**Discovering the Art of Photography with Meta 35**

If you're an avid photographer looking to elevate your workflow and add an extra layer of detail to your images, then Meta 35 is definitely worth checking out. This innovative camera accessory allows users to add metadata to their photos, making it easier to organize and archive them. But what sets Meta 35 apart from other camera accessories? Let's take a closer look.

**The Camera Setup Experience**

One of the standout features of Meta 35 is its intuitive camera setup experience. To get started, simply plug in the device, download the companion software, and start exploring. The process is incredibly straightforward, with clear instructions guiding you through each step. No need to pull out a cheat sheet or memorize complex settings – everything is neatly laid out for you. As I navigated the camera setup menu, I was impressed by how quickly I could access the features I needed. The custom functions section is particularly impressive, allowing you to tailor your camera settings to suit your specific needs.

**Presets and Automation**

One of the most exciting aspects of Meta 35 is its ability to save presets and automate your workflow. With this feature, you can create customized settings for different types of photography, such as portraits or landscapes, and easily switch between them with a few clicks. This saves time and effort, allowing you to focus on what matters most – capturing great images. Plus, the presets are incredibly versatile, making it easy to adapt your camera settings to suit any environment.

**Pricing and Value**

While Meta 35 may seem like an investment at first glance, I firmly believe that its value far outweighs the cost. At $150, this device provides a wealth of benefits, including cable connectivity, software integration, and advanced metadata management. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, Meta 35 is an essential tool for any serious photographer. And with compatibility with seven different cameras, you can use it with your existing gear without breaking the bank.

**Support and Customer Service**

Meta 35's customer support is another area where they truly shine. When I reached out to my friend Pete, a fellow photographer who had experience with Meta 35, he reported some initial issues with the device communicating with his camera. However, Mena 35 promptly stepped in to resolve the issue, providing excellent service and support. This kind of dedication to customer satisfaction is music to any business owner's ears.

**The Verdict**

In conclusion, Meta 35 is a game-changer for photographers looking to take their workflow to the next level. With its intuitive setup experience, presets, and automation capabilities, this device makes it easier than ever to manage your metadata and streamline your photography process. While it may come with a higher price tag, I firmly believe that the value Meta 35 provides far outweighs the cost. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, this is an investment worth considering.

