Q. for Ken Rockwell

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006 14:41:26 -0800, Paul Allen wrote:

Indeed. My wife and I went on a Burke Museum sponsored tour of old
Haida village sites in the Queen Charlotte Islands back in July.
There were a bunch of cameras on the boat. My brand-new FZ30, several
big Nikon dSLR's, the skipper's Canon with a big heavy hunk of glass
on the front. One of the women on the boat sat and sketched or painted
on all of our excursions ashore. She brought all of her images to the
get-together we had last month, and darned if she didn't "shoot" some
of the same scenes I did and I like her rendition better.

Too bad you couldn't have had a pro on the boat to show what
really could be done with sketches and paintings. You can only get
limited quality from a paint and shooter.

Annika1980 wrote:

Stewy wrote:

I think if you gave Adams a cellphone and told him to get on with it,
he'd come back with better pictures than most of us even with our latest
piece of flashy technology from Hassy, Leica, Canon or Nikon...

Only after spending many hours in his digital darkroom.
Ansel's big secret weapon was his darkroom skills. That's where the
magic happens.


His big secret was that he knew how to make a photographic composition, soup
to nuts.

--
Thomas T. Veldhouse
Key Fingerprint: D281 77A5 63EE 82C5 5E68 00E4 7868 0ADC 4EFB 39F0

Stewy wrote:
I think if you gave Adams a cellphone and told him to get on with
it,
he'd come back with better pictures than most of us even with our latest
piece of flashy technology from Hassy, Leica, Canon or Nikon...

I think if you tried to give Adams a cellphone camera he would have
told you to shove it where the light does not shine. Adams was a
founding member of the Group f/64, not a group that is going to try and
use a point and shoot camera.

Scott

"Scott W" wrote in message
ups.com...
Stewy wrote:
I think if you gave Adams a cellphone and told him to get on with
it,
he'd come back with better pictures than most of us even with our latest
piece of flashy technology from Hassy, Leica, Canon or Nikon...

I think if you tried to give Adams a cellphone camera he would have
told you to shove it where the light does not shine. Adams was a
founding member of the Group f/64, not a group that is going to try and
use a point and shoot camera.

Adams was a very inclusive personality, and seldom uttered a discouraging
word to anyone. In the charter for f/64 the point is made that, although
they favored a certain way of making images, this was not meant to imply
that other ways of using photography were invalid or inferior in any way.

Adams was not the meticulous technologist that many make him out to be - far
from it. Adams was a long time user of 35mm film for casual people shots,
and he experimented with Polaroid images. As a teacher he always emphasized
individual preference over any hard and fast technique. I don't think he'd
go off and reshoot half dome with a cell phone camera, but he would
certainly spend a pleasant afternoon or two with what would have been a
marvelous toy. I suspect that, after discovering a good quality digital
camera together with Photoshop, he would have scarcely set foot in the
darkroom again.
--

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/

Stewy wrote:

I think if you gave Adams a cellphone and told him to get on with it,
he'd come back with better pictures than most of us even with our latest
piece of flashy technology from Hassy, Leica, Canon or Nikon...

I nominate this post for the most effacing hyperbole this Fall.

--
john mcwilliams

In article ,
Mike Russell -MOVE wrote:
but he would
certainly spend a pleasant afternoon or two with what would have been a
marvelous toy. I suspect that, after discovering a good quality digital
camera together with Photoshop, he would have scarcely set foot in the
darkroom again.

That sounds like good advice. Have a pleasant afternoon or two with a
digital toy (camera phone or cheap P&S) and then move on to a good quality
digital camera for real photography :-)


--
That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it
could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.
-- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

On Sat, 2 Dec 2006 13:45:56 +0100, (Philip Homburg)
wrote:


That sounds like good advice. Have a pleasant afternoon or two with a
digital toy (camera phone or cheap P&S) and then move on to a good quality
digital camera for real photography :-)


Is a photo "real" only when captured with a sufficiently
expensive camera? Surely you jest.


rafe b
www.terrapinphoto.com

In article ,
Raphael Bustin wrote:
That sounds like good advice. Have a pleasant afternoon or two with a
digital toy (camera phone or cheap P&S) and then move on to a good quality
digital camera for real photography :-)

Is a photo "real" only when captured with a sufficiently
expensive camera? Surely you jest.

No, I think it is a complete waste of time setting up for a good shot
and then the limiting technical quality by using sub-standard equipment.

It is different if nothing else is available. But this is about
what equipment you prefer to use.


--
That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it
could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.
-- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

On Sat, 2 Dec 2006 14:53:11 +0100, (Philip Homburg)
wrote:

In article ,
Raphael Bustin wrote:

Is a photo "real" only when captured with a sufficiently
expensive camera? Surely you jest.

No, I think it is a complete waste of time setting up for a good shot
and then the limiting technical quality by using sub-standard equipment.

It is different if nothing else is available. But this is about
what equipment you prefer to use.


You miss the point. For some people -- including myself,
at times, photography isn't the main event. The camera
is there as a recording device, no more and no less.

Your choice of words is interesting. Most folks don't
"set up" for a shot. They point and they shoot. For their
purposes, that's good enough.

When my dad died a few years back, I inherited thousands
of negatives and slides and prints. You know which ones
matter? Not the artsy stuff. The ones that mean the most
to me are the people and the events. Some are poorly
composed, poorly lit, out of focus. Doesn't matter. Those
are the ones that *didn't* get trashed.


rafe b
www.terrapinphoto.com

In article ,
Raphael Bustin wrote:
On Sat, 2 Dec 2006 14:53:11 +0100, (Philip Homburg)
wrote:

In article ,
Raphael Bustin wrote:

Is a photo "real" only when captured with a sufficiently
expensive camera? Surely you jest.

No, I think it is a complete waste of time setting up for a good shot
and then the limiting technical quality by using sub-standard equipment.

It is different if nothing else is available. But this is about
what equipment you prefer to use.

You miss the point. For some people -- including myself,
at times, photography isn't the main event. The camera
is there as a recording device, no more and no less.

This sub-thread is about what AA would do.

Your choice of words is interesting. Most folks don't
"set up" for a shot. They point and they shoot. For their
purposes, that's good enough.

Even in that case, you don't want sub-standard equipment. However,
some of the trade-offs will be different.

When my dad died a few years back, I inherited thousands
of negatives and slides and prints. You know which ones
matter? Not the artsy stuff. The ones that mean the most
to me are the people and the events. Some are poorly
composed, poorly lit, out of focus. Doesn't matter. Those
are the ones that *didn't* get trashed.

It doesn't have anything to do with 'artsy' or not. For people shots I
still want good images. It may have been different 50 years ago, but these
days there tend to be so many images, that it is better to focus on getting
some good ones.


--
That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it
could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.
-- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency