fits into.

Yes, I set Focus Magnifier to C1 to make it more accessible. I also like the way focus assist works, which makes it pretty easy to focus manually.

I'm just getting started with my new Sony A6000, and I am trying to understand the relationships between my various lenses and how they work on a crop sensor camera like mine.

I have a few old Minolta and Vivitar lenses from my film days. I bought a cheap adapter on eBay and have been playing around. I am trying to understand how the apertures and focal lengths work on an adapted full-frame lens.

My Sony lenses are the 16-50 and the 55-210 kit lenses. When I compare these to my film lenses, I know that I need to apply the crop factor, which means that my lenses will work more or less like a 24-75 and an 83-315 would on a film or full-frame camera. Is this also true of the apertures? Is a 3.5 max aperture really more like 5.25?

I guess the idea here is to understand what the advantages would be of using say, my 50mm 1.7 Minolta lens. Are the apertures on my old film lenses comparable to the stated ones on my modern Sony lenses (such that the 1.7 on my Minolta can be compared to the max available at 50mm on my Sony of 5.6)?

Interestingly enough, I took some pics at 50mm with the Sony 16-50, and then shot the same scene with the Minolta, at varying apertures. The Minolta at 1.7 was very smeary looking, but as I worked my way to smaller apertures, it got better. I'm not at all sure though that I see the great advantage of using the 50mm manual lens vs. having the zoom and autofocus of the Sony lens. The sharpness was not really any better to my eye, though I imagine there might be specific cases where I could shoot at say 2.8 or 4, and get better background blurring.

Sorry if I am meandering here, but I guess the main question is whether both aperture and focal length are comparable when looking at full-frame or adapted film lenses vs. a lens made for a crop sensor camera. Oh - and does the adapter figure in at all here? Do I lose anything when adapting a lens? I guess I am just trying to figure out whether it's even worthwhile to use my old lenses.

Brian

Hi UHHers. I've been lurking here for a few months, enjoying the wealth of information and the many amazing photos that inspire me and yet make me wonder if I will ever get there.

I began in this hobby almost 40 years ago when I was still in High School. I had a good friend whose dad had a darkroom, and we spent many hours developing film, making B&W prints, and taking more pictures. At that time I had a Minolta SRT-201, and later an XD-5 which I used until after my kids were born, and found that I was shooting mostly snapshots and that I was missing a lot of shots while trying to focus and compose. So for many years I used various point & shoot cameras.

Last year I bought a film scanner & scanned thousands of negatives from the last 40 years, and got them all organized in Lightroom.

Now that that project is done, and my youngest is 13, I have the bug again, and hopefully more time to pursue photography. I have been underwhelmed by the quality of the pictures I was getting from my latest camera, so I started studying the choices. My budget is very tight, but I finally narrowed it down to the Nikon D3400 or the Sony A6000. I finally bit the bullet and bought a used A6000. The 16-50 lens has problems, but the seller says he is sending me another. I also got the 55-210 kit lens and that seems to work fine. I have already ordered a converter so that I can use my old Minolta lenses on the A6000.

Now that I have the technical stuff somewhat sorted out, I really need to get out there and learn photography. Looking back through my old photos, I am disappointed that outside of the snapshots, there are few really nice pictures. Obviously, equipment is only a (small?) part of taking good photos.

I am looking forward to getting outside, learning how to use my new camera, and how to take better pictures.

I hope you are all looking forward to more stupid newbie questions :-)

Brian