I recently learned of a fun hack photographers can perform on the Sony DCS-F828 digital camera of 2002 vintage. I happen to have a sort-of-working F828 in my photo closet, so I thought I’d try it out.
My sort-of-working Sony Cyber-shot DCS-F828 of 2002 vintage is shown with three infrared filters.
The fact that I just learned about it doesn’t mean it’s new. It only means that I stumbled upon it on one of a million trips into Internet dreamland.
The trick is to use a neodymium (“rare earth”) magnet to move the tiny infrared-blocking filter, sometimes called a “hot mirror” filter, inside the Sony camera. The result is that you can then place an infrared filter on the lens, enabling the photographer to explore the range of the spectrum in wavelengths longer than visible light.
Neodymium magnets are cheap. I ordered mine from Ebay for $9.
Holding this neodymium magnet just above a spot on the bottom of the Sony DCS-F828 digital camera will move the tiny infrared filter out of the light path, or back into the light path, depending on which pole of the magnet is next to the camera.
Holding the magnet just above the right spot on the bottom of the lens will either move the filter out of the light path or into the light path, depending on which pole of the magnet is next to the camera. The movement of the filter creates a barely audible “click” from inside the camera, and changes the image on the monitor from black to a kind of deep purple, depending on the filter mounted on the lens.
I have three infrared filters, each blocking a slightly different part of the spectrum. The filters are labeled in nanometers (a billionth of a meter), 720nm, 850nm, and 950nm. The filters appear black to the naked eye, since they don’t pass visible light, but, unlike eclipse glasses, are not safe for viewing the sun, which emits damaging ultraviolet energy.
The idea behind infrared photography is to express a view of the world unlike human vision. Therein lies the challenge, too, since while it is neat to explore our world in a different way, it doesn’t immediately lend itself to a strong narrative. I have explored infrared a couple of times before, but I think it may be time to push a little harder and make images that have more visual value than just “this is different.”
This is a view from my front deck using the Sony F828 with the infrared blocking filter “hacked” out of the light path and a 950nm infrared filter on the lens, yielding an eery, ghost-like rendering of ordinary trees and sky.
Continuing with a series of scans from my newspaper files from the film era, these images are from a photo essay to go with a story about the Ada Police Department training in special tactics in February 1990.
This is an interesting study in the evolution of police gear, attire, weapons, and tactics.
I made these images with my Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 lens and my 24mm f/2.0 lens, two of my all-time favorite lenses.
Here are a few recent images that passed my eyes on the job, but which weren’t suitable as content for my newspaper.
Crooked arrow on sidewalkI want to be like BarbieCrumbled chalk on crumbled sidewalkMorning, small town, ChristmasFlowers in brilliant morning sunYou’re pretty uglyBless our snipersShirt on hangerSummer naps in the sunZendaiya photographs a brush fire
Some of my old 50mm lenses sit on a shelf in my home office. It’s always fun to play with these.
I sometimes miss the days of Internet past, when a search yielded an interesting web page that had links in it to other links, which might have still more links. I loved clicking around to see everything from dancing hamsters to moon landing hoaxes.
Now, I say with a heavy sign, the Internet seems to be dead. Look it up if you want: use the phrase “Dead Internet Theory.” I know it’s a “conspiracy theory,” but it makes more sense every day.
With that said, I did a few obscure web searches recently, deliberately trying to find actual, real web content, and I went down one rabbit hole after another.
As a photographer, of course I’ll click on all things photographic. One of these led me to revisit an interesting topic: ultra-large-aperture lenses, especially, in this case, the Nikkor Z 58mm f/0.95.
This lens is what’s known as a “halo” product, something that shows the prestige of the camera maker, car maker, computer maker, fine winery, distillery, etc., but is expensive enough that they actually expect to sell very few of these items.
The 58mm f/0.95 sports a list price of $7999.95. Wow. What could this lens offer that sets it so far above and out of reach? Well, upon reading some reviews and looking at some sample images, the answer is: nothing. Reviews like to point out that the optics are just about perfect, as is the build quality, and that shooting this lens at f/0.95 should result in an impressive amount of selective focus.
Two of my photographer friends and I have occasionally talked about possible renting this lens, which appears to be $363 for seven days from one prominent lens rental place.
Then, of course, the practical photographer in me took over and said, “Can I create what this halo lens can do, with the equipment I already own?” I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out a broken, 40-year-old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 that someone had given me, and stepped out into my front yard.
The result, as I might have expected, was every bit as usefully good as the $8000 behemoth. It’s probably not quite as technically perfect, but right out of the camera, it delivered.
