A very dark forest scene with an empty freestanding doorframe listing left. There is also a contrasting tree on the left side.

realized the correct way to execute this is to dither to 16 bits? i think? first sky image is no dither second is with. the difference between the two is fucking minuscule and i cant be certain that im not just tricking myself. as you can see my technique is very scientific.

both images processed in darktable, first exported to jpg, the other exported to 16bit tif, imported to gnu imp, dithered to 8 bits, then exported as jpg.
viewed at 1:1 zoom from a distance far enough that the dither artifacts become invisible the second image should theoretically appear to have more gray tones? i'm not really seeing it though. maybe the lx3 takes low bit depth images, maybe its my monitor, maybe this is just a bad image for it (the effect would be most obvious in gradients). actually, the dithered image appears to lose detail in the darkest shadows so ??? perhaps this is a dead end for now

jpg has 8 bits per channel meaning it can display only 256 distinct shades of gray.
camera raws tend to have lots more bits than that. is there a way to fit more of these grays into the evil format we call jpg?
perhaps we can dither the higher bit depth data into the jpg? darktable has a dither option but im not surrrrrrre if its doing what im talking about here. i think this is something i need to play around with in gimp.
my other idea for fitting that higher tonal data into a jpg is to use false colors to represent more gray tones, producing a fun gradient of colors from light to dark??

anyway whatever heres a picture with the darktable dither on auto and with it on 1 bit for fun.

i think i may be done capturing color

i hate photos i hate cameras i hate photography i hate that i'm a dumb broke faggot finding beauty in what is a rich man's game i hate that photos mean nothing to anyone i hate that the more a piece of art has to say the less anyone wants to hear it i hate that i've wasted my precious time on this earth doing this stupid hobby i hate how few people get it i hate that those who do are all as miserable as i am i hate people trying to cheer me up i hate art and i hate myself

^ those words would have been much worse if i did not make the attached vent art

i found a dedicated scanner! controlled via usb! works right out of the box with xsane!

but uhhhh... it sees differently.
in the first image, you can see the wild depth of field that it's capable of
and in the second you can see that it sees through a lens... how my eye would. or how another lens would perceive it.
it's not scanning the projected image from the lens like the epson does. it's... taking a photo much more how a camera with a lens mounted to it already would. and i have NO idea why. i guess it's a different type of scanner? maybe i can mod it to behave the way i want? is this why i see people mention needing a ground glass in the setup? if so then why doesn't the epson need it? sooo many questions.

my hand is a good subject, it knows just how to pose. b&w on the lx3 has been feeling pretty rewarding lately. trying out new ways for editing. i'm liking where i'm heading.

second image is from adapting my f mount 28mm f/2 to the pentax q using a toilet paper roll... it's not a very good experience, and is soft even when i hit the focus out of luck. eh. using any of my higher focal length lenses like that would be a true nightmare, yet... im still tempted to get a F to Q adapter. at least then i could properly tripod the setup

i erased the source file by mistake... this scan will have to live as a screenshot for the rest of times, eh

all the tinkering has paid off, i've got xsane working to control the scanner!

lx3 in a rural setting

hoisted the thumbcutter up on the window and took some backyard photos. looking past all the exposure problems, these shots feel so wild to me even though they're so mundane. feels like there's lots of depth, sense of space? idk

the previous strip of good exposure in a sea of darkness is now a strip of clip with a small gradient of good exposure around it, then quickly fading off, but with much better corner details than the indoor shot.

i do believe this is a scanning problem and not a lens one, because looking back at the scannographs with my nikon lens in them reveals that those tiny image circles also possess the top-bottom vignette. interesting.

while i still do not fully understand the scanner ive seen mentions that there is slight parallaxing as the scanning head moves. maybe this means that at the top and bottom the light comes in at a shallow angle, and suffers loss, then head-on in the center where it's picked up nice and bright. how is this counter-acted? probably through modifying the scanner, which I cannot do with my houses printer/scanner :P

i hunted some thrift stores today but they have piles and piles of combo printer/scanners, no dedicated scanners. soon. soon progress will be able to be made...

fair warning im very sleep deprived right now and may soon catch the flu from my housemates so maybe this is all the ramblings of a mad plushie before certain doom.

brought to you by the world's worst very large format camera

something about my setup creates wicked vignetting with a long horizontal line of good exposure (im guessing the shape is due to the scanning head being a line)

the lens being adapted is the lens from my overhead projector. i learned a nice bit about optics putting it all together based on intuition, took a few hours of fiddling to get to this current setup

a friend has retrieved the Df and she wanted to take pics with it before sending it to me... and uh....
while the shutter fires, the mirror locks up and has to be forced back into place by hand.
so nearly 3 months and like $200 wasted. pissed off about the repair guy saying its fixed and leaving it in this state without even mentioning it. tomorrow when he opens up shop im calling him to ask him what he did and from there uh. i dunno, maybe he'll fix it. but if he's gonna charge me for another repair i'm just gonna cut my losses and try to sell shit off on ebay and see where that lands me i guess.
i'm trying not to despair until i have a clearer picture after talking to the guy tomorrow but this is pretty crushing.

edit: hes gonna look at it, but itll be weeks before my friend heads back into town to give it to him... this things gonna be outta commission longer than its been in commission...

anyway, photos.
moving the lens with the scanning head produces unpredictable warping. i think this is because i'm not moving it perfectly relative to its movement. this produces some very abstract images.

i've also observed that any image focused through the lens is always greyscale. while i dont know much about scanners, i think this is because the scanner reads color by blasting colored lights at whats on the bed and reading the reflection back, so focused images from elsewhere produce no color data.

these shots were taken by a sunny window, indirectly lit. it seems like its kinda easy to blow out the highlights but adjusting aperture easily controls this. the brighter the ambient light the more you can see vague out of focus forms in the background of the shots, at a certain level of ambient dimness things are pretty well isolated.

something something man ray
something something technicalities
proof of concept
featuring my hand seen thru my arsat n 50mm lens, "mounted" to the scanner via a toilet paper roll i've cut to about the flange focal distance of f mount (the focus was missed but for how small it is in frame it matters little)

experiment, made with two 995 files. very unhappy with the result, interesting draft i guess

from december

bled

from december

oh no i forgot–
cheat! fast!

from december
my df might be ready to come back home soon, repair guy says it seems good, he's gonna test it thoroughly tuesday, then it's in the mail if all goes well!