This reply was written in a great hurry. And supper is ready. If anything is wrong or unclear let me know...
> On Jun 7, 2019, at 5:00 PM, David Eustace <dave.eustac...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Nixie's aren't too difficult with a good camera phone, just trial and error - > VFDs are hard as hell though. Any tips on photographing those would be very > much appreciated. I use multiple exposures to photograph objects with lights. There are two ways of combining exposures. One is to load them into separate layers in an application like Photoshop and mask out the areas you wish to composite. This can be time consuming but it works. The second is to use High Dynamic Range (HDR). This requires bracketing several exposures one or two EV apart and processing them in an HDR app. Photoshop has some HDR features but I find it to be too limited for my purposes. There are a number of specialized HDR apps available now. They fall into two camps: inexpensive ones that don't give you very many variables to play with and spit out generic and often unnatural looking images and expensive ones that can be tweaked to death to create more realistic images. Here are pictures of two Systron Donner devices that I processed in Photomatix Pro: https://www.astarcloseup.com/2019/06/systron-donner-6052-frequency-counter.html https://www.astarcloseup.com/2019/05/systron-donner-8350-readergenerator.html These required five exposures and took about about twenty minutes each to process. The timecode unit is a bit fuzzy because I didn't have time to set the camera up properly for low-noise images and it took a while to clean it up in Photoshop. The frequency counter was done the right way with the camera configured like this: * Camera on tripod with remote release switch * ISO set to 100 * Aperture set to f18 * Autofocus and image stabilization turned off; camera focused manually in live view * Custom white balance calibrated with a rather expensive gray card Given the relatively low ambient light some of the exposures took over 30 seconds, hence the need for the complicated, "everything set to manual" configuration. I ended up with exposures that were very low noise and had good depth of field. Unnatural HDRs aren't necessarily bad. Take a look at my Halloween setup: https://www.astarcloseup.com/2011/11/halloween-2011.html Finally, here's an article about photographing Nixies on the JB-Electronics site: http://www.jb-electronics.de/html/elektronik/nixies/n_artikel03.htm?lang=en Terry Bowman, KA4HJH "The Mac Doctor" "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."—Roy Batty, Blade Runner -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/CB7D5CE7-1AF5-4AC7-8450-B99900B67E4D%40gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
