What the Hell is a Diopter?

It has something to do with optics, specifically the optics of eyes. According to the Nikon salesman that visited us during orientation week, the eyes naturally change up to two diopters over the course of the day. What this basically means is that your eyes lose the ability to focus. This is particularly troubling when you are shooting the technical assignment of the session once the light of the day has gone to avoid conflicting lighting of the scene. This means starting a shoot around 8:00 at night. With this particular assignment it also means shooting until at least 2:00 in the morning. This assignment is graded on an element called "critical focus." So, when your eyes lose their diopters, you can't determine if you have "critical focus" which makes you go crazy!!!!

Of the fourteen shots that I have slaved over for the assignment, I would say that probably five of them are out of focus. Match that with the exposure issues due to some extreme bellows compensation and probably seven of the shots need to be reshot. Which means another, oh I don't know, ten hours of work. And that doesn't include the two hours to develop the negatives, another hour for standard printing, and at least five hours for presentation. All this by Wednesday at 9:30 in the morning.

Booyah.