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| Anyone into photograpy. | |
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| Topic Started: Apr 30 2017, 08:54 PM (275 Views) | |
| Tigger | Apr 30 2017, 08:54 PM Post #1 |
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Senior Member
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Well I wasn't until recently, with a little bit more time on my hands these days I purchased a film/slide scanner to put the thousands of pictures I've taken since the early 1970's onto a PC. I bought an expensive digital camera about a decade ago and thought the picture quality was abysmal, I hardly used it. I recently got a far better camera (a Sony RX100 compact) and this does indeed produce quality images, not only that I've started using 35mm film again! ![]() I have a Yashica Electro 35GSN rangefinder and a Minolta x-700 reflex camera, the former was purchased new in 1975 after a summer of paper rounds and gardening and the latter in 1983, after some basic servicing both are in use again and produce stunning images, it's cheap as well these days you can pick up film for a quid in Poundland and do the developing at home, it's not hassle I actually enjoy the process, yes digital is better these days but I still like the nostalgia of 35mm And phones should be for talking to people, not for taking pictures. |
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| Steve K | Apr 30 2017, 09:03 PM Post #2 |
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Once and future cynic
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but don't rubbish camera phones. A picture has to have content and content is often ephemeral and having a decent enough camera ready to hand trumps wishing you had the decent camera you'd left back at homeThe RX100 sounds a useful piece of work, I use a Canon SX50. Can't be doing with SLRs |
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| Curious Cdn | Apr 30 2017, 09:26 PM Post #3 |
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I was keen on silver-based photography for decades. I even took two courses in University on Photographic Chemistry (largely Organic Chem) I used to develop Ektachrome slides by hand (14 steps!) . I miss my old Rolleiflex with it's "fast" Schneider lens and my Nikkormat ..... but ... Digital is fabulous (if of much lower resolution) and I love what I can do with an image using Photo Shop. It's a whole new world. |
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| Tigger | Apr 30 2017, 09:28 PM Post #4 |
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If I take say a 100 pictures with digital I end up with about 20 that are worth keeping, if I take 24 film pictures I also end up with about 20 that are worth keeping! Snap happy v take your time! |
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| Tigger | Apr 30 2017, 09:40 PM Post #5 |
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The C41 colour film process is surprisingly simple, that said a local lab will process a film for about 30% more than you can do at home, and digital now has better resolution than film, I fell into the trap of thinking more pixels = better image, not so, it's sensor size that counts, the more expensive digital cameras often do away with vast zoom lens and concentrate more on image quality. I visted a local camera shop some months ago and asked to see what the owner considered the best camera he had in the store, I was handed a Leica M, and quickly passed it back when told the price, daft money but some will pay it. |
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| Steve K | Apr 30 2017, 09:45 PM Post #6 |
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Once and future cynic
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Why not do both? |
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| Tigger | Apr 30 2017, 09:56 PM Post #7 |
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I do! Digital is way more convinient, film is more fun, I think it's an anticipation thing going on here. |
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| johnofgwent | May 1 2017, 06:19 AM Post #8 |
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It .. It is GREEN !!
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My daughter rather enjoys working with film as a pro. She mocks my allegiance to the Canon EOS 750 QD that cost me £350 when she was two years old, she rather prefers the model with a far lower number and far more controls she picked up on ebay for about £40 (original price when new IIRC about a grand) to do the "film/wet work" module of her degree. But even she wonders how the hell dad ever took anything decent with his AE1 of serious vintage. Funnily enough she has two medium format cameras that have the appearance of posh box brownies and a POLAROID camera too !! It's interesting when you take a "real" photograph into a shop to get a photo frame; they suddenly realise there's something different" about the texture of what they're holding and say "... is this ... " like as if you've just handed them a volume of some historic tome and they realise it's bound in human skin .. A couple of arty farty centres in Cardiff (one alas demolished to make way for a new bus station that won't take the city's buses ... wtf ??) have enlargers they allow students and "members" to use for a pittance but as you point out, these days film scanners are pretty cheap. It's allowed me to revisit the negatives and slides I developed what I now realise is forty years ago... |
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| johnofgwent | May 1 2017, 06:19 AM Post #9 |
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It .. It is GREEN !!
