....Why I like digital

My romanian friend, jeni, 75 years old, bought a digital camera from Lidl,
not like my one, but a lesser, nut still good. I told her to buy an SD card,
which she did, 15 euros for a 1 GB Lexar card. She hardly ever believed that
she could take 1000 photos before the card would be full, and needed to come
to me to burn the contents on a dvd, and then format (or delete) the card
and starting afresh again. I even recharged for her the pair of NiMH
batteries that came with the camera. 15 euros would hardly suffice for
developing two 24 exp. films. , with many pictures of course being bad ones.



--
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios
major in electrical engineering
mechanized infantry reservist
hordad AT otenet DOT gr

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:31:42 -0800 (PST), Pat
wrote in
:

My son is doing a report on former US President Gerald Ford. So for
the first time in a long time I went into my basement archives and
pulled out the contact sheets and negatives from when I photographed
Ford back in the early 80s. I shot a fully manual camera with a
pretty sophisticated flash -- for the time. It was a PR event so we
shot a LOT of pictures. I went through something like 15 contact
sheets with my son before I realized that there wasn't a single bad
exposure in the set. Every one right on and consistent with all of
the others. I was shocked.

And good, or you've forgotten that you culled them. When shooting film
semi-professionally I would typically cull 80%.

Switching away from film -- where every exposure counted -- and to a
camera with automatic metering has led me to believe that the shear
ease of exposures now is contributing to many, many more bad
exposures. ...

Sure, but also many, many more good exposures -- there are now just more
to cull and more to save.
--
Best regards,
John Navas
[PLEASE NOTE: Ads belong *only* in rec.photo.marketplace.digital, as per
http://bobatkins.photo.net/info/charter.htm http://rpdfaq.50megs.com/]

"John Navas" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:31:42 -0800 (PST), Pat
wrote in
:

My son is doing a report on former US President Gerald Ford. So for
the first time in a long time I went into my basement archives and
pulled out the contact sheets and negatives from when I photographed
Ford back in the early 80s. I shot a fully manual camera with a
pretty sophisticated flash -- for the time. It was a PR event so we
shot a LOT of pictures. I went through something like 15 contact
sheets with my son before I realized that there wasn't a single bad
exposure in the set. Every one right on and consistent with all of
the others. I was shocked.

And good, or you've forgotten that you culled them. When shooting film
semi-professionally I would typically cull 80%.

Switching away from film -- where every exposure counted -- and to a
camera with automatic metering has led me to believe that the shear
ease of exposures now is contributing to many, many more bad
exposures. ...

Sure, but also many, many more good exposures -- there are now just more
to cull and more to save.
--
Best regards,
John Navas

And, let's not forget that the "pretty sophisticated" flash system for the
day was just starting to use light sensors to automatically set flash
output, and the camera was probably a first generation auto-exposure camera.

Of course, the justification for going with an innovative flash system and
the auto-exposure, back then, was to reduce the number of bad prints due to
quickly changing lighting conditions which photographers, especially
journalists, couldn't manually adjust for quickly enough....

Take Care,
Dudley

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:31:42 -0800 (PST), Pat
wrote:

On Dec 15, 1:14*pm, "Tzortzakakis Dimitrios" wrote:
...
Switching away from film -- where every exposure counted -- and to a
camera with automatic metering has led me to believe that the shear
ease of exposures now is contributing to many, many more bad
exposures. I am pretty certain that I have not went through 400 to
500 exposures now without blowing an exposure.

I don't know what it all means but I would attribute "bad ones" to
shooting film.

It means the tools have changed and you have changed to take full
advantage of the new tools.

Of course I hope you delete all the bad ones as soon as possible.
Just because you can take them cheaply and store them cheaply is no
excuse for keeping your junk shots that you likely would not have even
exposed back in the file days.

All that old junk just gets in the way of the keepers and makes
finding the right good image all that much more difficult.