So I am completely unimpressed with the idea of an $8000 50mm or 58mm lens.
I always have fun with little “what if” projects like this, and they often remind me of a term I’ve been using in the last couple of years, “Shop your closet first.”
I photographed this Shumard oak leaf lodged in a chain link fence in my front yard just after dusk, using my 40-year-old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4. I don’t know how a much more expensive lens could offer to this image, which is sharp, has good color, and shows great selective focus.
I was sorry to see the Ada Cougars football team’s season come to an end Friday with their loss to Bethany.
Ada Cougar football fans wore hunting camo for their Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 playoff game against Bethany.
At the same time, I am definitely a forward-looker, and I am looking forward to basketball season.
Honestly, every season is great, as long as I and mindful of what matters most: being the eyes and ears of our newspaper.
Vanoss cheerleaders line up to wait for a free throw as their Lady Wolves team takes on Latta Friday night, Nov. 22, 2024 at Latta Panther Field House.
As I write this, I just finished covering the Santa Stroll in Wintersmith Park. I saw hundreds of people who were glad to see me, and glad I was there.
Community members enjoy the Santa Stroll Monday, Nov. 25, 2024 in Wintersmith Park.
A friend of mine pulled me aside and chatted for a minute, then said something incredibly humbling and flattering: “Richard, you have done so much for our community.”
Community is, in my opinion, the real reason for being a journalist, and it has been an honor that you welcome me as your community journalist.
It is amazing and humbling that the people of my community like me and love my work. Thank you, my friends.
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.
My readers might remember that last month I talked about my very memorable first weeks at The Ada News, in October and November 1988.
On a Friday night at Norris Field, while covering the Ada Cougars on the way to their 15th State Championship in 1988, I made this image of scout saluting the flag. Everyone loved this image.
One image in particular, of five Boy Scouts holding the U.S. flag and saluting it, came back to mind last week when Scouts from Troop 4, Hawk Mater, Kevin Fender, Carter Osborn, Aiden Holder, Finn Holman, and Harrison Townsend presented the colors at an Ada High football game.
These young Scouts were doing the same exact thing, in the same exact spot, 36 years later, and I think that is pretty cool.
Boy Scout Troop 4 members Finn Holman, Harrison Townsend, Aiden Holder, Carter Osborn, Kevin Fender, and Hawk Mater present the colors ay the Ada High School football game Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024 at ECU’s Koi Ishto Stadium.
This is part of a much larger project of mine: scanning the thousands and thousands of images I made during the first years of my career (before digital), a project my readers and I both love.
So watch this space for more old photos, scanned from film so they can see the light of day once more.
Finn Holman, Harrison Townsend, and Aiden Holder salute the U.S. flag at the Ada High School football game Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024 at ECU’s Koi Ishto Stadium.
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.
A flash cube sits mounted on a Sears Easiload Auto 600 camera, which dates to about 1970.
Journey back in time with me to a time before digital photography and before the peak of film photography, in which photography wasn’t the ubiquitous juggernaut of internet culture it has become today.
Today’s wayback topic is from the 1960s and 1970s. Families made far fewer pictures in a year than families make now in a day. Cameras were awkward, film and processing was expensive, and lighting was unheard of.
When a photographer wants to shoot in low light today, we have all kind of luxuries at our disposal, like sky-high ISO settings on our cameras, bright, lightweight LED panels, and a plethora of large-maximum-aperture lenses.
But to make pictures in 1974, for example, we faced some annoying obstacles. Film was low-ISO, affordable cameras had very small lenses, and most of the indoor artificial light in our daily lives was produced by incandescent light bulbs.
In these difficult lighting situations, some photographers had electronic flash units that we could put atop our cameras. They were expensive, bulky, and didn’t deliver good light more than a few times per minute.
For the rest of us, like my family, were flash cubes.
Flash cubes were almost always mounted on top of the camera, close to the center of the body. Not only was the light from this setup harsh, but it often resulted in “red-eye,” which is caused when light reflects directly off of the retina in the eye back into the camera.
Flash cubes contained a flash bulb, usually filled with filaments of metallic magnesium, with a small reflector behind it. The bulbs were arranged so that all four faces of the cube had a bulb and reflector, so each cube delivered four flashes. The socket the cube plugged into at the top of the camera rotated when the film was advanced, putting a fresh bulb at the front of the camera, ready to shoot.
It’s worth noting at this point that very frequently, the family photographer (usually a parent), forgot to advance the film, so there would be an awkward moment when everyone stopped to grin at the camera, waiting while Mom or Dad figured out that they needed to wind the crank to advance the film. All the time. All. The. Time.
In that era and environment, a roll of film was considered very valuable, so after the photo session in front of the Thanksgiving dinner table, shooting maybe three of four “now I want the kids in this one” photos, you put the camera away. So many people did this, so that after Christmas when you finally got that roll of film processed (“developed” is a misnomer when talking about film, since developing is only one step in processing film), revealing surprises, like photographs you forgot you made.
So here we are, dressed up for Easter or the beach or Halloween, and Mom or Dad want a picture. They line you up against a wall, since it was plain and therefore not distracting, clicked a flash cube on top of the Kodak Instamatic, “Smile,” and kapow!
I made this image of my father in the late 1970s, showing how harsh the light from the flash cube can be.
The funnest thing about using flash cubes was that everyone who had just looked directly at the camera now had a bright green spot in their visions for a little while.
It’s hard to imagine bad lighting today, when our AI-powered smartphones fix it automatically, but, just like with the pop-up flash on all our consumer digital cameras, flash cubes delivered some of the least-flattering light in photography. The reason is pretty straightforward: everything and everyone close to the camera is over exposed, and everything in the background is underexpose, often by a lot.
The science behind it is the inverse square law: the intensity of a light source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. You don’t really need to memorize that, since there are tons of examples everywhere, but I happen to think science is fun.
Following the painful, blinding flash from the cube, the bulb inside the cube was too hot to touch, since there was just a tiny explosion in there. In a minute it could cool off, but I always thought it was neat to try to touch it, just to experience that little science experiment first hand.
You might be able to find a flash cube in the box of junk in the top of the hall closet, but I advise against trying to use them. The components in the newest flash bulbs are likely to be 50 or more years old now, and have surely deteriorated. But if you do find some, now you know how they worked!
Two flash cubes sit on a table recently. Each cube contains four flash bulbs.
This week on October 24, I marked 36 years at your Ada News. I know at least a few of my readers will remember what Ada looked like in 1988, and who I was then, just 25 years old.
I photographed these girls on a swing at Hayes School, on my very first day at The Ada News. Some people on social media saw this image this week, and suggested getting these people together to recreate this image, since they would be in their 40s now, and I love that idea. Let’s make it happen!
The passing years have brought changes, but the essence of the work we do at the paper hasn’t changed: bringing you the news.
One thing that’s been on my mind for a while is the idea that my photographs – photographs of you, your friends, your family, and our community – deserve to see the light of day again. It kills me to think that a really nice image I made lots of years ago is sitting in a Kodak box tucked away under my desk, might not ever be seen again.
On a Friday night at Norris Field in 1988, while covering the Ada Cougars on their way to their 15th State Championship, I made this image of scout saluting the flag. Everyone loved this image.
Thinking about this is a broader context, I wonder how many newspapers and their photographs were lost or destroyed or are sitting in a storage building somewhere, only having been published once and forgotten.
I don’t yet know what I am going to do about it, but I know that if I don’t make an effort to archive and preserve and reshare the tens of thousands of images I made during the film era (before digital), it won’t get done.
I am also mindful of my own ideas about big, seemingly overwhelming projects: chisel away at them one tiny bit at a time. What if I dug out and scanned just 10 photos a week? It would get done slowly, but it would get done.
Finally, thank you for reading our newspaper. We love bringing you the news.
In November 1988, I made this image to go with a story about Hanukkah, and it, too, was very well-received.
Most of us have seen the fake photos making the round this week, mostly the one of the little girl in a boat holding a puppy. These photos are easy to spot as fakes, being created by AI image-generators.
Many of my photojournalist friends called out these photos, some even promising to “unfriend” anyone who shares them.
I called someone out for it right here in our community, and the response was the usual defensive nonsense: yes, but there is a real crisis, so it’s okay. They even took the opportunity to accuse me of “the liberal media,” laying bare the depth and breadth of their ignorance.
As it turns out, there are plenty of real photos of the hurricane and the flooding, created by real photojournalists.
“Fake disaster images don’t just damage trust in the specific events they misrepresent, they erode trust in all media over time. People who feel deceived by one image are more likely to become skeptical of future disaster coverage, even if it’s legitimate,” Forbes Magazine said last week.
So what are these AI defenders saying? That sharing, posting, and believing fake photos is fine when you want them to support your point of view?
As I write this, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida, but by the time you read this, it will have struck. My hope is that everyone sets aside the nonsense of AI and fakes, and takes in the real journalism surrounding this event.
