The Ada Cougars’ recently enjoyed pep rallies in advance of their playoff football games.
Both pep rallies were hosted by Doc’s Food Truck Park, which is fun and says that Doc’s is really engaging with the community.
Ada Cougar football team members play “Musical Chairs” at a pep rally Thursday at Doc’s Food Truck Park. Shot at 1/40th of a second, there is some motion blur, but I happen to like the way the blur shows us what’s happening.
The stage and a sound system are lit by couple of street lights, various LED lights on food trucks, and a few dozen string lights, low-wattage light bulbs strung across the park. The light is enough to see by and have a pep rally, but it is somewhat challenging photographically.
First, there’s not a lot of light. In the film era, this essentially meant we would need to use a flash to get an image at all, or rely on mounting our camera on a tripod and shooting at long shutter speeds.
Secondly, the light is from all sorts of odd angles, and is all different colors, so there isn’t really a “correct” white balance setting.
As digital has evolved, cameras have gotten more and more capable at very high ISO settings. ISO is one of the three items in the triad of exposure control, with shutter speed and aperture.
This is a side-by-side comparison of Adobe Lightroom’s noise reduction tool, and you can see how effective it is at cleaning up very-high-ISO images.
For my coverage of these events, I dialed my Nikon D3 cameras up to ISO 12,800, which would have sounded like science fiction in 1980. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I would have believed you then if you told me that ISO 12,800 is even a real thing.
The D3 is an older camera, but actually creates a very usable image in what I like to call “the ISO stratosphere.” The images are somewhat noisy, but in the last 18 months, products that I use like Adobe Lightroom have introduced some very sophisticated and effective noise filters.
Shooting in the low-light regime doesn’t just test the high-ISO capabilities of your camera. It also takes lenses, image-stabilization systems, and your ability to see and manage a situation, to their limits.
Cheerleaders and Couganns perform at a pep rally Thursday at Doc’s Food Truck Park. I shot about 40 frames of this performance, and only a couple are decently sharp. But I also recognize that getting really sharp images isn’t always as critical as photographers make it out to be, and a better priority is to tell the story.
There has been a lot of talk lately about point-and-shoot cameras being repopularized by the Gen Z crowd. The photography press says influencers on popular social media sites are buying them up on the used market, then using them to create content that they then hashtag #Digicam.
My old, well-worn and well-used Olympus FE-5020 digital point-and-shoot camera sits next to the keys to my vehicle, illustrating how small it is.
The only working point-and-shoot camera I still own is the Olympus FE-5020, which my wife bought for me for Christmas in 2012. All our other point-and-shoot cameras died long ago, mostly because Abby and I used them all the time, and they just wore out.
The 2012 smart phone scene was quite different than it is today, with the built-in cameras barely able to make selfies. Abby and I both had Olympus point-and-shoot cameras at the time, and used them as often as everyone uses smart phone cameras today.
I loved the FE-5020 for its very slim form factor. It is so small that I can tuck it into a shirt pocket and take it anywhere.
Here are some thoughts on why we liked them, as well as things we didn’t love about them.
Advantages
If someone runs off with your point-and-shoot camera, or if you drop it into a manhole or off a cliff, you won’t lose your entire life and identity like you might with a smart phone.
Although you were just buying a camera (vs buying a whole lifestyle with a smart phone), they were cheaper overall, and the image quality tended to be more robust than the over-processed images from smart phones.
When using it, you felt more like you were “being a photographer.”
Disadvantages
Most point-and-shoot cameras aren’t connected to cloud storage, so if you’ve gotten accustomed to having everything backed up automatically, you will need to adjust your workflow.
New point-and-shoot cameras are hard to find on the market or in stores because camera makers were driven to lower production as Apple and Samsung put better and better cameras in our phones. There are some on the used market, but prices have shot up.
Despite the advantages, one of the most obvious reasons smart phone cameras got so popular is that they are the one thing we all grab on the way out the door. The old slogan says that the only camera that matters is the one you have with you, and that’s absolutely true.
Periodically, I will pull my FE-5020 our of its bag, charge the batteries, and try to motivate myself to use it, but I seldom do. Maybe I’ll set it next to my keys in the next few days, and make myself fold it into my workflow, and see what happens!
When the Olympus FE-5020 is shut off, the lens retracts into the body, making it so flat that it fits easily in any pocket.
Prior to the Olympics this summer, several news agencies decided to issue new cameras and lenses to their photographers, some of whom would take them to Paris to cover the Games. Some of those photographer posted this news, often that their newspapers or agencies were buying them new Sony equipment.
