MikeWhy wrote:


LF is a mature technology. :-) If there ever was a mature technology, LF
certainly qualifies. In fact, I think it matured in the 50's or 60's, and
that's part of the difficulty just starting out. I was still in my zeroes
when 1969 left us; my tens and teens waited one more year, in the 70s.
Whether it's a cultural difference, or simply a lack of continued
"refinement" and change after that, the result is that how things work or go
together are, for lack of a better word, foreign. The solutions are
different from how we would design them today. Not that I can think
of a better way; it's just different.

Depends totally on what you're used to. LF cameras that I have seem to
have moved past the point that they require complicated gizmos to prove they
have worth. Everything is dirt simple. Turn the knob and something moves.
Just play a little and it makes sense. Many of todays items need to be
complicated to convince people they haven't wasted thier money. Or at least
it seems that way.


The film holders I ordered arrived today. I still lack the camera, but I can
pre-load the film that arrived earlier this week; the UPS guy is my new best
friend. I really look forward to our brief meetings. Again, in hindsight,
it's all too obvious how the film goes in the holder. It was several
minutes, though, before I noticed that the back hinged out and away.
Reaffirming, then, that everything is already fully thought out and not easy
to get wrong, once you understand which brand of fool they were proofing
against.

Until you've seen it done, or actually did it yourself, every one of those
hundred and one little things you do to take a picture are potential sources
of anxiety, frustration, or the simple joy of discovery. Once you've seen it
done actually did it yourself, every one of them I'm sure will be too simple
and too obvious for words, let alone the pictures that would make everything
exceeding clear.

No, no steenkin FAQ for me. FAQs are predominantly typed text. I find it odd
that for a photographic interest, long tomes are mostly what I've found.
Well written, useful, and meaningful to be sure, but I don't think I want to
follow that model. A simple photo essay with the digital will have to do.




Paul Butzi's film loading web page made it all click for me. The pictures
made the words make sense. Alot of it would be easier with somebody to show
you but most can be figured out with just trying. I'm always amazed when I
figure out some new and novel method and then the next day I read it in a
book. Proving that it was invented 70 years before I was-)


http://www.butzi.net/articles/filmload.htm

Nick