I mainly carry on my camera gear. Ten years ago, though, I had packed a camera bag inside my hard-side suitcase. It had a Nikon body and three lenses in it. The camera bag was not there when I opened the luggage in Tucson. I have always figured that it was stolen by a TSA employee who saw the camera gear in the x-ray check. I was pretty angry, but never received any compensation from the airline or TSA.
On the other hand, I had a Nikon body and a couple lenses packed in my suitcase on a flight to Paris. My bag never appeared on the luggage carousel. After walking around Orly for a while looking for someone to work the issue, I saw my old Samsonite bag set aside on a stopped carousel, lying wide open. Apparently the latches on the bag broke, probably when it was coming off the plane. All my clothes were still there, as was the photo gear. That time American Airlines eventually paid for a new bag.

I found that on my 5+ year old PC the built-in SD card reader is connected via a USB2.0 interface, which limits transfer rates to USB 2 speeds.
I was able to increase picture download speed 5-8x by using a $10 ANKER USB 3.0 data card reader which I plugged into a USB 3.0 slot. That is a big improvement when downloading a couple hundred RAW pictures.
Even my built-in SDHC reader is way faster than plugging a cable into the camera. That would be the absolute last choice.

I was incredulous when I read in the user guides for my Nikon VR lenses that VR should be turned off for use on a tripod. I ran some tests, and the guide instructions were correct. Images taken on a tripod with VR enabled were noticeably blurry. I'm not sure I understand why that happens, but the effect is clear and and the reduced sharpness is quite evident.
Maybe later models are better, but I have three Nikon lenses with VR and I saw the loss-of-sharpness in all three when I ran tests.

I sprung for a Nikon 60/2.8 macro, and I'm very glad I did. It is easily the sharpest lens in my camera bag. I'm shooting with a DX camera (D7100) and find that the 60mm focal length is also about ideal for portraits.
What I really put the lens to work on, though, is taking pictures of troubled parts on airplanes I am working on. The detail available in ultra-closeups is just amazing. Helps me figure out the best repair method to apply.

Cheers,

Jerry

That table appears to be a little obfuscation.

Totals of cost look like they add up to the wholesale cost, BUT:
- The number provided for refineries operations cost includes the refinery profit. That is where the bulk of the profit that any oil company like Exxon or Shell comes from.
- Oil cost is from Alaska crude. However, there are hundreds of oil wells in California, and the product from those wells is cheaper than Alaska crude.
- The $0.02/gallon underground tank fee is applied to all gasoline. Almost no refiners or wholesalers pay that tax. IT is almost entirely liited to retailers who have underground tanks.

Bottom line - wholesale gasoline in California is a money making machine. If it wasn't, the oil companies would either leave the business or raise prices until they once again made a profit.

Cheers,

Jerry

I don't think a UV filter on the camera lens will have any helpful effect. When UV light strikes a phosphorescent surface, the phosphors absorb the UV and re-emit energy in longer wavelength visible colors. There probably isn't enough UV light coming from your subjects to make a difference in imaging.

If you are using flash, a UV filter over the FLASH head might be useful. That would reduce the UV from your flash hitting the day-glo surfaces. But I doubt seriously that is actually your poblem.

It seems likely to me that what you are fighting is not phosphorescence, but rather retro-reflectance. Many kids garments have retroreflective materials coated on, mainly for safety reasons (so car drivers can see them at night). You can think of the retro-reflective stuff as little glass beads, like on a slide projection screen, or a traffic sign. They have the special optical property that light hitting them reflects back mostly in the direction exactly opposite to the arrival vector - that is right back at the source. If you are using on-camera flash that reflected light is the almost certainly the sources of your image quality problem. It is easy to correct. Here are some options:
1. Turn off the flash altogether and use available light. This approach is cheap and will give you the most natural-looking result. It will also eliminate those nasty thin shadows below stuff in the pictures.
2. If you feel like you have to use flash, use a hot-shoe mount with a rotate-able head, and rotate the head to point at the ceiling. That way the light from your flash reflects off the ceiling, which will illuminate your subjects more normally.
3. Use two or more off-camera strobes, and trigger them with RF from your camera. I have done this many times, mostly using strobes with either umbrellas or soft boxes to spread out the light source so I don't get hard shadow edges on my subjects. This is the pro approach, but requires schlepping and setting up a set of portable studio-style strobes.
4. It's possible to use smaller strobes like a pair of Nikon SB-5000 AF Speedlights mounted on tripods. The off-camera lights can radio-trigger from the camera. Because the small lights are pretty much point sources, they will create un-flattering shadows, and you will occasionally miss a shot because you trip the shutter while the battery-powered flashes are still re-cycling. A pro flash set with AC-power (like in option 3) will recycle almost instantly, so you don't miss shots.

