Cameras

I know many of us have a range of cameras including those with phones wrapped around them.

Years (make that decades) ago I was into 35mm SLR slides. However I had never transitioned to a standalone digital camera (I did buy the FS a small pocket/purse Canon that kept us going until the arrival of the 4S).

However I just bought myself a retrospective Christmas present of a GoPro Hero 3.

It's first field test was Saturday's "Wind in the Willows" picnic party and I was very pleased with the results - apart the occasional finger intruding into the very wide field of view.

Unfortunately today's Australia Day is non-stop rain - and even though the GoPro is in a waterproof casing I am not

I might have to take some distorted pictures of B&O

What beautiful colours Elephant. I too love the GoPro's - I think that they are incredible. I'm a huge keen surfer and all of the surfers that I follow film on these. Wonderful. Have lots of fun :)

Paul W:

What beautiful colours Elephant. I too love the GoPro's - I think that they are incredible. I'm a huge keen surfer and all of the surfers that I follow film on these. Wonderful. Have lots of fun :)

You should get yourself one !

I am using it as a very easy to use hand held camera. I had it on a 2 second burst of 3 photos.

I also took a few movie shots.

What I forgot *doh* was the movies would be without audio given that the camera was in its water proof housing.

( can't trust Ratty and those weasels )

I use a Panasonic Lumix as my test was that I want to click randomly fast at anything and i want the camera to take the picture and clear.

I had an Olympus before and it took too long to focus.

The Lumix likes the surf, so that's also good.

If i were to change, I might not for a while. The camera on the Xperia Z2 is excellent and also loves the surf lol.

I see people with go pros on their heads when they ride motorbikes and I always think they are crass. They are the new bluetooth headset set! lol

But my feelings aside, the photo you took with it was great.

Hi Elephant and Michael!

Yes I love the GoPro concept, price is great and it's the size of a matchbox with one even shooting in 4K. They have some great social media & a superb channel on YouTube. I love the way that its a young team of guys from university that set up the business and have remained true. Their marketing is clever in the way that they give most extreme sports guys one to document and blog!

Very nice. Like you, Elephant, I still use my iPhone 4S for taking pics & HD video. I've read that the new 6S may have a superb camera built into it, so that may be my next upgrade. But i'll go for a 128GB next time around as I use it for everything :)

Michael the Lumix are lovely! Highly regarded by Leica :)

I used a very nice Nikon DSLR at one of my radio stations and it was incredible picture quality wise, but just too cumbersome to the with me and too showy for walking around the city - I thought that i'd get mugged! There is a saying 'The best camera is the one that you have with you to take that shot' :) I agree!

Along with B&O I had always dreamed of a camera from this brand ..... this one might be affordable at the price of a pair of BL20s

https://youtu.be/Smx7T1ERGZc

Sweet. Back in the day when I was heavily into film photography, I always wanted both a Hasselblad MF camera (not too unaffordable if you wanted the basic kit with the waist level finder, one back, body, and the standard 80 mm lens, but any other lens got hyper expensive fast). I wound up with a Kiev 60 just so I could use the MIR 30 mm fisheye lense, and with a Rolleiflex TLR with the Zeiss Tessar lens that I traded my McIntosh MC240 for. I also had a YashicaMat 124G TLR MF camera which was a Japanese copy of the Rollei. I can well remember my initial impressions after getting the Rollei, what a piece of mechanical perfection! Turning the film advance on the Yashica was like turning the handle on a coffee grinder compared with the Rollei, which was just as smooth as silk and snicked home with a delightfully solid click. All other controls were just silky smooth as well, definitely a quality piece of gear that deserved its reputation.

Now, what I lust after but don't shoot cameras enough to justify is the digital version of the classic Leica rangefinder body and a few lenses, but all that kit, body and lenses, is eye bleedingly expensive. So, I settle for my old Minolta DSLR and a few lenses.

My Minolta and its lenses date back to 1975 !

Somewhere from then I lost my passion for stills however for a brief while I had a passion for capturing the family on video.

However I still lust after the great still photography cameras like Leica.

My GoPro was an experiment to see if I could reignite my passion before spending too much unwisely.

At the moment the jury is out ......

You told my story...

elephant:

My Minolta and its lenses date back to 1975 !

 

Somewhere from then I lost my passion for stills however for a brief while I had a passion for capturing the family on video.