Almost immediately, Sony users chimed in, saying they were great cameras and lenses, but “Good luck navigating the menus!”
Most modern digital cameras are “set up” by pushing a “menu” button somewhere, then scrolling through lists to select things like color space, date and time, flicker reduction, and so forth, but once those are set, there is seldom reason to change them.
A “menu” in the camera world is a list of features and functions we can access by pushing a button on the back of a camera, usually labeled “Menu.”
Apparently, Sony engineers have yet to figure out how to organize camera settings, at least in a way that will please everyone.
But for me, most menu items are “one and done.”
I know there are photographers out there, maybe most of them, who would disagree, but the way I run a camera makes very little use of menus, so I don’t really understand why photographers who complain bitterly about how confusing they are.
One popular online camera critic said of the Sony A9 III, “It’s a pain to sort through the obtuse and complex menu system.” He also adds, “The menu system is huge and disorganized. This is not a fun camera to set up.”
And that’s the real reason I don’t care about menus: once I get a camera set up, I almost never revisit the menus, and I don’t really get why other photographers do.
An apt analog to this might be the way audiophiles used to buy stereo equipment with more and more controls, buttons, filters, switches, knobs, sliders, and on and on, though most of the time, they got the sound they wanted from their equipment, they seldom changed those settings. I know – I was one of those guys.
An odd addendum to this line of thought is the fact that despite complaining about the difficulty getting these cameras “set up,” many photographers don’t bother with some of the most basic settings like the date and time.
All the digital cameras I use professionally have buttons on the body that allow you to perform important basic functions on a regular basis, like this “FORMAT” button on one of my Nikon D3 cameras.
The bottom line is that once I really, actually get your camera set up, I almost never go into the menu again.
As I write this, the photography press has been up in arms again about, as you might be able to guess, Artificial Intelligence, or AI. And while there are legitimate concerns about the misuse of anything complex enough to damage the human condition, I feel that AI will soon move from the “next big thing” list onto the “whatever happened to” list.
No, it’s not going away, but as the flash-forward world of technology moves on to the next interesting topic like an 11-year-old at a Game Stop, so will the photography and media companies move on.
In this world of photographers, from seasoned professionals to dabblers and dilettantes, our world is full of photographers. What are we trying to accomplish, and what it the role of commerce in all this? Photographers seem so eager to spend money to prove themselves, tell the world that they are actual artists, whether they are artists or not.
I am certain there is too much ego in photography, and not enough humility and compassion.
That notion helps me circle back to my real topic today: the explosion of technology, and the idea that we think it works for us, but we actually work for it.
What do I mean? An article about photographic technology on fstoppers.com recently echoes one of my oft-recited ideas: do we really need the tech we claim to need?
A few specifications about photography serve as example; for instance, frame rate. I shoot tons of news and sports, and it’s nice to be able to shoot 8, 9, 10 frames per second. The fastest camera I use right now will shoot 11 frames per second, and sure, it means I am making lots of pictures of the events in front of me. But then I think of some of the fastest cameras in the world being able to fire off 240 frames per second, and, honestly, at that point, aren’t we really just making more of the same frame?
For what it’s worth, I actually put “fastest frame rate camera” into a web search, and it told me that the “swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography” camera is capable of making 156.3 trillion frames per second. Finally, a camera fast enough for Ada’s fast-paced t-ball scene!
Yes, I know. But seriously, where is it all leading? When will photographers decide their cameras are enough of this and enough of that? What did you get for your $5000? Doesn’t it seem, at least some of the time, that we spend more effort (in the form of money) to acquire equipment so we can say we are photographers than time we spend actually being photographers?
Part of me has always had the desire to take the path less traveled, and the feverish race to load up credit cards and empty bank accounts in pursuit of ever-less-significant camera improvements has left me wanting to to pull out a sketch pad and some pencils and draw a flower instead of photographing it.
This is your humble (hopefully) host making a picture of himself with a humble Pentax Auto-110 lens, one frame at a time.
I’ve been taking pictures for a living for a long time. The apex of technology when I started in this field were cameras like the Nikon F2, the Canon F-1, the Hasselblad 500 series, and the Leica M and R series. It was a very interesting time in the evolution of photography.
Most long-time Nikon photographers will recognize the “claw” on the aperture ring of Nikkor lenses.
The film technology on the day I started my first job in journalism as an intern in 1982 was Kodak Tri-X Pan Film in the black-and-white realm, and Kodacolor, Kodachrome or Ektachrome in color. Fuji had only begun to compete with Kodak, and had yet to introduce their groundbreaking films like FujiChrome Velvia or Fuji’s Super G and Super HG line of color negative films, and Fujicolor Press, which I used all the time in the early 1990s.
