(Edward A. Falk) writes:

In article ,
Robert Coe wrote:

All of my film Nikons had a horizontal shutter, but the shutter on my wife's
Nikkormat was vertical.

BTW, for the original poster: although horizontal vs vertical is an
interesting topic, it's not actually important for a beginner to care
about this. I own three Nikons right now, and although I *think* they
all have vertical shutters, I'm not positive.

Yes, I agree completely. This is esoteric trivia. I'm enjoying that,
but it's NOT of any basic importance. (It may be of importance for
planning some very specific photos, in theory. If you're actively
looking for focal plane distortions for example, which way the shutter
goes makes a huge difference to how the result looks.)

It's really not something you care about unless you're doing high-speed
photography of action scenes, and usually not even then. It can also
affect flash sync speeds, but that's another advanced topic.

Exactly.

And you just need to know what the flash sync speed for your camera
*is*; you don't need to know why (and it's marked on the shutter speed
dial on the old cameras that have such a primitive device).
--
David Dyer-Bennet, ; http://dd-b.net/
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Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info