Hope that this helps.

Have to disagree with MtnMan. The laws of physics apply to diffraction limits regardless of lens quality. The diffraction limit, defined by Airy disk (the nominal size of the image blur from a theoretical point source) can be calculated as 2.44 * wavelength * f-number. To pick a wavelength, I would use yellow light, because it is not as short as blue light nor as long as red light. The sodium yellow line is at 589 nanometers.

2.44 * 589E-9 * 16 = 2.3E-5 meters, or .02 mm. Does that matter? If you have a lens that is capable of 60 line pairs per millimeter (which I think the Tokina is) the resolution limit is around .016mm. Since nominal resolution limit of 0.016 mm is better than the Airy disk size 0.023 mm at f/16 you are in fact making at least some reduction in the available lens resolution.

The general rule of thumb for best sharpness is that any quality lens will show best acutance (combination of resolution and contrast) stopped down about two stops from wide open. For teh f2.8 Tokina, that would be about f/5.6.

How does that compare to the sensor pixel size? On the D7100, the sensor is nominally 24mm (actually 23.7??), and the image is about 6000 pixels wide. 24/6000 = 0.004 mm, way smaller than the Airy disk size at F/16. Note that with the D7100, you might need a lens with a resolution of 125 line pairs per mm to actually take advantage of the full camera resolution.

Practically speaking, my pictures did not get noticeably sharper when I upgraded from a D90 (12 megapixels) to the D7100 (24 megapixels). I have only one lens that I think has has resolution high enough to surpass the D90 camera limit.

NOT a helicopter. That is a gyrocopter, entirely different type of aircraft. Although there is usually a small clutch that lets the engine start the rotor spinning prior to the takeoff roll, in flight the rotor is powered only by the airflow through it - it is windmilling. There is no collective or cyclic pitch control on the rotor, just a pair of rotational bearings. That craft looks like an old Bensen gyrocopter, and appears to have the original McCulloch 2-stroke engine that Bensen designed the craft around. That's a 4 cylinder two stroke engine, good for around 75 HP, originally designed to power target drones (think very short design life). Bensen produced these gyros for about 30 years, from 1956 to about 1987.

Are you wanting to get multiple flashes to show an event in process? I don't know of any normal camera strobe that will do that. Camera strobes are generally designed to light up until they have reached a given exposure level, or run out of stored energy, in a single pulse.

Camera strobes (or off-camera flash) have relatively brief pulse times, generally less than one millisecond. That is probably okay for "stopping" things in motion that are moving less than five or ten feet per second (the motion blur would be 120 inches/sec *1/1000 second, or .12 inches at most for these cases).

If your goal is to stop faster events, you will need a faster flash and some kind of flash trigger. Super-short flash photography is quite an art form, and generally requires special-purpose tools to accomplish. If you want to take images that show multiple positions of a moving object, you would want a flash with a short duration and high repetition rate. I have used old "Strobotach" units for that. You can occasionally find a working strobotach on Ebay. Note that the individual flashes aren't very bright, so you end up working mostly in the dark.

Good luck!

Jerry

If you are using a camera with TTL metering, the meter should make compensation for filters unnecessary, as long as you are using panchromatic film.

The extra stops needed for a red filter applied when using films that have low red sensitivity. IIRC, Kodak's Verichrome was such a film, with low red sensitivity. Pictures taken with Verichrome showed artifacts like very dark lips and almost black-looking roses. I think that the old Verichrome emulsion was replaced by Verichrome Pan in the early sixties.