One piece of kit that has changed completely since I’ve been in the business is the way lenses are made. Until the 1990s, most lenses were built like tanks, but as plastics got better and bottom line profits got more important, lenses just aren’t build like they once were.
An older Nikkor lens with an aperture “claw” is shown next to a lens from the next generation of Nikkor lenses that used a notch in the ring itself instead of a claw.
An interesting piece of trivia about Nikon lenses made prior to 1977 is the crescent-shaped metal “claw” on the aperture ring. When you mounted a lens on a camera from that era like a Nikon F2 or a Nikkormat, the claw would engage a pin in a collar around the lens mount of the camera. The procedure, which most non-photographers have never seen, is to mount the lens on the camera, then rack the aperture ring until it stopped in both directions, which would set a little tab in the collar to the maximum aperture of the lens.
A lesser-known fact about the old aperture indexing “claw” is that the holes machined into the ears of the claw are there to let light through to the smaller aperture numbers behind the larger numbers. The smaller aperture numbers were part of Nikon’s “Aperture Direct Readout,” which let the photographer see the selected aperture in the viewfinder.
A photographer friend of mine showed me her Nikkormat a few years ago, and I saw that the aperture wasn’t indexed, so I dutifully racked the aperture ring back and forth. She’d never seen that done, and told me she didn’t even know it was a thing.
Believe it or not, the “skeleton holes” drilled on either side of the claw were there to let light shine on the ADR (Aperture Direct Readout) scale, the smaller aperture scale below the main aperture scale.
Our photographic history is so interesting, and one of the funnest things about it is that we have access to old cameras and lenses that still work perfectly. I would encourage you to dig out and dust off these old machines, and if you are so inclined, shoot some film with them. But if film photography doesn’t interest you, these machines remain so interesting, and, as it happens, can be excellent props for photo and video shoots, so get them out, play with them, and have fun!
This is what the aperture indexing “claw” looked like on a Nikkormat of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Note that this claw doesn’t have holes cut into it because it predates Nikon’s “Aperture Direct Readout” feature.
Several friends of mine recently took the dive into Nikon “mirrorless” digital camera photography. Two of these photographers, Robert and Scott, hail from Tulsa. The three of us met at the University of Oklahoma forty years ago.
I used the Nikon Z30 mirrorless camera to make this image at sunrise recently. It’s a solid image, but I could have made it with any number of cameras, old or new.
In 1984, we photographers had only the vaguest idea about digital photography, and I recall quite clearly imagining that newspapers would merge with or form partnerships with television stations. I had in mind that all photographers would shoot video for tv and newspapers would use screen captures for their print editions.
Robert bought a Nikon Z5 a couple of years ago, while Scott bought a Nikon Z30 and last year, then just a few months later, a Nikon Z8. With the Z8 easily overshadowing the Z30 for Scott’s wildlife and wilderness photography, he mostly stopped using his Z30, and recently offered to send it to me to test it out and see how it fit into my workflow.
The Nikon Z30 sits in my home studio recently.
The short answer was: it didn’t really fit.
The Nikon Z30 is a very capable camera. It is lightweight and fast, makes clean images, and is made and marketed as the kind of camera you might use if you were a videographer or vlogger. And that’s the rub for me: it’s a great camera for someone else.
The Z30’s biggest deficit for me is the lack of a viewfinder. It is set up to be used the same way you might use a smartphone, by holding it at arms-length, and looking at the monitor on the back of the camera, or, in the case of many cameras in this class, with the monitor flipped up, down, or to the side.
I own a couple of mirrorless cameras that more-or-less fill the same role at the Z30. From left to right are the Fujifilm X-T10, the Nikon Z30, and the Lumix GH2, each wearing similar “kit” lenses.
I’ve been throwing this camera into my news and sports workflow, and over and over I have put the camera up to my eye, only to remind myself to hold it away so I can see the monitor.
The Nikon Z series is an impressive lineup or cameras. Scott has been posting images made with his Z8, and they are amazing, but I am inclined to say it’s because of his constant journeys into the mountains above his home near Provo, Utah. A great camera can certainly help make images there, but the real end game is what’s in front of his camera, not inside it.
Robert brings his Nikon Z5 mirrorless down when he visits, and I’ve shot some with it. It does have an electronic viewfinder, so I am more at home with it in my hands and at my eye.
A fellow photographer friend in California, Nic Coury, mostly shoots as a freelancer for news organizations and magazines, and a couple of years ago bought a Nikon Z9, the current top-of-the-line Nikon mirrorless. He makes great images with that camera, but again, the camera is only one link in his photography chain. For Nic, especially, I’d say that his biggest asset is his understanding of light.
