Do You Have Your Crop Lines Yet?
December/14/2007 Cool Stuff!
During the film era I was never very tidy with my cameras. But that changed since I went digital, because I've seen the repercussions of letting dust hit the sensor: ugly microbe-like specimens that you have to clone off your images. Last week I noticed that some particularly nasty stuff had taken up residence in my trusty Canon 5-D, so while I was gone last week, Jim sent it off to be cleaned by the folks at Crop Lines. When I got it back, it was clean as a pin, and there was a brochure about their focus-screen etching product enclosed. That's when it hit me that I've never written about this wonderful service that really speeds up your workflow.
What Crop Lines does is take the guesswork out of cropping in your digital 35mm camera by etching crop lines right on your camera's focus screen. What you will see through the viewfinder is clean, crisp, lines that you can see even in low-light situations. I chose to have a both a square format and a perfect 8x10 format etched on my screen. These formats are especially helpful for those of us who were trained to "get it in the camera" so that we didn't have to mask our negatives. Digital drove me nuts for a long time, because I couldn't see the format, thus I had to spend time cropping, which to me is the workflow equivalent of ditch digging. When you crop in the camera, you can use ProSelect's instant cropping feature, and that alone will save you a huge amount of time. Learn more by logging on to www.croplines.com, or call 815-477-3366. And don't forget that they do sensor cleaning too!