If your contacts look good - what light did you use to make them? A #2 filter, or no filter is what I'd generally use for contact sheets. That may be telling you that the issue is with darkroom lighting. I imagine the exposure time for your contact sheet was brief, just a few seconds. If the exposure time was substantially longer for enlargements, so was the exposure to safelight, which could wash out your prints.

Other ways to lose contrast in enlarging you might check:
a. Take a close look at your enlarger lens. is it clean - or is there any fog on the glass. What f-stop did you use? I prefer two stops closed from wide open. Wider and you get some excess flare, smaller and sharpness is reduced due to diffraction.
b. Assuming you have a condenser enlarger, check the condenser position. Is it correct for the focal length lens you are using for enlarging
c. If your lens board has a plastic stem to carry light out to illuminate the lens f-stop, make sure that the silvering at the 45 degree end is intact, and that the red filter at top is also solid - else that feature is passing white light to your easel.

Good Luck!

Jerry

I agree with the PP comment about checking your safelight. Take a piece of unexposed paper, and a same-size piece of cardboard, and put the paper with an inch or so exposed on your enlarger easel. Every 30 seconds pull the cardboard back to expose another inch or so of the print paper. In five minutes you will have ten progressively exposed stripes on your paper - process normally.

The exposure lines will tell you how long you can safely hold paper in your darkroom on the enlarger baseplate. Just count how many stripes appear totally white, subtract one, and multiply by 30 seconds, and you have the max safe open time in your darkroom with your safelight. It may be less than a minute, especially if you have any light leaks in the darkroom.

Light leaks can come from outside the room, or from the enlarger itself. Look carefully for any light that is escaping the lamphouse or bellows. Small leaks can usually be fixed with darkroom tape (like black masking tape).

Ideally, your developer tray area will be lit much less than the enlarger area.

Good luck!

Jerry

I am thinking that if you used a hand-held light meter you may have neglected to add the filter factor to your metered exposure. Those pictures look to me like classic underexposed film.

That said, what was your agitation schedule in development, and how was temperature controlled? Was the film fresh?

Poor agitation can cause low contrast, particularly in thick emulsions. In a small tank I agitate 10 seconds every 30.

Low developer temperature can result in under-development. You added 10% "per Kodak recommendation"? What was the basis for the recommended extension?

Old (out-of-date) film can have an overall grey tone that robs contrast. Old developer can have lower activity, and result in under-developed film. Were both film and developer fresh?

I agree with the previous post that a #4 filter is seldom needed with properly exposed/developed negatives, particularly of your high-contrast subject matter.

The last thing I'd check is lens condition - is there any fog or fungus visible on the internal glass surfaces? Any kind of contamination in the lens will kill contrast. You last picture looks like it might indicate a lens problem, due to flare.

Hope this helps!

Jerry

You might try to see if you can find a known-good battery. If the battery in your D90 is tired (entirely possible with a ten-year-old D90) it might have enough voltage to show as fully charged, but still not be able to supply sufficient current to operate the on-camera flash or focus motors. It may be a long shot, but is one issue that could cause both the dark pics and lack of autofocus.

The D90 needs a certain amount of ambient light to autofocus. If the lens is no more than f3.5, it will want a pretty well-lit room to focus inside.
If you are using a zoom lens, try using the minimum focal length. If it's an 18-105 lens, for example, use 18mm. That will make it easier for the camera to focus in poor lighting.

This is a little obvious, but have you taken off the lens cover? Nevermind. I do see some details in your photo
It looks as if the camera was set to use flash. Did the flash door open, and did the flash go off?It's possible that the flash door is stuck down, or that you accidentally held it closed.
You might check what ISO (sensitivity) the camera is set to. If it's set to 100 indoor photos with the kit lens won't be getting enough light. Try changing to 1600. Or just try taking some pictures outdoors in daylight.
Make sure that the lens aperture is set to Auto, if it is settable. Not an issue if it is a G lens.
Try dis-mounting and re-mounting the lens on the camera. Not likely, but it's possible that corrosion on the lens contacts is preventing the camera from operating the lens properly.
Hope this helps at least a little.
Jerry