Photographer Nic Coury is based in Monterey, California, so he has the opportunity to photograph the state’s Wine Country. He made this with the Nikon Z9.
Scott didn’t place any kind of deadline on returning this camera to him, so I’ll keep shooting it for a bit. I’m grateful both for his trust and his generosity.
The bottom line seems to me to be this: the current mirrorless cameras are great machines, and when it comes time to replace aged-out cameras, that’s the way for many to go. But they aren’t the game-changers everyone seems to think they are. In fact, if you have a new mirrorless camera, my challenge for you is to show me – not just tell me – how great these cameras are and what they allowed you to do that you couldn’t do before.
I used the Nikon Z30 to photograph fireworks in Ada’s Wintersmith Park July 5.
The Pentax Auto 110 was a neat-looking little camera, show here with its lens and film removed.
Sometimes we in the photography community take things too seriously. We are inclined to tell ourselves that our work is important, sometimes more important than it really is, when much of the time, we need to take a breath and relax, and have fun doing our jobs.
I thought of this recently when I saw an article about the Pentax Auto 110, a novelty camera sold in the 1970s. This camera used the 110-sized film cassettes, which produced a negative of just 17mm x 13mm, and had interchangeable lenses.
The Pentax Auto 110 sits in my hand, illustrating just how small this SLR camera really is.
The article suggested getting a cheap adaptor to put the Auto 110’s lenses on a modern mirrorless camera, and I happen to know someone who has an Auto 110 with it’s most popular lens, the 18mm f/2.8. I poked around on Amazon for about 30 seconds before I found an adaptor to put this teensy lens on my Fuji X-T10 mirrorless camera.
Shooting with it delivered as expected: this small, well-built lens is optically kind of primitive, and creates a look and feel of photographs from the 1970s. Of course, that’s really reverse engineering, since the look and feel of photographs from the 1970s were defined by lenses like these.
The lens doesn’t have aperture blades in it, since the camera used an internal aperture, so the only way to use it is “wide open,” f/2.8, but I think of that, and the look of the lens, as tools instead of liabilities.
It’s been fun to play around with this combination, and I would encourage my readers to dig around the house or the shed and see if you have any relics that might be fun to play around with, and explore their look and feel in a creative way.
This image of Summer, my Chihuahua, made with the Pentax 18mm f/2.8, has the look and feel of a photographic print you might have gotten from the Fotomat in 1976.
I love the idea that this beautiful image was made with a camera that someone once described as “the worst DSLR ever.”
If you know me at all, you know how fed up and I with the mythology surrounding photography, and at the center of my frustration is the idea that you can – an should – buy mastery.
Anyone in any art knows that you have to earn mastery. A new piano won’t make you play that etude better, a new red dot sight won’t make you shoot straighter, a new airplane won’t make your approaches safer.
In the photography community, there is a lot of social pressure to “upgrade.” Photography websites often rely on advertising, so they are eager to promote and praise the latest and greatest, and, of course, the most expensive, cameras and lenses. That message goes hand-in-hand with the idea that what you have now, what you bought last year or five years ago, is “outdated,” and by proxy, incapable of making good photographs.
I know it sounds ridiculous to pay $6000 for a camera, then be told by the web, and the photography community, that your camera isn’t good enough because the next $6000 camera is better.
But that is the unambiguous message of the photography community.
I know so many photographers who bought into this thinking, and bought newer, more expensive cameras, yet whose work remained exactly the same.
If you think I am talking about you, I probably am.
I can think of an important exception: my photographer friend Scott AndersEn bought a Nikon 200-500mm and a 35mm f/1.4 a couple of years ago, then – and this is the real reason for buying it – he went to Europe for two weeks. His stuff from Europe was incredible, and I know he enjoyed shooting it with his new cameras. But of course, the real star wasn’t more pixels or sharper lenses, but the things he photographed with them. (See his images here and here.)
But photographers themselves are often the heavy hand of social pressure to spend more money on equipment. I was at a baseball playoff game a few years ago in a media scrum next to the third base dugout when a photographer from another newspaper grinned and rolled her eyes and, with a sarcastic lilt in her voice, said, “So you’re still using the D2H.” Her message was clear: I was an idiot for having an old camera.
What these photographers never do: hand you their credit card.
In the years since then, her newspaper has collapsed under the weight of foolish spending and failure to plan for the future, with wave after wave of layoffs, while my news staff and I do our jobs with what we can afford, and keep going strong. I wonder if she would trade any of her pricey gear to have a few more photographers or reporters at her paper.
