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| Danger zone! |
While I've been impressed with the quality of the pictures you can get from the Samsung Galaxy S II's camera, and I appreciate the spontaneity afforded by essentially always having a camera in my pocket, I finally gave in and went shopping for an old DSLR to use for when I actually set forth with the intent of taking pictures.
I kinda fell out of anything like real photography twenty-some years ago. Working in photo labs and as a photographer's assistant, I had access to cheap processing (a very important thing before the days of digital; ask your parents, kids) and so I burned up a ton of film for a young, broke kid. There's a cardboard box in the attic full of negatives, and somewhere up there is my old Canon AE-1 Program and my ML point-'n'-shoot. When the employee discounts ended, however, so did the picture-taking, and I never really took it up again even after getting my first digicam, a Sony Mavica that took pictures on 3.5" floppies (again, ask your parents, kids), back in late '01.
I got a brace of old Rebel bodies at very reasonable prices, a fixed 50 and an 18-135 zoom for lenses, and I've been starting to reacquaint myself with doing something other than pointing and poking. We'll see if the bug bites all over again.
44 comments:
We still got our Mavica with the floppy thingie...It's the camera of last resort now, though.
Rich in NC
Heh. My Mavica is in a box in the attic.
As a former film shooter, the thing that got me back into photography in the digital age was Photoshop. Stuff that used to take hours to accomplish in the darkroom can now be done in nanoseconds. People complain that it's complicated, but if you understand the underlying principles of photography it is very intuitive. Find yourself a copy and give it a whirl.
Alath
With film photography, the professional's biggest "secret" was a willingness to burn lots and lots of film, and then throw out over 90% of the shots. They also had to have sufficient artistic vision to find good camera angles and pick the right shots to keep, but simply having a large enough budget for film and processing gave them a considerable advantage over someone who couldn't charge it off as a business expense. Digital photography gives everyone the same capacity to keep shooting until they get it right.
Unfortunately, cheap digital photography also means that Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is dreck) has become too optimistic. Even if no one would ever pay for your work, it no longer stops you from continuing to do it - and posting it on the internet.
I wish I had the talent for photography but I'm not creative enough. As a developer I've always thought the default battleship grey you get for controls in Visual Studio was just fine.
I still make feeble attempts. I sent you a pic on Facebook recently. Don't know if you got it.
Still have my Canon A1 with 120mm lens, Tamron 80-200 mm zoom, 300 and 500 telephoto lens. Still works great and when I get pics developed I get a free CD with'em so I can upload. JPEGs are nice but physical pics and real books will never be obsolete.
I LOVE being able to take 100's of shots to get 2 or 3 good pics. That's what finally got me back in to taking pics. Once kids came along I had to stop with the experimental pics back in the 80's. Couldn't afford the film.
Am I the only person who thinks it's odd for a Navy plane to be at an museum for an Air Force pilot? (Or was Grissom Navy...and the B-58 is out of place??? Nope...USAF Lt. Col) Odd...but a welcome addition!!! :-)
I was trained at taxpayers expense (Thank You!)to take good photos with both film and trons. There are now affordable digital cameras that compare favorably to my AE-1, but only just.
I learned film photography helping my ex FIL to shoot crime scenes.
I was wrangled into shooting a wedding once, loathed it, and the wedding photos looked like crime scenes. Those people learned when someone says "That's not really my thing" they should LISTEN.
Now I take pictures almost solely to demonstrate the function (or lack therof) of something. I keep thinking about getting a decent digital SLR and learning to take photographs like normal people.
Ah, yes, the Canon AE-1. I had/have (it's still around) the Minolta XD-11, which was a nice-handling camera. It's also been for me about 20 years since I did much photography, and I occasionally contemplate taking it up again, but I lie down in a dark room until the urge passes.
And the word verification thingy here is getting really bad. It's puisée iesmalc.
That first "e with the dealy on it is an "e with acute" if it sailed the other direction it would be a "grave", as in the W.C.Fields movie, "the Bank Dick" where he played W.C. Fields, as Egbert Sousé with the running joke, "accent grave over the "e"
What's next? word verifications of embedded pictures of landscapes?
Og,
Yeah...I took pictures for my future b-in-law's wedding. Pics from the rehersal all came back with red-eye and I was sick to my stomach waiting for the wedding pics to come back. They turned out "ok"...yah get what you pay for. But NEVER, EVER AGAIN!!!
it's annoying to have like 60 film camers that were really high end in their day and which now are worse than useless. I would LOVE to have a thin film sensor that could be put into one of my old mamiya RB67s or even one of the funky old rolleis.