**A Word from the Author**

As I put Meta 35 through its paces, I couldn't help but feel impressed by the company's commitment to quality and customer satisfaction. From the initial setup process to the final product, every aspect of Mena 35 has been carefully considered to ensure a seamless user experience. If you're looking for an innovative solution that will elevate your photography game, then Meta 35 is definitely worth checking out.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet's talk about scanning for a second now scanning is obviously a very important step in the process of developing film where you're going to digitize it and bring it into the computer and this is probably the single thing that I get asked the most about in conjunction with doing this show and the truth is and you can see my scanner behind me I do not have a very fancy scanner in fact it's very old and at some point I'll have to replace it simply because the software won't be able to keep up because that's getting old too I've got an Epson 4870 and it's something I'd recommend not necessarily but scanners aren't like cameras there's not a new scanner out every 6 weeks uh to check out and look at specs on and most of the affordable options for people as far as scanners go are going to be flatbed scanners now we're shooting 35mm film today and 35mm is not exactly the easiest thing to do on a flatbed scanner it does create problems sometimes with keeping the film flat and there are other options available for me I know how to get really good scans using the scanner I'm going to tell you a little bit of what my secret is to that so that's why I have not upgraded to something else I know that there are other options and you guys might look into things like the pack on or even some of the Nikon Cool scan stuff that's just built for 35 mm if you do a lot of that I don't do exclusively 35 mm and I don't do it enough to justify the cost that it would go in for me to buy an expensive scanner so that's really why I haven't done it so the flatbed works for me um get something decent you don't have to spend a lot of money but I'm going to tell tell you what the secret is to getting good scans for me it comes down to what the software is doing now here's the deal when you set it up to automatically do scans um generally it's going to do things like uh you know they're going going to be digitally but it's going to do things like sharpen your images autocrop them try to fix the levels and it's kind of like when you go into Photoshop and just hit the auto button and let it do its thing sometimes it works most of the time it doesn't you're going to want to get more specific so for me the key to getting really good scans is to turn as much off in that software as you possibly can this means I don't use digital ice um generally what I will do is I will go through and I will set the auto exposure to see what it does nine times out of 10 the software that comes with this Epson scanner generally tries to overexpose highlights and underexpose shadows so in essence the Shadows are too dark and the highlights go too bright now remember anything you do on that scan is not something you can undo once you bring it into whatever editor you're using whether it's Lightroom or photoshop so it's really important to scan with as many options as possible so a lot of times when I bring in my scans they look a little on the flat side that's because I want to be able to go in and do curves adjustments uh D Dodge and burn and do all of my light related stuff inside the software myself and this goes for sharpening as well a lot of times these things can oversharpened there's no way you can get rid of it and it becomes kind of a mess so that's really the secret I think to getting good scans on a scanner is bringing it in and allowing yourself the most options as possible now there's a couple different ways you can scan you can do it from inside Photoshop I prefer just to use the Standalone app as bad as it is because it will batch scans so I can get up to 24 exposures on the flatbed at one time and then I'll go in and I'll go ahead and scan all of those if it's a roll of 36 then I have to do another batch of uh 12 to get in there but then that's it and I'm good to go um the only other thing and that I want to show you in a second because I've started using um some software from a company called meta 35 which will add metadata into your scans and it's very useful and we'll talk about that in just a second because I think what they're doing is really pretty cool uh and it adds a lot of functionality if you're shooting film to what you can do when you are scanning so anyway when I do that as a second step what I like to do is have a whole batch of Tiff files that I can use and then I will go in after I've used meta 35 and do some more work in addition to that let's talk for just a second about metadata now metadata is something that if you shoot a digital camera you probably don't think much about because so much of it is automated when you make an exposure uh the camera automatically embeds all that information into the image file so this could be everything from exposure information so for instance what your aperture setting was what the focal length on the lens was what the iso setting was what shutter speed whether or not the flash fired you can even have copyright information in there you can put GPS data and location information in there just depends on how fancy your setup is and what you've got going on now if you shoot film this is a little more difficult because there is no way inherently of scanning images and assigning metadata to the images that youve scanned until now now one thing I want to preface this by saying is the last show I did my little review of the Nikon F5 and one of the things I mentioned about this camera and there's a couple other models from several manufacturers that do this as well but it was very crude at the time but one thing it did was it kept an internal text file of some basic settings so like focal length of the lens the aperture shutter speed ISO settings so basic stuff that could be turned into metadata but what it did is it just saved it as a text file now this is stuff that back in the old film days um when you were learning as a photographer a lot of us or I did anyway kept a notebook and when you would go out and learn how to make exposures particularly when you're using an external meter or something you would write all that stuff down so you could refer back to it later when you're looking at your pictures and so anyway when we caught kind of into that late step of the end of the 35mm camera lines um that was something that all of a sudden they were starting to do internally and of course when we went to digital you could embed that into a file and it didn't even matter now one of the things I've started using lately is some software by a company called meta 35 and when you actually buy the meta 35 stuff uh comes in this box here you get and this is really cool you get the PCI cable which will plug into the back of the camera so this is the PC link so you plug that in and the other end of this this is really interesting too it's just a little 8 in connection and it goes into a USB terminal and and then you plug that into your computer and so what I want to do is I want to show you how I'm using this and how powerful this is if you're interested in converting that text viol it'ss inside the camera into your images so what we're looking at here is the meta 35 application interface and one thing I want to mention before we start using this that is very important is that the file types that meta 35 supports are basically JPEG and Tiff files they do not have support right now at this time for Photoshop PSD files so the reason I'm mentioning this to you is this is very important that you put this in the right place in your workflow so typically what I do is I batch scan from the Epson software and I batch scan those into naming convention and ordered Tiff files and so what I'll do is I will go in and I will actually batch the Tiff files and then I will take that and then open them as Photoshop files now you could conceivably do this at the end of your process as well when you have JPEG files that you're ready to distribute on the internet but I think most people probably like to keep that photoshop file so you need to do these as Tiff files first so the first thing we're going to do is we need to import the metadata off the camera and I'm going to show you how easy this is to do all I need to do is plug in the PCI link here or the PC terminal and we're going to go ahead and turn the camera on so we got power going there and I will take the other end and I will just simply plug this into the USB port and uh once that's in I'm going to go into the software here I'm going to say import data it's going to connect to the camera and