 

However I still lust after the great still photography cameras like Leica.

 

My GoPro was an experiment to see if I could reignite my passion before spending too much unwisely.

 

At the moment the jury is out ......

While I have a Sony Alpha 100, basically a rebadged Minolta DSLR after Sony bought Konica Minolta, I've never been happy with any modern auto focus camera. My favorite camera of all time, which I still have, is my 1976 Minolta SRT-201. Best camera I've ever owned, and the prime lens, a Rokkor X f1.7 50 mm, is the best lens I own. Wonderful bokeh on it, just buttery smooth out of focus areas and quite sharp. The 50 f1.7 I have for autofocus Minoltas sucks. Tack sharp but the bokeh is a spikey, edgy mess that looks bad. I'd read that the original Minolta lens designers were in love with Leica lenses which also were noted at superior in that respect.

Like you I used to have a major photography thing going on, but never got attracted by video. I don't like autofocus cameras, which includes my DSLR, because my main shooting style is not automatic, I do careful focusing by hand and use f stop to control depth of field, and evaluating that on a modern camera without a decent focusing screen/aid is almost impossible. If someone made a DSLR with a good manual ground glass/fresnel/split screen focusing screen I'd be all over it.

But there's lots of scenic things and historical things around where I live, so I should charge up the camera, hit the road, and do some photography. I wound up donating my substantial darkroom, even then I had a hard time finding a school that wanted it.

I left out my Nikonos which I got second hand in 1972 for its robustness.

It had a lovely mechanism for measuring the probable depth of field and I was able to get great shots.

The Nikonos was used a lot in Vietnam by combat photographers due to it's waterproof and rugged construction. I've seen a lot of pictures over the years of photogs there with Nikonos cameras, the Army and such used to buy them and issue them.

When I dove a lot I had a cheaper camera by far, but with an outboard strobe it worked reasonably well. Underwater photography required relearning just about everything about photography. You wanted ultra wide angle lenses to let you get as close to things as possible to minimize the amount of water blocking and scattering the flash, and hauling around even a reasonable rig was hard unless conditions were calm and perfect. Even then it was awkward, and for me whenever I took a camera down there were almost never any good fish to shoot, as soon as I said bah, I'm done with this and left the camera on the boat, bingo, more fish than an aquarium! Grumble, damned fish. I made the mistake once of trying to dive with my rig when there were heavy seas and a lot of surge, not a pleasant experience at all.

elephant:

Along with B&O I had always dreamed of a camera from this brand ..... this one might be affordable at the price of a pair of BL20s

https://youtu.be/Smx7T1ERGZc

BeoNut since '75

I traded both my current Leica's in and got their latest camera, the Leica Q.

I wanted the best point and shoot camera I could get, so apart from a Sony I got this. Beautifully made, easy for a novice like me to use and it takes fantastic photos. The Hasselblad does look interesting, albeit a £10,000 one! The Q if you can get one, is £3,300.

https://uk.leica-camera.com/Photography/Leica-Q/LEICA-Q

Interesting comparisons of phone vs DSLR here.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/smartphone-camera-vs-dslr/3/

The phone camera might be good enough for most (not all!) photography.

I like the quotation:

And there is a (likely apocryphal) story that tells the tale of an encounter between famous novelist Ernest Hemingway and famous photographer Ansel Adams. In the story, Hemingway is purported to have praised Adams’ photographs, saying, "You take the most amazing pictures. What kind of camera do you use?"

Adams frowned and then replied, "You write the most amazing stories. What kind of typewriter do you use?"

Final article quotation:

"Amateurs worry about gear; professionals worry about money; masters worry about light."

My own feelings are that if camera sensors get smaller and smaller with the same or greater pixel count, there is no real reason why a tiny lens should not produce the same results as a large DSLR camera or 35mm film camera.

Graham

I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, and they have tried doing just that. Less megapixels(enough) but bigger pixels of a better quality. The night time photographs are amazing for such a tiny lens.

Great pics Chris

Chris Townsend:

I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, and they have tried doing just that. Less megapixels(enough) but bigger pixels of a better quality. The night time photographs are amazing for such a tiny lens.

Beovision 7-55 Mk2, Avant RF 28, Beolab 9, Beolit 15, Beoplay A2, Beocom 2, Beotime, H8/H6/H2, Form 2, Beoplay A3, Beovision 5-42 connected to a DVD1

Nice pics.