I LOVED my AE-1 Program, and hated getting rid of it before I moved to Japan in the late '80s. Never did pick up photography after that (sad face).
Congratulations on picking up photography again. This is however bad. You already collect guns, camera gear also lends itself to collecting. (At a recent camera show I exited over 20 pounds heavier with more than a dozen film cameras and lenses that I did not own before I went in. Bought new they would have been thousands, in 2013, less than $200 for all, but still fun to play with. And I did not have to show a permit for anything....) The following may help when the inevitable cross over between hobbies happens:
http://www.dantestella.com/technical/leica-fwb.html
@og (the wedding photos looked like crime scenes) Hah! Some weddings should be illegal.
Always fun to revisit former hobbies and interests, especially with the new technology. I had both the Canon and the Mavica -- great minds think alike! I always liked how the Mavica was like a little view camera, I used it for my first forays on Ebay.
I got back into taking photographs a while ago, buying a little point-and-shoot. I was so impressed that I bought a Pentax DSLR so that I could use some of my old lenses from my jen-you-wine antique Pentax SLR's on it.
While an interesting concept, it turns out that the adaptor required to put a Pentax-thread-mount lens onto the new Pentax quick-release isn't all that handy (although the good ones come with the tool you need to remove it). And then most of the auto features don't work, so you're back to mostly-manual exposures. It's still fun, and those old pieces of Takumar glass were pretty incredible (my favorite lens is a 185mm f2.8, which was pretty fast for those days).
I'll agree with everybody else that being able to burn pixels without regard to the cost of film makes it much easier to get one or two good shots for the hundred or so pictures I take.
A side benefit is being able to copy a whole pile of pictures onto a stick drive, put it in my pocket to take out to my Mom's and show here the pictures on her (new, digital) TV.
Be careful - Canon kit / starter lenses have a high suckage rate. And hence are often available cheap.
If you still have your lenses from your AE-1, certain digital Canon bodies can use them. Bodies are disposable, lenses are precious.
I used to do film photography, but film and I never got along real well. Then hubby bought me my first point and shoot and I was off :D Have upgraded to a Cannon Rebel T3i and so far I am loving it. Being able to take lots of pics for that one good one or two and not spend $$$$ is very nice.
Miniature faking is a pretty fun effect of photography, which I was not familiar with until I started to research what was going on in the opening credit scenes of Sherlock.
There's a great All State commercial that does it with tilt shift photography. Fun.
"As a former film shooter, the thing that got me back into photography in the digital age was Photoshop. Stuff that used to take hours to accomplish in the darkroom can now be done in nanoseconds. People complain that it's complicated, but if you understand the underlying principles of photography it is very intuitive. Find yourself a copy and give it a whirl.
Alath"
Another alternative, if you don't want to lay down the cash for Photoshop, is The Gimp. It does something like 80-90% of what Photoshop does, while being cheap as free.
What markm said. The best thing about digital is the near-0 marginal cost of a shot.
That's also, if you're not thoughtful, the worst thing.
It's the diametric opposite of shooting, say, medium format film, where pressing that shutter release costs you a dollar, all told.
og :You could make that happen.
(http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/738545-REG/Silvestri_7006_7006_Adapter_for_Mamiya.html, http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/823017-REG/Mamiya_010_05901A_Leaf_Aptus_II_22_Digital.html)
But it'll cost like $8,500 all together, making it ... perhaps unwise.
(Me, I'd like a notional thin-film digital insert for my stupid folding MF cameras, or maybe for my F3. But I'm a sucker for waist-level viewers...)
Great Move, The DSLR sensor is sooo big compared with a P&S, images will look so much better and available light is easier. Shoot a lot and play! Editing is fun, I still use Photoshop Elements (original, no number, they are up to 11 now and its still under a C-note.)
Shoot, Play, Compute!
When I was young I was using an Argus C3 to take pictures. Now all you kids get offa my lawn!
Robert: do you know there were 13 different models of the C3? And I have almost every one. A damned fine old brick, that.
My neighbor is a big fan of Lightroom, it's like Photoshop was intended to be before it got diverted and perverted by all the tacked-on hipster designer-crap and layers of minutiae. I gave him my (old-circa '03 layoff) Nikon Coolscan slide-scanner in trade for a Wacom tablet that I can actually use to draw. And it's less stuff to move up to ElDorado County.
"My neighbor is a big fan of Lightroom, it's like Photoshop was intended to be before it got diverted and perverted by all the tacked-on hipster designer-crap and layers of minutiae."
Ah, irony. That's got to be one of the most hipster comments I've ever seen. "I liked Photoshop before it went mainstream, man!"
