Precious photo in the comic the other day, from Mutti's flying visit to Israel. The pic is a colour one of Mrs Merkel and Mr Netanyahu, both wearing blandly agreeable expressions. But Netanyahu is pointing at something, and his forefinger is casting a shadow on her upper lip which at one end resembles guess who's moustache...
Of course no one tried to do that. It can't have been deliberate. The photographer took a video or machine-gun-like succession of images, like a movie film. Some wicked picture editor decided that was the image to go for. I wonder if the editor noticed it before the paper went to bed?
In my hacking days some of the pro snappers had cameras with huge 35mm film magazines and attached motor drives, kit worth thousands of quid that I envied enormously. The motor drive quadrupled the weight of the camera and made it an awkward shape, and the battery pack to power it weighed a hell of a lot too. Now with digital it's an absolute doddle (but a photographer is still a person with a special talent, an eye, and a practised technician too).
Anyway, naughty naughty, but chapeau. That snap is up there with the one of Tony Benn looking like a Christian martyr on a demo with his head framed exactly in the sunburst on a huge old trade union banner, a socialist halo... that was in the comic too, in another age.
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I remember seventies motor drives in context of snapping planes at airshows with my Cosina CS or the rather better Pentax K1000. A film costing a quid to buy and several more to develop ould be run off in seconds.
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I still have a K1000. Earlier Japanese made one too. I didn't think you could put an engine on them? Mustafa look.
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The Poke was running this last week...wonder who pinched it from who !
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I thought not too, Manatee. I looked at one in 1984 and bought an ME Super instead, which was smaller and, I judged, would be more versatile. That could take a 2fps winder - not a full-on 5fps motor drive - as could the rarer, manual-only MX.
That must have formed a habit. Even today, I use A-for-Aperture as the default mode on my (Pentax) DSLR. Never did buy the ME Winder 2, though.
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I still have my ME Super c/w Winder....
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Still have my Ashai Pentax Spotmatic (1966) and an even earlier Agfa Rapid two-and-a-quarter by three-and-a-quarter inches film size folding bellows model.
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Sold my MX for a Canon. Then a Nikon F800 then a manual FE. Wish I had the digital version of the MX. If there is such a thing: the Nikon DF is rip-off territory, but tempting in the event of an unlikely event.
Last edited by: NIL on Sun 2 Mar 14 at 21:05
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I've got an Olympus OM1-N and quite a lot of lenses for it. Shame 35mm film process is so expensive as I love using it. Even fitted an adaptor to allow the light meter to work on modern batteries (standard is a mercury cell...).
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>> I still have my ME Super c/w Winder....
Dumped mine very recently. Don't see any point in keeping 35mm film kit any more.
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>> Don't see any point in keeping 35mm film kit any more.
There is a point, but only if you can be bothered: the image you will get with a bit of luck (or management if you are a proper snapper) is incomparably better. But not every time of course. And film is expensive and a hassle.
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>> the image you will get with a bit of luck (or management if you are a proper snapper) is incomparably better.
I've got two or three photos - more actually, a dozen perhaps - some of which are incredibly clear and beautiful... I'm not a proper snapper, far from it, and the camera was just run-of-the-mill Japanese SLR, but the lens was a very good small-aperture telephoto belonging to my old man, and by some fluke, or perhaps because of the lens, I got the focus right sometimes. Most of the pix are of desert warriors clustereed on Toyota Land Cruisers with twin .50 calibre machine guns weighing down the cargo bed, when it isn't a recoilless rifle so called, or of the bullet-nibbled centre of Ndjamena. A couple of warlord portraits.
You wouldn't have wanted to be there when they were at it. Fortunately and unfortunately I wasn't.
The old man accidentally dropped that lens in the sea somewhere in New Zealand. Tsk. He wasn't best pleased and neither was I.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Mon 3 Mar 14 at 01:40
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My daughter's fancy and VERY expensive Sony DSLR camera can take action shots at 12 frames per second!
Awesome stuff for those of us brought up on box Brownies et al!
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>>> expensive Sony DSLR camera can take action shots at 12 frames per second!
My Sony compact manages 10 frames per second on burst and it's much more useful than you might think. For example with a pet/nature portrait or non-panned shot of a fast moving object it means one shot is usually spot on. Even with a group shot of half a dozen folks at a party it will usually have one shot where the balance of who does/doesn't have their eyes open gets the best result.
My Lumix bridge camera has 12fps as long as you are happy with the same focus for all shots, 5.5fps if you want the focus to track.
Camera software is staggering these days.
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There's a simple trick to getting good people photos and as it only wastes one shot - has been around for a very long time. Get the group all set, make sure they can either hear your shutter, or know when the picture has been taken. Then when they all relax and stop looking stupidly at the camera, take another unannounced shot.
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Don't most groups just scatter to four corners the second the picture has been taken?
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Incomparably better, AC?
Most photos are never blown up beyond 6x4. At which level a camera phone is producing as good a pic as film.
And today's photos are designed to be seen on a computer. So if you shoot on film you then have to digitise.
Only nostalgia forbids me to ditch my c1970 Minolta SLR. Doubt I'll ever use it again. But it's spent 45 years without requiring any servicing. Meanwhile a digital camera has a practical life of about 3 to 5 years. Assuming it doesn't die first. Other bonus of Minolya was it weighs a ton.
Oh yes. And I wish I could put a polarising filter on one of Fenlander's Sonys.
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>> Incomparably better, AC?
I would say so, yes. There's always a grain, a sort of subliminal fuzziness, in a digital image. If focus, aperture and exposure are all spot on the image has a sort of crystalline perfection that I don't get from digital images, wonderful though they often are.
I too have a Minolta SLR. When working I used the fastest monochrome film I could get. That way I thought I could get shots in poor light and in bright places use very fast exposure to minimise any camera shake or movement by the subject, along with a very small aperture to make focus less critical.
It worked sometimes but not always by any means. In very bright places for example the shots were often overexposed. You win some you lose most, or I did anyway not being a proper snapper. On one trip I used a cheapo plastic 120 cassette tourist minox-sized thing, and did get one memorable shot with it (not a beautiful one though).
'No one's going to call you pretentious with that thing,' sneered one French pro snapper. Heh heh...
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Don't most groups just scatter to four corners the second the picture has been taken?
As a rule, yes, but not instantly. The tension goes out, folk relax, you click the shutter again and then they move. As long as the camera can do quick repeats, no problem.
Last edited by: Slidingpillar on Mon 3 Mar 14 at 16:28
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Naughty naughty - Bromptonaut