So that circles us back to the central idea in photography, the idea that you can’t make great pictures without this lens and that camera. It turns out that last weekend, I actually won an award for Photo of the Year, which I shot with the very camera she scoffed at years ago, the Nikon D2H. There is nothing about this photo that would be improved in any way with a more expensive or newer camera.
It’s a shame this photo wasn’t shot with a modern mirrorless camera. It’s too … uh, well. You tell me what’s wrong with it.
I made this image on the trail at the western portion of Saguaro National Park. Shot with the Nikon D5500 and the AF-S Nikkor 18-135mm f/4.5-5.6, it has a lot of detail, and just a bit of flare and ghosting.
My readers might recall that I spent spring break in Arizona, hiking and exploring. One result of this was that I missed covering one of the biggest news events of the year in Ada, a huge hailstorm.
Nevertheless, I had an amazing time. I visited Chiricahua National Monument, both halves of Saguaro National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Montezuma Castle National Monument, The Pima Air and Space Museum, San Xavier del Bac Mission, and Biosphere 2, and had several out-of-the-way drives through Arizona and New Mexico.
The trip exceeded my expectations, and I feel it was a complete success.
Of course, photography is at the top of the list for trips like this, but when I travel, I am definitely not the same photographer I am for my newspaper. Key among these differences is that when I travel, I travel light, and my photographic kit is light and simple as well.
One reason I can do this is because I am not shooting sports and news, which often requires big, heavy, high-performance cameras and lenses, and travel photography requires high image quality, but doesn’t usually require high frame rates, high-ISO settings, or large apertures.
My kits have shifted some over the years, but here is what I used for my most recent trip: the Nikon D7100, the Nikon D5500, the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6, the AF-S Nikkor 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6, the AF-S Nikkor 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6, the AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8, and the AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8.
I love the combination of the D7100 and the 18-200mm, but together they are kind of heavy, so I worked more this trip with the D5500 and the 18-135mm, which is much lighter, so that’s my news favorite combination for those long hikes.
Some photographers might note that I don’t have any super-telephoto lenses in this lineup, but since I have no interest in photographing wildlife, I’ve never really needed one.
Traveling light means having more fun, and being able to go deeper into the backcountry. It definitely works for me.
Pictured from left to right are the AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8, the AF-S Nikkor 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6 on the Nikon D5500, the AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8, the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 on the Nikon D7100, and the AF-S Nikkor 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6.
There are a few digital cameras on the market today that have monochrome sensors. These sensors work the same way that color sensors work, in that each pixel, or picture element, senses the amount of light that strikes it. The key difference is that color sensors have one of three, red, green, or blue, filters above it, called a Bayer pattern array.
My wolfhound looks up at me in a recent monochrome image. I thought the tonal qualities in this image worked out pretty well.
The real question is: what makes a monochrome sensor superior to a color sensor that has a decently high pixel count, basically any new camera sold today?
Sometimes the idea of a monochrome camera isn’t even clear to consumers. While reading around the web for this piece, I came across an article on monochrome cameras from Adorama that listed two non-monochrome cameras , the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV, and the Fujifilm GFX50S II. The article says the cameras “allow you to switch between monochrome and color shooting modes,” but in case you just woke up yesterday, that is every digital camera made in the last 15 years.
I don’t know where I got this glass dolphin; it might have belonged to Dorothy Milligan at one point. Anyway, I photographed it with some Christmas lights to illustrate an image that was mostly made of color.You can see how profoundly different an image of color can appear in monochrome.
The article added that, “…you’ll be able to capture low light images far better than you could with a color sensor.” But who, in 2023, has a problem capturing images in low light? I routinely roll past ISO 12,800 with little in the way of noise.
I asked a photographer friend who had a monochrome Leica what he liked about it, and he said it made, “…nice files, with really crisp, dark blacks,” but then said, “the color Leica images converted are fine.”
He later sold the camera, saying he didn’t shoot with it enough to justify owning it.
Ah, there’s another point: the Leica M11 Monochrom (that’s the way they spell it) lists for $9195. No, that’s not a typo.
I got out a few cameras and played around with both their built-in black-and-white options, and options in Adobe Lightroom for converting color images into black-and-white, an activity I try to do several times a year. I had fun, and made some images I liked.
Then, along comes the elephant in the room: sharing, displaying, or exhibiting your images, color or monochrome, somewhere that matters. I see a very pointless chase unfolding before me: faster, bigger, better images, shared and diluted by cluttered, heavily monetized social media sites on which potentially brilliant 46-megapixel, super-clear, high-ISO gems get posted to Facebook or Instagram, compressed by their servers and never shared at resolutions higher than 2000 x 1400 pixels, which is equivalent to 2.8 megapixels.