Matt G,
Way back when, I used to build models and dioramas...played with B&W film to try to get a WW2 look to my photo's. Never really pulled it off...mainly because I didn't have the right lenses I think.
Maybe I need to get back in to building models and bring both of my old hobbies back to life. Hmm...a model of a Tomcat on a museum display apron would be a good place to start...
og: What I liked about it was that you could reset the shutter without advancing the film, so some really funky multiple exposures were possible.
Not to change the subject or anything, but I love that F-14. Had the pleasure of standing under one when it went (briefly) supersonic at the airshow here; I bet that guy got a good yelling at when he landed.
Robert:
" so some really funky multiple exposures were possible."
yep. Sometimes they were even intentional! Did you know the first gen C3 the rangefinder was not coupled do the lens? Somewhere some smart guy said 'hey! If we put a gear in here....'
Mamiya 1000s Sigh...
I shoot 60k+ frames per year of sports action photos. My go-to software is ACDSee Pro 6 - it is faster, cheaper, and much more fluid and intuitive than Photoshop, and waaaaay less clunky, quirky, and wonky than Gimp.
When the Canon 7D Mark II comes out (in a few months??), the original 7D price will crater - that is a hell of a nice camera.
Well, it's bitten me in a big way--a Nikon D600 and a couple of lenses. You know, the part that really ticked me off was that DSLRs are way bigger than SLRs, and my expensive Lowepro bag needs to be replaced with a bigger bag. It never ends....
Reminiscing...Harrumph, I remember the hazy days of the command line graphics, and the Video Toaster - and the hot redhead who bought a Lambo - and of applying for work at Pacific Data Images. It spun-out of ILM an but there were other companies concentrating on digital video animation, but consumer-level memory cost were out the wazoo and hard-drives were in the 100-MB range.
I think they called it Photoshop because the bitmap/brush effects of the early touch-up capabilities - which were so much better than Illustrator - except the text sucked rocks - but everyone wanted something to do the "Video Toaster" work and it could, then it was turned to compete against Macromedia Director and so added layers. Then Macromedia merged with Aldus and that put Freehand into Director - and leaving Illustrator outside in the vector camp, but still Corel Draw was vector-based too, and with bitmap brushes...
And then they all merged into one gooey metastasized mass of equations. I'm still scratching the surface after nineteen years and I still don't use it for photos much.
Had a Mavica. Got a Nikon D5100 now, not top of the line, but way more camera than **I** need. I like the cost of film for it. A 16 gig SD card holds a lot and swaps quickly, and as an old photog told me one time while he was documenting a project, shoot lots of film, because compared with the cost of travel and time, film's the cheapest hing you have.
MC
Useta shoot Kodachrome 25. Exclusively. Awesome stuff. Made it do all kinds of things it wasn't supposed to do. Like high-speed airshow photography. Had a coupla K-1000s, both of which have been half 'round the world and back, and each of which had upwards of 50K frames through them. One survived a dunking in the Pacific Ocean, and both have been on more hot, dusty, dirty airfields and endured more pouring-down-rain back-packing trips than you could shake a stick at, and aside from replacing the felt several times per camera, they still turned out the good shots.
And then they took my Kodachrome away (cue the song . . .):
Kodachro-oo-ome
gives ya those nice bright colors
gives ya the gre-e-eens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a pho-o-o-tograph
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away . . .
(dude musta had a rich daddy ta be shootin' Nikons). :-)
Now I got a little shirt-pocket P&S digital. Sad days.
BSR
As a college student, I could not afford a Nikon but instead purchased an OM-1 SLR - smaller and lighter but with great lenses. Kodachrome 64 was my favorite film with side excursions to Agfachrome when not shooting B&W. Learned art photography with some technical photodocumentation skills thrown in. The Art Department used stop bath but the Biology Department used copious amounts of water to stop B&W print development as the water was "free" but stop bath cost money. How environmentally aware!
Working in photo labs and as a photographer's assistant, I had access to cheap processing (a very important thing before the days of digital; ask your parents, kids) and so I burned up a ton of film for a young, broke kid.
I did the same as a reporter for the hometown weekly (the only pictures I kept from the era are three from a visit by the then-Confederate Air Force). I have a 1964 Leicaflex in my closet.
bluesun said...
Not to change the subject or anything, but I love that F-14.
Yeah...always one of my favorite planes. Was uber sad when they retired it.
Someone needs to photoshop a Star Destroyer in place of that Tomcat.
Fantastic shot!
Nice pic. I saw the F14 on a trailer making the turn from highway 32 onto highway 38 in Noblesville. My desk overlooked the intersection.
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