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Bloody hell this is heading to be a first. I agree with everything you just said. |
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| RoofGardener | May 1 2017, 06:23 PM Post #10 |
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Lord of Plantpots
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Power to your elbow, Tigger. It sounds like a very rewarding hobby ! Going off the topic; the proliferation of "cameras" (including phones) means that the number of people capable of taking a photograph (or even a video) has increased a million-fold (or more ? ) over the last 20 years. So why have the frequency of UFO, Nessie, and Bigfoot photographs remained the same ? |
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| Tigger | May 1 2017, 07:04 PM Post #11 |
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Do art students still use film cameras John? I was going to bin or give away my two 35mm cameras but after doing some internet checking, like you do, I found both were in the well regarded "classic" category and have dedicated fan bases and after reading about this I got back into my old cameras and had a new appreciation for them. A lot of the US sites I visited are (getting back to my original question) about the best 35mm camera for those doing photography courses, the general trend seems to be the less automated the better so as students get an idea about the technical aspects of taking pictures, as opposed to modern point and shoot digitals. |
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| Tigger | May 1 2017, 07:08 PM Post #12 |
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Funny you should say that, I recently took some pictures of fairies dancing around at the bottom of my garden! But then if someone fakes something everyone these days, and especially those aged 10 or less will know exactly how they did it. |
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| johnofgwent | May 2 2017, 06:05 AM Post #13 |
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It .. It is GREEN !!
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It is very much the case that students are required to use both wet and dry media, and as you say, the less automation, the better. My £350 when bought brand new Canon 750QD film job was utterly useless to her as it has an "on" button and an "off" button and little else, it was bought for that reason, it does everything for me. She went out and got one of Canon's 70 something range off ebay and paid about £45-£60 for it (!) Her tutors wax lyrical about the Praktika MTL-3 which I was trained to use over two summer schools.... There is a lot they do learn about digitals and image manipulation. It's a real bloody pain in the arse that dropbox have fucked about with their public folders as it used to be a doddle to share an image, and if i could, i'd pop up the shot of Old Harry Rocks as it came out of my 450D (in full manual) as a "raw" and how it looked when jennifer had finished bringing out the details. (might try anyway - watch this space !!!) Dunno if you can see these.... Original https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1079892042157356&set=pb.100004097119733.-2207520000.1493704716.&type=3&theater after jennifer did her thing https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1079892138824013&set=pb.100004097119733.-2207520000.1493704716.&type=3&theater |
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| johnofgwent | May 2 2017, 06:15 AM Post #14 |
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It .. It is GREEN !!
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Well, I might be able to answer that.... Over on an arsebook "south wales landscape and seascape photographers" (or the like) group there was a most stunning photograph The photographer basically fitted the heaviest, darkest neutral density filter they could find, aimed the centre of the lens at polaris, opened the shutter and ** NINE HOURS LATER ** They were in posession of one of the most entrancing "star tails" images I have EVER seen. In their words, one cloud in the sky would have shat upon it. You can actually see polaris has drawn a tiny, tiny horseshoe at the centre of the image where they did not QUITE have it lines up exactly, and all the other stars in the sky rotate around that horseshoe. But this is an extreme rarity as it took the guy a week of camping out at the top of a mountain forty minutes from his home to capture the shot, and at nine hours a pop, it takes a while to get it right ... |
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| johnofgwent | May 2 2017, 06:29 AM Post #15 |
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It .. It is GREEN !!
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Ah yes. Nessie I have a bit to say there myself. Driving to Inverness in the days when I was a freelancer and had the money to do such stupid things, I pulled off the road very, very quickly when the kids yelled "there's the monster" You need to go there to understand this. At that time of day, with those clouds, the light fell in a way that meant the water seemed to meld with the rocks on the far side of the loch. Out "there" were two necks, clear as a bell to see, craning out of the water. with a practiced hand i swapped the canon 340D rebel's standard 55-80 lens for the 180-330 telephoto, brought it up and... ..experienced the frustration of a total failure to get a weapon lock. It's the same trick as we used to play with the german navy in 1914. Paint it strange patterns and against the grey sea you can't get a rangefinder to lock. The motordrive screeched in frutration and pain loping through trying to lock on Switch to ful manual and do it old school. It was still a bastard, but i got the shot. Two cormorants, range 400 yards, looking for all the world to be something much bigger a long way out. You had to **BE** there. You would not understand otherwise. Oh yes you might have some sort of distanced appreciation for what I'm on about. But you had to stand there, on the side of the loch, in that light, to see what i saw. In all good traditions, you'll never see what i saw as the image is on a 160GB SSD drive that is royally fucked at the interface chip level and I canlt afford the £600 to have the contents professionally recovered and I can't recall what porn might be on there so I'm loath to pay it anyway ...But ever since that day I have made my mind up about something. I'll never disbelieve a "nessie spotter" again. well not in that way, because although I donlt believe they saw what they swear they saw, I believe there exists, in their mind, an image they think they saw, because I've seen the same. |
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| Deleted User | May 2 2017, 01:39 PM Post #16 |
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Deleted User
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When does the actual show start? |
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| Oddball | May 2 2017, 07:07 PM Post #17 |
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I used to enjoy taking snaps back in the days when to take good ones was more of a challenge. My dad was an exellent photographer - long shots, close shots, maxi, micro, night, time exposure, multi exposure, slides etc. - he also had his own dark-room/cubby hole when we were in Hong Kong; and taught me the knack of developing the B&Ws. Consequently I now have much nostalgia tied up in images going back a long way.