I have a buddy (who lives in another state) who seems intent on chasing the photographic dragon, and it seems that all that camera power and photographic prowess is squandered on the ever-increasing views on smartphones.
The other side of that, though, is harder to see and appreciate, and that is the experience of making pictures is fun and exciting even if the images aren’t fully exploited on the other end.
My bottom line: monochrome cameras probably have a place in a few photographer’s lives, but for most of us, including me, shooting in a color camera’s monochrome mode is more than enough for the occasional creative excursion.
And if you do enjoy pushing the limits of camera technology, find a way to really take advantage of it by printing, publishing and displaying those amazing images.
Wheatgrass waves in the breeze on a recent photowalk.
I was tapping away at this and that on my laptop recently. I listen to my Apple Music on shuffle most of the time. As I worked, I came across the song Silo Lullaby by Toad the Wet Sprocket, originally offered as a “hidden bonus track” on the CD Coil in 1997.
When I first got Coil, I used my made-from-scraps Windows 3.1 386-processor desktop computer to unhide the track, and played it many times. Later, in 1999, I went on a photo trip to New Mexico, called Villanueva, the tiny hamlet where I borrow a friend’s cabin, and still listened to Toad all the time. So, as can happen with music and the way it leads places in our imaginations, Silo Lullaby became something of an anthem, at least between my own ears, for that week in the desert.
That week in New Mexico was inspired by the beginnings of the move from printing film to scanning film at my newspaper, which meant I was suddenly in possession of rather a lot of orphaned black-and-white film and paper. What to do with it? Head west!
The Villanueva trip was a great opportunity to use my Fujifilm 6×7 GW670III, a rangefinder camera with a fixed 90mm f/3.5 lens, which was very sharp. The 6×7 negatives that came out of that camera were full of an amazing amount of detail.
The flaws of the Fuji in my workflow in New Mexico, however, remained as obvious as they had all those times I tried to use it in the newsroom: too slow to focus, plasticky controls, and because it was a rangefinder and used a mechanical parallax compensation system in the viewfinder, it was never really possible to take full advantage of the much larger area of the 6×7 cm frame size because something always ended up getting cropped in or out.
I was, and still am, pretty good with a rangefinder, since my first camera, a Yashica Electro 35 GSN I got for Christmas when I was 13, used a rangefinder. I had more time and less film in those days, so I spent a lot of time practicing with the rangefinder.
I don’t want to say my Fuji 6×7 was a failed purchase, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my fine art photography.
In the end, I have built a career on discovering what does and doesn’t work for my photography styles; news, sports, illustration, fine art, travel, and on and on; and though I wish it had, the Fuji 6×7 just never worked for me.
Your humble host poses for a snapshot at White Sands National Monument on a sunny morning in September 2000. Hanging from my neck is the camera in question, the Fuji GW670III Professional 6×7, wearing a B+W deep orange filter.
For a long time, Sony was mostly known for their consumer electronics, like the Walkman, the Discman, DVD and MiniDisc players, televisions and more. In fact, my first television was a 13-inch Sony Trinitron.
The biggest news in photography in recent weeks has been Sony’s announcement of their release of the Sony A9 III, a $6000 mirrorless camera that is equipped with the first-ever global shutter.
Do a web search for “why is global shutter a big deal?” and you will find no shortage of articles and videos explaining why. At the top of all these lists are “rolling shutter” and “flash sync speed.”
As I read and watched these items this week, I kept coming back to this: I know what these problems are, but when do I experience them? The answer kept coming back again and again: never.
So what are the possibilities? Am I somehow divorced from the technology because of my age and experience? Am I cynical about endless technological developments as needless, pointless corporate money grabs? Am I somehow missing the point?
It’s not easy to write off my answers, since I make pictures for a living, sometimes thousands in a week, and I really don’t run into these problems.
Last week another photographer, a Sony shooter, echoed my sentiment: what does global shutter do for us? Are these actual problems that need to be solved, or is this just another technology to buy to “keep up with the Joneses?”
Let me also say that I don’t want to be that old guy shouting, “Back in my day, all our film was ASA 25. You kids and your damn contraptions! Get off my lawn!”
Here is a strange gift from Sony: as the sensor on my well-used Cybershot F828 started to malfunction and generated this this pattern for me, which reminds me of the tesseract from Intergalactic.
Okay, the final elephant in the room: video. This might be the obvious answer to the question of why global shutter is so significant. I don’t shoot a lot of video, and aside from a few people in my area who work in media relations, I don’t see a lot of “produced” video, just start-and-stop video from smartphones posted to social media.
Video in the last few years has become so self-referential, it’s hard to remain interested. There are so many videos on how good camera are at making video, but very little actual content produced from those cameras. “See what the new (brand) can do! Isn’t it amazing?”
So, is global shutter a solution in making videos? If it is, I’m not really seeing it. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Do you have a video that you have produced that benefits from global shutter?
Another angle: digital camera sales have been way down as they compete with the cameras built into smartphones, even to the point that a lot of my photography students are pulling camera out of their bags that they neglected, telling me that want to learn to use it, “but I’ve mostly been shooting with my phone.”
How can they compete? The only way is to produce cameras with more features, with faster this and that, sharper this and that, cooler this and that. Global shutter is one of those things. And you can’t make cameras slower and heavier, even if you are trying to make it more affordable, because no one says, “You saved money? Cool!”
What do you think? Is this a solution to a problem, or a solution looking for a problem?
I dug through my photo junk, and this, the Cybershot F828, is the only Sony camera I own.
This week Fujifilm announced their newest camera in the “medium format” digital market, the GFX100 II. I am very excited by this camera, for several reasons.
Fujifilm announced their new medium format digital camera, the GFX100 II, this week. One of Fuji’s marketing taglines for this line of cameras is “More than full frame.”
Fujifilm has always been a favorite brand for me. My first single lens reflex (SLR) camera was a Fujifilm ST-605n, which I bought in the summer of 1978.
Fujifilm has been developing one of the most interesting lines of camera and lenses on the market today.
Fujifilm understands that the idea of “full frame” for digital imaging has always been a compromise, as in, “full frame” is a full frame of what? 35mm film, a format that was the most popular film size in history, but which was never the film format that resulted in the best image quality.
As a result, Fujifilm has developed two successful lines, one smaller-format, APS-C sensors, the other a larger format, in this case a 43.8mm×32.9mm sensor, about the size of a Post-It note.
The specs on this new camera include the ability to shoot 8K video, but in a world of 100-million-dollar action movies, more video resolution might be a selling point, but as it increases by leaps, my interest plunges by leaps. Imagine, for example, how much better your videos might be if you went to filmmaking school with the money you’d use to buy all the cameras you think you need to make films.
At the heart of any digital camera, from your smartphone to the biggest, most-expensive digital camera, is the imaging sensor. This is one I took out of a dead Nikon D100.
Of course new, this camera’s price is high, though not as high as cameras in this class once were. If I were constructing a camera system from the bottom up, and image quality, especially in terms of maximum resolution for high-end photographic applications like portraiture, advertising, product and food, or fine art are concerned, this camera might be the cornerstone of that system.
But honestly, how many pictures made with incredibly powerful digital cameras end up on social media and nowhere else? Does it make sense to make images at resolutions like 12,000 x 9000 pixels, only to have it instantly reduced to 2048 × 1371 by Facebook? And does it make sense to spend $7000 so your friends will ooo and ahh at you on Instagram?
In a way, this feels like a call to photographic artists to resolve to do more – much more – with their images. Think about how much more satisfying, and long-lasting, it would be to have some of these super-resolution images printed really big and displayed in our homes, in galleries, or for sale to the public? How great would it be to spread out a dozen of your best images, all printed the size of posters, for sale on the Plaza in Santa Fe?
I have been to Santa Fe, New Mexico many times over the years, and I have always loved it’s artsiness, and have often daydreamed that someday I might like to sell my images there.
Between gifts from readers and estate sale box buys, I have a nice collection of cameras. From actual antiques to digital cameras that are almost up-to-the-minute technology, it forms a timeline of photography on my selves.
The Nikon N8008 and N6006 pose in my home studio.
Two cameras that fall in the middle of all that are the late-1980s, early-1990s Nikon N8008 and N6006. These cameras were among the first to provide fully automatic everything, from shutter speeds and apertures to film winding and rewinding.
My fellow photographers and I grew up believing that manually-operated, mechanical cameras were our only safe bet, so when cameras like these came along, we were skeptical. We were especially suspicious of cameras that didn’t allow us to wind the film to the next frame or rewind the film back into the canister when we were done.
The control quad on the top left of the Nikon N8008 and N6006 are similar but not identical. The location and shape are inherited from the location of a mechanical rewind knob on earlier 35mm cameras.
It turns out were were mostly right. The tech of the late 1980s and early 1990s was transitional, and while I understand that cameras like the N8008 and the N6006 were a part of the transitions that got us where we are today, I wanted nothing to do with it. Croaked-out batteries didn’t just mean you had to guess the exposure. They meant you were done using that camera, and your film was a prisoner inside it, until you could get ahold of fresh batteries.
