Digital Cameras
The Luddite does not have a digital camera. In fact, he has an old Pentax K-1000 that still uses film and it not automated at all. I take that back, there is a light meter in the thing and that is powered by a battery but technically, the K-1000 is not considered a powered camera.
As a matter of fact, it's considered by Pentax, which stopped making the thing in 1997, as a bare-bones camera. You can see one here if you want:
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/japan/manual-camera/k10001.htm
You want lights? Stare at a christmas tree. The K-1000 does not DO lights. What it did do, and still does in the case of mine, is take great pictures. Furthermore, in a world of plasticized shit that is supposed to break, I bought my K-1000 in 1977 and it's still going strong. You heard me. Nineteen Seventy-Fucking Seven. Twenty-seven by-God years ago. They made lenses out of metal then. Mine is so solid that I could beat an attacking wolverine to death with it and it would probably still work. The Luddite does not necessarily pine for the good old days but hey, there was a time when you couldn't dent the fender of a car with a sneaker and that should be respected.
Unfortunately, The Luddite will probably have to give up on film, simply because it days are numbered and The Luddite is not one to command the sun to stand still or the tide to go out. (Those are historical and literary references. Don't you people read anything but PC World and TV Guide, for God's sake?)
Anyway, The Luddite will have to buy something digital, I imagine, and a digital whatever to house the chip so I can broadcast the contents to my editors. I have come to this decision because of an interview in which I shot what have to be two of the lousiest pictures I have ever taken in my life. I am not kidding. I made the woman, who I would guess is in her early 40's at the most, look like she is 65 in one picture and a model for Edvard Munch's 'The Scream,' in a second. I made her look like a fucking gargoyle. On two separate churches.
You are taught in photojournalism to take lots of shots just in case of this eventuality, which I did. And in every goddam one of them, something was wrong. My wife is now with the negatives and her copy of Photo Shop in her photo lab and is putting the eyes from one picture into the eyesockets of another. In this instance the eyes should counteract the sleepy expression that is on the face of the woman in the one usable picture on the roll. I hope it works because if it doesn't, I am royally screwed.
This wouldn't be a problem if I had a digital camera. I could take the shot, look at a preview of it on the back of the camera and erase it and shoot a fresh one if I had to. You can't do that with film. The medium is permanent. Outside of the subject closing his or her eyes when you trip the shutter, everything happens so fast that it is almost impossible for you to know what you got.
After you shoot a couple of hundred pictures, you develop a kind of gut feeling as to whether or not the shot is good, but that's not the same thing as being able to preview it and see for sure. I was working with a short roll too; twelve exposures at the most, and I didn't have a lot of room for error. Also, I had been on the shelf with a brain aneurism for four years and I was out of practice. In one of the aforementioned 'gargoyle' pictures, my instincts were great. I got a vertical shot of my subject while she was lecturing people on chocolate. She was holding an 11-pound bar of Belgian baking chocolate against her chest. The thing was as big as a wooden cutting board. I am not exaggerating. The composition was great, the color was great, the sharpness was superb, the flash produced almost no shadow.
Then you got to her face. Everyone is sensitive about how they look on film. A picture is never quite right. People always demur, "I look terrible," or "I don't take good pictures." Those excuses are always overblown.
Except in this case. This was a perfectly good picture. I mean, how many times do you see someone cradling an 11-pound chocolate bar? Then your eyes float up to her face and see that weird, open-mouthed contortion, her head tilted back and her eyes looking down at you through the bottoms of her glasses. I kept looking at it, trying to find a way to make it work and there was just no way. Every time I looked at it, the immensity of my screwup just came and hit me right between the eyes.
So to avoid future screwups of this kind, I am probably going to have to get a digital camera. Someone wrote that America is a land of second chances, anyway. At least my camera can be the same way.
As a matter of fact, it's considered by Pentax, which stopped making the thing in 1997, as a bare-bones camera. You can see one here if you want:
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/japan/manual-camera/k10001.htm
You want lights? Stare at a christmas tree. The K-1000 does not DO lights. What it did do, and still does in the case of mine, is take great pictures. Furthermore, in a world of plasticized shit that is supposed to break, I bought my K-1000 in 1977 and it's still going strong. You heard me. Nineteen Seventy-Fucking Seven. Twenty-seven by-God years ago. They made lenses out of metal then. Mine is so solid that I could beat an attacking wolverine to death with it and it would probably still work. The Luddite does not necessarily pine for the good old days but hey, there was a time when you couldn't dent the fender of a car with a sneaker and that should be respected.
Unfortunately, The Luddite will probably have to give up on film, simply because it days are numbered and The Luddite is not one to command the sun to stand still or the tide to go out. (Those are historical and literary references. Don't you people read anything but PC World and TV Guide, for God's sake?)
Anyway, The Luddite will have to buy something digital, I imagine, and a digital whatever to house the chip so I can broadcast the contents to my editors. I have come to this decision because of an interview in which I shot what have to be two of the lousiest pictures I have ever taken in my life. I am not kidding. I made the woman, who I would guess is in her early 40's at the most, look like she is 65 in one picture and a model for Edvard Munch's 'The Scream,' in a second. I made her look like a fucking gargoyle. On two separate churches.
You are taught in photojournalism to take lots of shots just in case of this eventuality, which I did. And in every goddam one of them, something was wrong. My wife is now with the negatives and her copy of Photo Shop in her photo lab and is putting the eyes from one picture into the eyesockets of another. In this instance the eyes should counteract the sleepy expression that is on the face of the woman in the one usable picture on the roll. I hope it works because if it doesn't, I am royally screwed.
This wouldn't be a problem if I had a digital camera. I could take the shot, look at a preview of it on the back of the camera and erase it and shoot a fresh one if I had to. You can't do that with film. The medium is permanent. Outside of the subject closing his or her eyes when you trip the shutter, everything happens so fast that it is almost impossible for you to know what you got.
After you shoot a couple of hundred pictures, you develop a kind of gut feeling as to whether or not the shot is good, but that's not the same thing as being able to preview it and see for sure. I was working with a short roll too; twelve exposures at the most, and I didn't have a lot of room for error. Also, I had been on the shelf with a brain aneurism for four years and I was out of practice. In one of the aforementioned 'gargoyle' pictures, my instincts were great. I got a vertical shot of my subject while she was lecturing people on chocolate. She was holding an 11-pound bar of Belgian baking chocolate against her chest. The thing was as big as a wooden cutting board. I am not exaggerating. The composition was great, the color was great, the sharpness was superb, the flash produced almost no shadow.
Then you got to her face. Everyone is sensitive about how they look on film. A picture is never quite right. People always demur, "I look terrible," or "I don't take good pictures." Those excuses are always overblown.
Except in this case. This was a perfectly good picture. I mean, how many times do you see someone cradling an 11-pound chocolate bar? Then your eyes float up to her face and see that weird, open-mouthed contortion, her head tilted back and her eyes looking down at you through the bottoms of her glasses. I kept looking at it, trying to find a way to make it work and there was just no way. Every time I looked at it, the immensity of my screwup just came and hit me right between the eyes.
So to avoid future screwups of this kind, I am probably going to have to get a digital camera. Someone wrote that America is a land of second chances, anyway. At least my camera can be the same way.
posted by S. Olson at 9:11 PM
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