Edited by Oddball, May 2 2017, 07:09 PM.
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| ranger121 | May 2 2017, 09:09 PM Post #18 |
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I began with a Zenit E and progressed to an Olympus OM1, then a Minolta Dynax 500si (still have it); I then lost interest in film for quite a while until digital came along and I found a starter with a Minolta DiMAGE 7 (cracked the credit card, flogged it quickly as it was crap; my mother's phone had better resolution) and have since moved to a Canon EOS40D, (bought SH with loads of kit) and in this I find a camera that does whatever one wants it to, except shoot video. But whatever, that's what camcorders are for... The camera on my Galaxy S7 is an excellent 16mp for 'snaps', but a steady hand is required. During my film days i used mainly slide film which, due to the cost, I found really made you make absolutely certain that the shot was framed right and the camera set up properly. You only had 36 goes. Fireworks? No chance. Then there was the frequent agony in finding that your calculations of lighting and composition were all to cock in 15 of your 36 slides after the anxious wait that Royal Mail would actually deliver the things - OR you had to use the last 10 shots on stupid stuff to put in a roll of cheap iso200 film for the visit to the zoo - but hey-ho! Digitally, you get as many goes as you want of course, and I haven't ever even come close to filling a 4gig Microdrive, let alone the upgrade to a 32gig CF card which I invested in only today. I'm lucky to live in a tourist area where cameras are prevalent and not regarded with suspicion - and I can get the World Championship Fireworks just across the road every year! |
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| Tigger | May 2 2017, 09:29 PM Post #19 |
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Film is cheap again get those film cameras out! Poundland sells Agfa Vista 200 for er... a quid a roll, (it's basically Fuji C200) as the only two copanies still producing colour negative film are Kodak in the US and Fuji in Japan, I wait until I've got four or five films that need developing and send them to a place in Hull called Photo Express, around £7 for developing and printing standard gloss bordered prints, add a couple of quid for scannning to a disc if that's your thing, all done in three days max. The point is it's probably no more expensive than using a scanner to do your digital prints, plus traditional film looks less clinical if you know what I mean. Edited by Tigger, May 2 2017, 09:32 PM.
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| ranger121 | May 2 2017, 10:17 PM Post #20 |
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Looks like Hull have gone down buddy... A net search finds plenty others though...
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| RoofGardener | May 3 2017, 06:05 PM Post #21 |
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Lord of Plantpots
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Umm.... their website is still up ? What makes you think they have 'gone down' Ranger121 ? http://www.photo-express.co.uk/ |
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| ranger121 | May 3 2017, 07:46 PM Post #22 |
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A google search window professed 'closed now'... Apparently, if one searches after 'business hours' one will see 'closed now' meaning they're just not open for business at the moment. I assumed it meant they had gone down. Apparently not. My bad. |
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| Tigger | May 3 2017, 08:58 PM Post #23 |
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He might have been in football mode?
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| disgruntled porker | May 5 2017, 07:08 AM Post #24 |
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Older than most people think I am.
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I used to be mad on it years ago. I had a silly amount of cameras. Praktika, Pentax, Olympus, Fujica ( the first with led's), Yashica TLR. Had my own darkroom to develop and print both b&w and colour. Big thermostatically controlled water bath and motorized drums. Just went off it, don't know why. Now I use a Lumix bridge camera with a big zoom facility. I must say it's pretty good and I get excellent prints from it. |
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| Stonefish | May 25 2017, 08:10 AM Post #25 |
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Yep worked in it for years ,mostly advertising photography,did some fashion work as well. In my printing days used to print page 3 in the Sun about the time of Linda Lusardi et al. |
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but don't rubbish camera phones. A picture has to have content and content is often ephemeral and having a decent enough camera ready to hand trumps wishing you had the decent camera you'd left back at home

so I'm loath to pay it anyway ...

8:50 AM Jul 11