Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

More on photography


Minox 35 GT, originally uploaded by Guido lighthunter.

In the mid-1990s I took up photography again, tentatively at first. By that time, good cameras made in the 1970s could be obtained for next to nothing. I was not keen on carrying around my big and heavy Nikon F2 so I got hold of an Olympus Trip 35, a small and simple camera with manual focussing and simple automatic exposure control. This was quite successful and I was not worried about taking it to places where one would not use a better camera. In that way I managed to get some dramatic shots such as one of the sea front cleaners at Brighton, trying to sweep back the sea at high tide in a gale. My only criticism is that the pictures are soft.

Other cameras from this period that I tried were a Canonet, which had an incredibly sharp lens but was bigger and clumsier then the Olympus, and an Olympus RC, a camera like the Trip but with a coupled rangefinder.

Finding I was taking my photography more seriously I obtained a Nikon F3 body for use with my lens collection, again at no great outlay.

By then, digital cameras had started to become popular and the better old classic film cameras could be picked up quite inexpensively. At that time, out of curiosity, partly encouraged by my friend Lomokev, I tried a variety of old classic film cameras. These include the Contax T2, which is beautifully made, takes sharp pictures with rich colour rendering, but suffers from a poor viewfinder and the lack of a thread for a protective UV filter; the Olympus XA , which is compact, robust and takes reasonable photographs; and the Minox 35GT (above) the smallest 35 mm camera ever made, not quite as robust as the Olympus and mine gave a disappointingly soft rendering.

Unfortunately the Minox was so small that I lost it a couple of times, eventually for good, so my cheap film camera is now the Olympus XA.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer