Your Cameras

well i bought a supercute little FED-3 for £31 incl deliver and a leather case. goes from 1s-1/500+B so i figure it can be my night one for throwing some 800/1600 (depending) into. feel v. excited about all this btw!

i mean, its not a leica but i've never used a leica so idk what im missing and its a helluva lot more appro for my budget.

My parents bought themselves at 60D (which I will probably be selling for them in a year when they realize it hasn't been used). I've played it with for a few hours here and there - definitely an improvement over the T2i/Rebel series (which is what my brother just got, giving them the impetus to buy something one step better), and the viewfinder is pretty big and bright for a crop sensor (except at night indoors, with the kit zoom).

The fold out screen is interesting - I could see maybe using it during the day, when shutter speeds are high enough to not care (holding a camera at arms' length to view an LCD screen is less stable than elbows locked and braced against your face). But OTOH, in daylight is it going to be visible at all? Guessing it would be more useful to someone who has some idea WTF they're doing with video.

i got my fn ФЭД

i get the focusing thing, it made no sense to me when it was explained. dying to get a test roll but its like it takes forever to take all those photos.

it doesnt have to.

well i had work all day and i got it today. i might be 2/3 through a 36 roll

KIU!!!

My friend's dad gave me his Pentax Spotmatic F w/ 50mm f/4 macro lens tonight, he used it for 30 years to copy slides for his classes and Powerpoint made it obsolete. I love the feel of the camera, so solid and smooth.
Need to order a cheap fast 50 from KEH.

That was my dad's camera too! Had a 50mm lens with a big wide f/1.4 aperture. Still has it, although it was replaced with a ZX-5n that he only used for a couple of years before switching to a high-end Canon digital.

just wanted to say I dig this thread. keeping it from slipping the surly bonds of new answers.
I like the timeline of everyone's continued interests and acquisitions, etc.

I realized maybe day before yesterday, in the middle of a conversation, that at worst i always have at least one camera on my person, on my phone. There's also one on my iPod. And another one on my iPad. And there's my pocket Powershot. And then there's my DSLR Nikon. So when I show up to work most days, with my overstuffed backpack, I actually have six cameras on me, or eight if you count the two cameras on the iPad and iPod. So there are two good cameras, one middling one (on my Android phone), and four completely shit ones. And sitting at my desk here at home, I realize I have two MORE cameras -- the webcams on my iMac and my PC. I have a LOT of cameras. They have different functions, and only two of them take actually acceptable photos.

all of those take acceptable photos imo

The iCrap, even? Really? Maybe in special, perfect, mid-day circumstances.

best camera is the one you have etc etc

love the one you're with

Right, assuming you're taking a picture of something that you could never take another picture of. The iPod camera doesn't have any white balance control, though, for one example of how it's shit. On a cloudy day, with none of the yellow sun that gives Superman his powers, everything is washed out and aqua. It sucks. Hipstamatic helps a little tiny bit, but not enough that it makes it a great camera all of a sudden.

And I'm not going to spend more than two bucks to try to make a bad lens look like a good one. And ffs, the fray "old photo" effect is over, dead, buried, and stop using it plz.

kenan the funny thing is that you despite having 8 diff cameras always take the same photo of your face over and over

jk lol

you should check out some of the photojournalism done with iphones kenan

xp It's the same face! What am I supposed to do?

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/

xp Ah see the iPHONE has a much different, much better camera in it. The iPod and the iPad2 both have low-rent garbage. Seriously.

But of course the other cliche is that it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools. You can take a great photo with anything that captures light and records it somehow. But I'll stand my my point -- these Apple prodocts that are expected to be used for videochat as best have terrible, awful, no good, very bad cameras in them. The very least they could get away with and still call it a camera.

In the case of the iPod especially, this camera was a waste of the Chinese people's time and effort.

. . .

That was a dark joke. Do you see?

I'm very amused

I'm not. People are jumping out the windows at Foxconn, and I still have a shitty camera. Someone died for THIS?

That was an even darker joke. I'll quit while I'm behind.

note to self: excellent thread revive

all of those take acceptable photos imo

― flagp∞st (dayo), Saturday, 10 March 2012 00:48 (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^
photos are weird, i think their value in having captured their subject far outstrips their proficiency in whatever other respects, exponentially, over time. i am here to tell the your cameras thread that you are too concerned about your cameras.

not me

for web display just about anything made now is acceptable, but if you want to print larger than 4x6, some cameras are better than others

oh I should prob link to one of my favorite flickr photographers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47477258@N04/page1/
a lot of pictures that seem to be taken with digital point and shoots, cell phones (maybe?), as well as whatever else (all digital) and I think it looks fantastic. a totally different aesthetic from what I'm used to dealing with, but I think it looks fantastic. there's something I like about the really rough digital image, even though I'm too into film/my old cameras to go there myself.

shit I really didn't think I said fantastic twice. small vocabulary

man, they're great. http://www.flickr.com/photos/47477258@N04/6801902428/in/photostream.
i don't have examples up my sleeve but it reminds me of something that came up when i was asking for lens advice; the maybe skewed priority of sharpness, and rendering, when there are photos in which those features aren't an advantage or an asset, when clarity isn't crucial or helpful.

yeah, it's sort of like how people trade exposing tips and talk about how to massage raw files to avoid ever blowing out highlights etc. and then one day you think, wait, why does this matter?? I've seen many good pictures in my day with blown highlights and it's never bothered me, digital or otherwise.
here's someone else on flickr who has a lot of digital blown highlights, iso artifacts, etc., and I think her pictures are glorious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elena_vidor/

matters bc it pisses off dayo iirc
we should post some of our best bad photos!, i am gonna think, i really have quite a library.

yeah there's something very appealing about 'straight' photography - I think it requires a lot of confidence! I like this one:

http://i.imgur.com/iIqAZ.png

the flatness of which reminds me of

http://i.imgur.com/jyfcB.jpg

lol I am going through her flickr now and I don't see anything that's explicitly about blown highlights?

these are the kinds of blown highlights that piss me off:

http://i.imgur.com/3QxKg.jpg

the upper left part

or something like this: http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/canon/powershot_sd850-review/IMG_0017.JPG

ILP man shakes fist at cloud

lol. there's def a difference between blown highlights and blown highlights used aesthetically. like this pic from that photographer def works

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elena_vidor/5101410623/in/photostream

I don't begrudge high-keyed photos as a matter of principle - but I think when a photographer is aiming for an otherwise quotidian scene like a forest or a hallway like above and lets the highlights get blown it's very distracting. I guess maybe the Q is, are there other parts of the photograph that can distract the gaze.

like the abrupt transition from dark branches to white sky is bad, it's not so bad here and there's plenty else to look at and it's even part of the image itself, the transition from midtones to highlights as the gaze moves upwards

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elena_vidor/6467002099/in/photostream

I almost posted that one earlier as an example of a picture that I love. I had a hard time at first determining if the very bright values were technically blown or not, but whatever else I think it's a beautiful image.

got distracted by making & consuming oatmeal in the meantime

yeah there's a difference between an image being high-keyed and the highlights being blown. robert adams is an example of a photographer (who shoots in B&W no less) who prints to emphasize the bright values. shooting into the sun is probably going to result in blown highlights no matter what. but the effect is certainly striking! here's another from her stream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elena_vidor/3998105339/in/photostream