Chemical
I got my first proper SLR camera in 1976. (It was last put to serious use in Switzerland in 1998.) In '76 or '77 I joined the Edinburgh Photographic Society in Great King Street. I used my attic as a darkroom and created black and white prints up to 16 by 20 inches with my Durst enlarger. (The enlarger in the photo preceded the Durst one.) My camera was a Yashica TL Electro and cost £91.35, quite a lot of money in 1976. The competitive spirit in the Edinburgh Photographic Society and the criticisms of fellow photographers helped to improve my pictures.
I persevered with this camera, firstly because it was adequate for my needs, and secondly because I soon amassed a collection of lenses from 17mm ultra-wide to 350mm telephoto. I dabbled with colour-printing but soon reverted to monochrome. Unlike black and white processing, temperature is very critical with colour chemicals and they're expensive.
With black and white you can work under a red safe-light but with colour you must work in total darkness; there's no watching the image develop on the paper because once you expose it you must then put the exposed colour paper into the light-tight drum. In 1979 I devised a water bath and controller to keep the developer temperature constant. The controller had a remote probe and a relay to switch a fish-tank heater on and off, as well as an agitator powered by a cassette motor.
Video Camera
I finally got a camcorder in 1997, a JVC GR-DV1 which uses mini DV tapes. It has no flip-out screen but a miniature screen (inside the viewfinder) which worked well in sunlight. It rarely pays to be first with new technology and this camera didn't have Firewire out, never mind Firewire in! To get the video footage onto a computer I had to use a separate Sony Video Walkman, a GV-D900E. For a while, the only Firewire card available was by Adaptec and it cost £650.
Nowadays you can get remarkable results on even a pocket sized digital camera. Most of the new 5 Megapixel ones will do good quality video at 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames a second. A 1GB XD card the size of a postage stamp can hold many minutes of video.
In the 21st century it's no longer necessary to darken a room and set up the projector and screen in order to show people your home videos - but nevertheless they're still home videos and likely to be boring no matter how much you tart them up with all the fancy features that video editing software affords.
Digital Still Photography
I bought my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 900 in July 1998. It boasted a 1.2 Megapixel resolution and came with a 4MB card which I supplemented with a 20MB card. Memory cards were so expensive then that I took a laptop on holiday to store the photos each evening.
The benefits of digital technology
are significant:
Instant
results, no need to hand your film into the chemist.
No need to buy film.
Photograph anything you
want without some Boot's technician deciding whether to report you to
the authorities.
No worries about wasting
film - encourages you to experiment more.
No degradation of the
image due to the enlarger lens.
http://www.steves-digicams.com/diginews.html is a good source of reviews of and information about digital cameras.
In real terms my Olympus E10 probably cost no more than my Yashica SLR did in 1976. Having scanned all my old negatives on my Nikon Coolscan III, I now know that I can get superior results using all-digital. 4 Megapixels seems to me to be superior to a scanned 35mm negative. I have since scanned my negatives again using an Epson 4180 flatbed scanner with transparency adapter. This cost a quarter of the Coolscan's price and gave better results! Having used ultrawide lenses on my old film camera I always felt the need for this capability with digital. Add-on (filter-thread fitting) lenses helped but when Pentax brought out proper fisheye / wide lenses with zoom, I was hooked. (I also use a Fuji Z1 pocket camera which has a 3x optical zoom.) Mind you, I've no desire to emulate chemical photography and pander to this preoccupation with printing. The thing about digital photography is its immediacy and the ease of selection and editing. Naturally it's good to compose the image in the viewfinder in the first place - but if you've ever dodged and burned and made test strips in the darkroom - you'll know what I'm talking about. Everywhere I go there are computer monitors plugged into the planet. Who needs prints? My gallery is the internet or my laptop. Prints would cost me a fortune, be ecologically unsound and would fill a room. Why do I do this, anyway? I just can't help it. There are lots of ways of looking at the world. Sometimes I want to try to capture something I see and like, or am interested by - just because I reckon it's worth looking at later. If I think a picture has some photographic merit, then I'll add it to my website to A: share it with others - B: enjoy the buzz of having others have a glimpse of my perception of reality. I give my stuff away for free partly because it's in keeping with the spirit of the '60s and I'm an old '60s survivor, and partly because maybe nobody would look at it otherwise. The only stipulation is that no-one must redistribute my images to gain payment. Free for non-commercial use such as wallpaper. |
click on the cameras below for more details
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