you can see that our roll of film is imported or the text file for the roll of film anyway see it says F5 number 10 up here and you can see as we scroll down here um you can see shutter speeds f- stop number and then there's an include yes or no anyway as you go through so anyway very cool the next thing I need to do is load my images so I'm going to say load images I'm going to go to my desktop select this folder say open and it's going to bring all of my images in uh it takes just a second to do cuz I did load Tiff files here we go once the images are in um you know with my scanner it's fairly foolproof but if for some reason you do have these the wrong order you can select an image and you can use the move up or move down arrows to Resort them um it really is easier if you have them numbered correctly so it just brings them in automatically and you can also do some basic adjustments with rotation in here but anyway this is what we've done and so the other cool thing you can do is appear where it says films on Roll notes you can put notes on the roll of film for some reason if you want to put a location or something like that to help you remember because you can archive all of these into the software and if you need to recall them later for any reason and resync them um and that'll give you some rather than just saying RO number 10 it might clue you in better as to what goes in there now that field doesn't actually go into the metadata of anything but the fields below do so you can see where I have this image selected and you can fill this out so for Content um this is my deep LM test shoot uh and my description I just put test shoot for the Nikon F5 along with meta 35 Kodak T-Max 100 Rod andol semi so I like being able to put this into the image because one of the things that I like to be able to remember about images later U that I have a hard time doing now with my back Catal is I want to remember what developer I used sometimes and what the film type was and so I used to have a way of putting the film type at least into the naming convention that I used um but anyway the developer's not in there so this is a great way to do that using metadata the other fields you have you have details in here you can use keywords to do that maybe that's a great place to do that too so you could go search that later using Bridge or Lightroom or whatever it is you're using so if you want to search keywords for rodol for instance I could go do that or semi or whatever it is that I want to do um location obviously is in here and then you can put your copyright information in here as well you can set this as a default so you don't have to type it in each time which is kind of nice and you can tick apply to whole role and it will apply to the entire role so anyway that is very nice to do and then when you're ready to sync up your metadata it's really easy all you have to do is click here what says embed data it's going to go say backing up images and it's going to go through and what it's going to do is going to take that text file and you can see it's thinking and it's going to embed all of that in as metadata into your image files and it is that easy to use um I'm really impressed with this because you know this is a really um challenging thing I think for photographers who have a large catalog of film related images that they're having digitized and so for me obviously developer and film type for instance is important to me it may not be important to somebody else but if you're a location photographer location might be important and that might be something you want to be able to have searchable or whatever it is you're shooting portraits you want people's names in there so being able to put that into the metadata is very interesting and I think very essential to do the other thing it's nice is when I upload these to flickers that flicker will extract metadata I want to take a second and give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at audible.com if you're not familiar with audible.com they offer over 180,000 downloadable titles of audiobooks across all types of literature including fiction non-fiction and periodical so if there's something you're interested in reading or listening to in this case audible probably has you covered if you're like me and you like to read but you don't have a lot of time to read audible.com is a great way it's a subscription based service and basically you get a book a month and it's a great way of passing time at the gym or on a commute or any other place where you'd like to listen to audiobooks and they have a deal going right now for Art of Photography viewers where you can get your first title absolutely free what you want to do is head over to from go ahead and sign up for the service and you have 30 days to check it out absolutely free if you decide audible is not right for you no hard feelings you get to keep the book and the book is yours 100% for free so go over there and check it out once again that URL is you know the way you go through and I mentioned that these custom settings are a little bit of a pain in the rear end um if I plug this in cuz what the deal is is you need to pull out the cheat sheet and you need to know what number the setting is and then what your options are for that setting so once I have the camera in I'm going to go ahead and turn that on as well if I go over here and click camera setup this is how easy this is so it's going to Blink for a minute while it talks to the camera and I can go through here Banks and IDs all functions I can go in and look at autof function autofocus functions only exposure function functions only this makes it really quick and you don't need that cheap sheet and all that scrolling to go in and as I mentioned when I reviewed the F5 one thing that's nice about the way Nikon did design this camera is that they put most of the stuff in the custom functions it's not stuff you're necessarily it's more stuff it's it's basically options of how you want the camera set up so they're not the kind of things you're going to go want to change on the fly a lot but if you do then it's really nice to be able to do this and you can actually save these as presets and reload them to the camera so if you have the camera set up a certain way for a certain type of shoot like if you're Outdoors doing street photography and then you have a different setup that you want to do for night photography and a different setup that you want to do for Studio portraits you can actually go save these as presets and it's very cool everything I've tested with this F5 so far has been really impressive and uh I'm really um seriously impressed with what meta 35 have done I think they do some really outstanding work and they provide something that is very beneficial if you happen to have one of these cameras um the only other thing I want to discuss with this is the price point on this because meta 35 is not the cheapest thing in the world it's about $150 and what that gets you though is it gets you the cable connector but you're also getting the software and the ability to do all this stuff and so really I think for me um when you consider if you're the kind of person who shoots a lot of film and you do want this step of being able to add metadata to your images I think the $150 is probably worth it you're going to be able to use it with any of the I can't remember was about 7 or eight cameras that that it's compatible with um and mainly if you're shooting even with one for a long period of time to be able to switch your settings around with the camera setup and be able to add metadata to your images and then be able to Archive those text files that let's face it right now probably nobody's doing anything with if you're an F5 or F6 shooter or n90 or whatever it is that you've got um to be able to add that into your process and your workflow I think is a very nice thing to be able to do so yes it is a little pricey but I think on the whole when you consider what you're getting out of that I think it's probably for some people just as valuable as the camera that they paid for or buying a lens it's another object in that and so anyway uh their support is excellent nice folks um my friend Pete who is a fan of the show who I met when I did the Atlanta Meetup um he has had some experience with this as well and he had some trouble with the thing talking to the camera and it turned out it was a cable that needed to be replaced Mena 35 took care of it no questions asked and uh I think they're just a really good outstanding company with a very interesting products so anyway that's it and if you guys got any questions on this or have any comments please leave them below the video and uh as always if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so that you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos we do here until the next episode I'll see you later\n"