Re: What'd you guys grow up on?
- From: "dwight" <tfrog93@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 10:38:09 -0400
<ajamess@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1193881858.551803.302870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This thread is for talking about the inverse of what most of the
traffic of the forum is devoted to: that POS that you started on.
What? You started on a D2*/IDMk*? GTFO. For all the rest of you,
what was it? Camera body, lens, film, and some thoughts about it.
First, I don't consider myself especially adept at photography. I enjoy
"taking pictures", thousands of pictures, but there are only seven of them
hanging on my wall. I'm that good.
I came late to the party. Actually, it was my wife who took a filler course
in college on black and white photography. For the class, she had to buy the
venerable Pentax K1000 and a mess o' developing equipment (and chemicals -
ick). At some point, I borrowed the camera, then fell in love with it. With
its crisp little 50mm lens, it "never took a bad shot."
After the bug was firmly set, I decided to upgrade to the then-new Pentax
ZX-M - the best of both worlds. Everything from fully automatic to fully
manual. And I struggled with this one. Many times, I would get one or two
acceptable shots on a 24- or 36-frame roll of film. And it would always be
two days or two weeks before I found out how badly I'd screwed up.
Enter the Olympus D360L, with its 1.3megapixel glory and optional 2X digital
zoom. This was magic. Take a bad shot, and you KNOW it's a bad shot
immediately; simply DELETE and move on. Of couse, this powerhouse of a
digital image capture wonder was never good enough that I could leave the
film cameras home, but it was way cool. (And, with the benefit of a decade's
passing, it was pure crap.)
From there, it was the Canon S1 IS, which led directly to the Canon RebelXT. I still have all of these cameras.
My father was a junkie. He has boxes upon boxes of photographs and reels of
8mm home movies. One day, I'm sure, my siblings will sit down and sift
through this stuff, picking out the family photos from amongst the scads of
flower close-ups, scenic backgrounds, pet photos, etc. All of this was
important enough to him that he held onto them; but they're destined to
become dumpster material.
I have a couple of boxes that my own kids can sort through (hopefully in
about 30 years). There are not a lot, but a healthy number of family photos
from the past few decades. And now I have CDs and DVDs, and about 40gig of
data as my "boxes". Maybe 1/10th - maybe - would be of interest to anyone
but me. But I suppose somebody's going to have to go through it all, after I
shuffle off this mortal coil (or whatever). And the problem is exactly
digital.
With film, I would pick and choose my targets wisely. With digital, I've
become a rather indiscriminate shooter.
My wife and I spent a week in the Finger Lakes area of upper New York State,
renting a house on a lakeshore. And this was just after I'd bought a new
telephoto zoom lens. When we got back, she wanted me to show the pictures to
her sister (can you say "slideshow"?), and they found that there were over
300 photos of passing boats (all kinds of boats), skiers, kids being dragged
on rafts and tires, sailboats at sunset, Skidoos, seagulls, ducks, raccoons
sleeping atop telephone poles, and only a handful of my wife and our dog.
Well, in my defense, my wife NEVER wants her picture taken, so don't blame
me for honoring that request. Second, my dog isn't all that interesting.
Third, when you have a house on a lakeshore, it becomes all about the lake.
(Doesn't it?) My 200+ photos of other people enjoying the lake has to count
for something, if only as a visual representation of the "feel" of that
week... And, besides, there are only so many sunsets in a week.
In the final analysis, though, out of those 250 images, only half a dozen
will be kept, and kept only so long as they are of interest to anyone other
than me (and, of course, assuming that the files don't corrupt). The
thousands upon thousands of images that live inside my technobox or on
digital media will have to be transferred to whatever data storage medium
comes next, in order to stay alive. And they are, for the most part, JPG...
If a new file format comes along to replace JPG in its standardized
acceptance, will I want to take the time to convert ALL of those thousands
of images to the new format?
Film is forever. Digital is tenuous, precarious, whimsical. But, damn, it's
fun.
dwight
www.tfrog.com
.
- References:
- What'd you guys grow up on?
- From: ajamess@xxxxxxxxx
- What'd you guys grow up on?
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