Just “knocking on the door” here, I haven’t seen anything new in this area of the Forum for quite some time?

Here’s a recent re-process of a series shot way back in the good old days of 2018. I’ve tried to sympathetically add a “homage to 1930’s Starlet” portraiture style. Originally a 3/4 Natural Light & Natural Beauty art nude portrait shot RAW in my specific color settings for that genre, this was a cropped to square frame and a little aging and discoloration added in.

And the title? Well, the beautiful models name is Cat, and all portraits shot were Natural Light captures in a Barn.

If there’s anyone home, feedback welcomed. If not, well at least I tried. 😀

I have a Canon 80D but am thinking of upgrading. I mainly take pictures of family activities - sports, school events, vacations, etc and some are low light or far distance. I'm struggling with what features really would be best. I have crop now but should I stay with that or does full frame really give me better options? I think if I'm buying new I should venture into the mirrorless cameras. While my old lenses are not bad, they aren't top of the line either, so I'm open to something different. Any recommendations?

Ricoh, Nikon, Canon, Sony and other camera makers were the only way for people to capture the moment. In 1970 when I was given a Sears/Ricoh camera in High School, very few people carried a camera. Now everybody with a smartphone snaps pictures. Professionals will probably always buy "real cameras" instead of smartphones. They have particular needs and requirements. For most, point and shoot is all that is required to capture the moment.

Are there enough buyers to support an industry that sells to professionals? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Don't get me started on the looming phenomena of AI photography where and idea can produce an image that never happened, like the Pope in a white full-length parka. lol

Those were great Olympus SLR cameras, many pros used them. I have used about every brand and model of SLR, DSLR and mirrorless over the five decades of my career.

One of the standout cameras I owned was the Canon F1 SLR, its camera meter had three meter patterns; center-weighted average metering, selective-area metering, and spot metering.

I used my two Canon F1 when I covered the war in Nicaragua in 1987 between the Contras and Sandinistas. The F1 worked flawlessly under the worst tropical jungle and mountainous war conditions., covered with dirt and mud .

One was loaded with Tri-X B&W film, the other was loaded with Fujicolor ASA 100 film. Our coverage was instrumental in the US Senate cutting off all aid to the Contras, and the long bloody war that had cost many innocent civilians their lives, ended. Our coverage won many awards and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

I used the F1's excellent spot meter the most under harsh lighting conditions of intense light and shadow. Out of respect for the victims, I will only share a couple of the non-gory photos, but I witnessed and photographed some horrible acts and their human tragedies.

1) A mother out in the Nicaragua countryside stands guard over her children in her humble shack of a home. Many innocent civilians were attacked and killed in their homes by the raiding Contras (yes supported by the USA). She flies the flag of the Sandinistas whom she supports while her husband is away as a soldier with the Sandinistas fighting.

2) A Sandinista special forces soldier, barely 17, takes a short breather as we all trek through the jungles and mountains on the look for the Contras. Yes the Sandinistas allowed me and my reporter to be imbedded with their special forces, amazing. Our newspaper the Philadelphia Inquirer also had a reporter-photographer team imbedded with the Contras crossing into Nicaragua from Honduras. We covered both sides of the story, but concluded that if the US stopped funding the Contras who were the former deaths squads of the Somoza dictatorship, the war would end. The US Senate agreed and over President Reagan's objections the Contra aid ended ,and the war ended.

3) Trekking through the jungles below and then climbing up and over the mountains on the Nicaragua/Honduras border with a unit of the Sandinistas Special Forces on the look for the Contras. We did find them.

There were no vehicles for transport in the jungles, everything was on foot for weeks for the soldiers and the reporter and this photographer.

From darker foliage in shadow to bright sunlight in the same frame, it was a great place for the zone system, but there wasn't time for that unfortunately. The Canon F1 spot meter nailed the exposures, I just needed to know where to point it.

BTW, I still have one of those Canon F1 SLRs, still kept in working order. I use it when teaching my university 35mm B&W film course. Still have a few lenses to go with it.

Cheers and best to you.

Works for color, but for BW, it analyzes the shade of gray into zones as in the Ansel Adams zone system. I worked with it years ago. This year it was resurrected by open-source org...
The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. Many man-hours in the darkroom for Ansel Adams's landscapes made him forever famous; few shared his passion and patience.

The 11 zones in Ansel Adams’ system were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle gray, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). Theoretically, each zone represents one f-stop in exposure. You’ll also notice there is then an 11-stop difference between pure black and pure white, with a 7-stop difference between the darkest black with detail and the lightest white with detail."

Wikipedia reports that "In mid-September, 2011, the Light Crafts website went offline without notice. It was reported that Fabio Riccardi, founder of Light Crafts and the primary developer of LightZone, was now working as an Apple.

Good News the zone system was reborn This is especially useful for IR with 720+ nm filter that yields BW images as well as those who love B&W photography. I had it years ago and I started a search... Photoshop has it version that only works in Photoshop. That prompted me to search, I found my old copy in my programs and that gave some direction but I encountered many dead ends until success... I found it and the free download.

"A zone preview at the top of the column divides the image into zones corresponding to these shades of gray. You can use the Zone Mapper to stretch or compress individual tonal ranges, and you will see the changes reflected in both the Zones preview and the image. [Isolates particular zones, shades, as I recall and leaves other zones alone]
By default, the settings are applied to your image globally, but there is also the Regions tool, which allows you to isolate areas of the image and apply corrections only to them. You can draw areas in the form of polygons, splines or Bezier curves."

Made the mistake of walking into a thrift store after using its parking lot. One lonely little camera was on the shelf, an Olympus OM 10 with its 50mm kit lens and a power winder. I need another camera like a hole in the head, but the lady offered it to me for 50% off, and so I walked out $34 poorer and one camera richer. All the controls seem to work just fine. I gave it a quick microfiber once over and used lens wipes on the glass, DL’d the manual and read through it, and loaded a fresh roll of HP5. Going to take a street walk this morning and see what develops. 🙄