Re: Al-Quaeda Battleships invade Heathrow

In article <150820061126160306%alanlothian@xxxxxxx>,
Alan Lothian <alanlothian@mac .com> wrote:

My case is similar. I've often had to take pictures for stories I've
had to write, too; and to this day I love and cherish my 26-yr-old
Pentax MX (I believe the good Dr Breen has one of the other two still
functioning in the UK, or did it break? Can't recall now, but Google

Mine died a year or so ago, dammit. I now have an old ME Super
body to hang the Pentax lenses on. It isn't even a small
fraction as good, but I've not managed to find a functional
MX since.

would doubtless do so) and as a functional tool it is about
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (more zeroes as you will) times
as useful as the Minolta Dimage 7 I , er, acquired. (ie I paid the
right price for it, new and in the box, for a sum not unadjacent to
that magical digit the Indians invented in order to transform
mathematics; even then, I was ripped off).

Ah. One of those cameras.
Minolta should know better than that. They did, after all, make
the CLE..

Modest example: quick snapped portrait against the light of a guy you
are interviewing and can't make pose. MX (already -- took about three
secs; a week after I'd bought it I'd have been able to do it in four or
five at max) is already set for ambient light. Quick check on d-o-f.
Open two stops aperture, shoot. Open another stop, shoot, down two
stops, shoot. Total time, maybe 5 secs. One of these pics will be
useable. If there's time I'll take another four or five, and one of
them might even be good.

With the Minolta:
impossible, flatly impossible, unless the subject is sitting there
stone dead for a fortnight while I work through the bizarre buttons,
menus, and then, even worse, try to guess whether pressing the shutter
button has actually done anything. God help you if you use the
"bracket" function.

A pet hate of mine is having to jump through hoops to fool the camera
into taking the picture I want, not the one it wants to take. I have
a digital compact camera which selects its own region to do autofocus
on, apparently at whim. I do not find myself impressed with this
behaviour.

OTOH auotmation does have a place, provided it can easily be over-
ridden. The Contax I've just indulged myself in in aut-everything
, but twiddling a dial gets manual over-ride on exposure, another
dial gets manual over-ride on focus.. It seems to work very well
indeed. Of course, they don't sell...

Oh, and the MX needs a new lightmeter battery every year or two. The
Minolta exhausts a set of Ni-MH batteries getting out of bed. What I'd

I've not - yet - found out how fast the Contax eats batteries.

really, really, like is an old style manual camera with a CCD spread in
place of a 35mm cartridge. (This was attempted back in the mid-90s, no
idea what happened to it, but I can see how the technology wouldn't
concentrate on that particular aiming point.)

This thing looks very tasty:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0403/04031101epsonrd1.asp

though I just bet it won't be cheap.

My pro photog friends, with 15 kilobucks worth of Nikon digi plus an
RTG to keep it powered up, are all right. And you are all right, too,
with your excellent quality point-and-shoot job, probably given away
free with every subscription to sci.military.naval.....

Anything in the middle is a horror.

Oh, and this is way off topic. Grey, if y ou're interested in
continuing, use email -- note my not very subtle spam traps.

It's a sight more on-topic than much of the mulch we've been
squelching through in here. Cameras can be used to photograph
ships (on topic in here ) or indeed ladies swathed in clingfilm
(always on topic in here).

--
Andy Breen ~ Not speaking on behalf of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Feng Shui: an ancient oriental art for extracting
money from the gullible (Martin Sinclair)
.

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