Picking out fakes from real photos isn’t always easy, so one thing I hope my readers understand is the importance of knowing real sources of content, like my newspaper. This photo is an example: it looks like a fake, and you might assume I drummed it up from an AI generator, but no. This image is a real scene, shot by me, with a camera with an infrared filter on it. Such a technique isn’t intended to fool anyone, but to explore different imaging possibilities. It turns out that the red sign and the white STOP lettering reflect almost exactly the same amount of infrared light.
The photography community has been taking itself a little too seriously lately, so I thought it might be fun to explore the more playful side of my work.
I took a vase outside to photograph it against the trees in the front yard with the morning sun shining through them. I made this image with a screw-mount 35mm f/2.8 lens, and the bokeh, the characteristics of the out-of-focus areas in this image, has a ring-like appearance that I think expresses the idea of shimmering.I then photographed the same scene with a 50mm f/1.4 lens, and, as you can see, the bokeh is softer and rounder, expressing to the viewer a different idea about how the morning light looks and feels.
One thing us nerdish-leaning photographers do is pull out old lenses and explore their “bokeh,” which is a term used to describe the quality of the out-of-focus areas in an image. It’s not only fun, it can teach us how to use tricks and techniques like this more effectively in the future.
I love to photograph the outdoors where I live. My home is in Byng, on a nice patch of green. I love photographing my dogs. I love photographing mornings and evenings.
One thing I love to photograph that stands above these other things is the light itself. I love it when it takes on colors and and shapes and textures. I love it when light plays tricks, or shines through otherwise normal objects to make them striking or beautiful.
Photography is literally recording light, and I am reinventing my ideas about how to record light all the time. What will you do today to reinvent how you make pictures?
As my morning progressed, I had need of a toothpick. This container had just the right number of toothpicks in it that they fell into this interesting, colorful configuration.
One of my biggest ongoing projects this summer into fall has been my efforts to make certain my digital life – the photos, videos, writings, audio recordings, and everything else that lives as data – is safe and easy to access.
An interesting, even counterintuitive, part of this project is that I am throwing away (deleting) files and folders that are actual digital junk.
This project is a subset of cleaning, organizing, and decluttering my home.
Here are four flash drives of various sizes, which hold an incredible amount of data. One of them has the case off so you can see what’s inside these small wonders.
They both follow the same basic theme, that I have more stuff than I need, that all that stuff has the effect of cluttering my life and make my life more difficult to navigate, and that any number of things could just go in the trash.
“But, Richard, I just bought a gadrillion gigabytes of cloud storage. Why can’t I just put all my files there?”
Yes, sure, that’s possible, but have you ever tried to find a photo from June 18, 2017 on a cloud server like that? Or worse, have you ever had anyone say, “You took my picture when I was in high school. Can I get a copy?” Then they don’t know what month or even year it was?
I have thrown away a few hundred compact discs (CDs) that were filled with my photos, but not before making certain that those files resided in several safe locations, like solid state flash drive or cloud servers.
And yes, I know I have talked about saving and migrating your data (if you care about it), but this is different: this is about getting rid of junk, throwing it away. I did that with hundreds of my wife’s saved, moldy, spider-infested books and magazines, and I did it with thousands of saved, irrelevant, bloated computer files over the years.
The trick, of course, is to be confident that you are deleting the right files. When using a laptop or desktop computer, it’s actually pretty straightforward: search for a file name (if you have an Apple Computer with a Macintosh operating system, it’s Command-F, and if you are using a PC with a Microsoft operating system, it might be Control-F), and look at how many times that file appears. If I search for “Utah” for example, I’ll probably see dozens of the exact same file, some saved in my archive, some resized for my website, still more orphaned by various unfinished products.
The only critical photo file to save are the full-size, archived versions. Everything else can probably go into what the Macintosh Operating System calls “trash,” and Microsoft calls the “recycle bin.
Pro tip: just moving a file to the trash doesn’t delete it. It just makes it inaccessible and marks it as trash. To really get rid of a file, you have to empty the trash.
I know, I know: Richard, I don’t want to end up accidentally throwing away the wrong photos. Solution: buy a really big solid-state external drive, plug it in to your USB port, and drop all of those files into it. Take a big magic marker and write “deleted files” on it, then put it somewhere safe.
I’m not a big fan of buying software or hardware as a way to clean up my digital life. My wife constantly bought shelves and hangers and organizers and and even a book about it, all to help her de-clutter, but that all just became part of the clutter.
When I say I am getting rid of clutter, I really mean it.
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.