When handling these cameras, the thing that strikes me the most is how heavy they are. I expect this is because another issue in the transition from film to digital was the idea that plastic was “junk.” Honestly, that’s mostly right also. There have been a lot of strides in the last 30 years towards better materials, both in plastics and metal alloys.
The surfaces of both of these camera is slick and hard, offering an uncomfortable grip surface.
The main display panel on the Nikon N8008 is smallish and a little hard to see, and is very evidently a transitional phase between all-mechanical film cameras and all-electronic digital cameras.
If you put batteries in these cameras, they seem to come on and run as expected, but that experience is as clunky and awkward as a 14-year-old boy asking a girl on a date. The buttons are oddly placed, the displays are small and not very contrasty, and the sound the camera makes – kerrrrclunk-whrrrrr – as it winds the film is like an underpowered VW microbus climbing a mountain pass.
Autofocus is barely there. That is an area of development that has skyrocketed in capability over the years.
Despite all that seems wrong with cameras of this ilk, I am glad I have them in my collection. They stand as a moment in photography history.
The Nikon N8008 and N6006 are shown with an AF Nikkor 35-70mm f/3.3-4.5, a lens these cameras wore as part of a kit. Some, including me, think this lens is among the worst Nikon ever produced.
During my freshman year in college, I sold my first two cameras, a Fujica ST-605 and a Yashica Electro 35 GSN. I liked them both, but even at the age of 18, I knew I would want and need more – much more – out of a camera system. I loved my first cameras, but I quickly outgrew their limitations.
The Nikon EM sits in my home studio recently.
I turned to Nikon, which was very much the frontrunner in professional photography in 1982. The Fujica and Yashica weren’t worth much, so I combined that money and some saved lunch money and visited Lawrence Photo in Oklahoma City. Photographers might recall that they went out of business decades ago.
I looked at the long glass merchandise cases at all the Nikon cameras. The most expensive at the time was the industry-leading Nikon F3, but as a starving college freshman, a flagship camera might as well have been on top of Mount Everest.
I started looking at realist options. For a short time, I actually held, and considered, the Nikon EM. It was very affordable, and not a bad-looking camera (kind of cute, actually), but it had a fatal (in my opinion) flaw: no manual exposure control. In those days, it was almost considered a sin to not shoot in manual mode.
A roll of 35mm film sits in the film chamber of the Nikon EM to give a sense of how small this camera is.
The camera I chose, and used until it died, was the Nikon FM, followed by a couple of Nikon FM2 cameras. These cameras were tough, solid, and completely manual-everything, and I made a living with them up to the time they died, which was also the advent of the digital age.
A kind reader recently gave me an EM. It appears to be in pretty good shape. The shutter runs and it looks like it is metering pretty accurately. Instead of manual shutter speeds, the exposure mode dial simply has B, M90, and Auto.
The exposure quadrant of the Nikon EM has the shutter release in the middle of the film wind lever. Shutter options are B, M90, and Auto. The button to the left of the shutter release is a battery test button, so when you push it, the little red LED next to it should light up.
The B setting holds the shutter open as long as you keep the shutter release button held down or open with a cable release, the Auto setting allows the photographer to set the aperture and the camera picks the shutter speed, and the M90 is an emergency 1/90th shutter speed that will run if the battery dies or is removed. There is a self-timer on the front of the camera in the traditional place, and there is a “backlight” button that serves as a one-dimensional exposure compensation feature; when you push it, the camera makes the image two stops lighter by switching the shutter speed two stops longer.
An interesting option for the EM was the MD-E motor drive, which would wind your film at a blazing two frames per second. You could use the MD-E on its successors, the Nikon FG and FG-20.
The baseplate of the Nikon EM shows where the MD-E motor drive would attach.
The EM was considered plasticky in its day, but in my hands it actually feels pretty sturdy. At the time of its release, 1979, Nikon’s “affordable” sub-brand was the Nikkormat line, and they were made of so much steel and brass, almost every camera after them seemed plasticky.
I’ve got a few rolls of film, but every time I think that sounds like a project, I recall the fact that all my film is expired by about 15 years, and how much it costs to have it processed, then, of course, scanned, which just makes it back into a digital image, so I’m not seeing a real reason to do it.
I seldom saw the Nikon EM in the field, and I never put a single frame of film through one, but thanks to my reader, I have another nice museum piece in my collection.
The Nikon EM sits on its back in my studio. It’s actually a neat little camera.
