CSotD: Cameras don’t take crappy pictures. People take crappy pictures.

Comments ⁵

1. Dann

   Regarding that last ‘toon, I still consider it demeaning to think that women make political decisions based strictly on their reproductive organs.
   —
   Regards,
   Dann

2. Mike Peterson

   They probably think it demeaning to have their issues reduced to “reproductive organs.”
   Your inexperience of pregancy and rape don’t excuse you from being sensitive to uterine cancer, for example, or of equal pay.
   Romney and Ryan both refuse to endorse the Lily Ledbetter Law — which is why Romney went off on some story, which turned out to be bullshit, about his attempts to recruit women.
   Republicans have also criticized the earned income tax credit and childcare credits, both of which tend to impact women more often than men.
   And, of course, you’ve got the fact that a question about gun violence turns into a ridiculous post-hoc-propter-hoc theory of how the children of single mothers — but don’t get him wrong, he loves and respects single mothers — turn into mass murderers.
   Which is also apart from the old song, “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.” Granted, the urge to invade Iran (wherever Iran turns out to be) would result in both sons and daughters of both mothers and fathers dying for a guy who demonstrated in favor of the Vietnam War but then decided preaching in France was a greater priority than actually going over there himself, a sense of values that is apparently genetic, since none of his five sons have risked getting sand in their knickers.

3. Mat

   I really don’t miss film a whole lot. Everything procedural about the medium was absolutely finicky: Storage, loading, unloading, development, etc. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is that it can and will look better in extreme lighting conditions. Where a digital sensor will either blow out the highlights (turn to white) or crush the shadows (turn to black), film can and will show greater detail and gradation in both areas. Is this worth the time/effort/patience of dealing with an old medium that is increasingly harder to develop and scan? That’s up to the photographer.
   As an aside, the best reasoning to use film is to use larger sizes. Image quality is a function of many factors, one of which is the size of the medium. A medium format film (namely 120 sized film shot in 6×7) will have 4.5x as much area as 35mm film. This provides you with FAR greater resolution and detail. It also makes you less beholden to super expensive lenses that stave off nuanced optical problems that make a big difference in image quality. Moreover, the difference in price between a medium format film rig and a medium format digital rig is an order of magnitude, if not several orders of magnitude. In such a case, digital will give you immediate access, but you’d have to shoot and process several rolls of film before you get anywhere near the price of a medium format digital back.

4. Mike Peterson

   When I first started giving tours of the paper, we were still shooting negatives for plates on a huge camera on a 1:1 ratio. That’ll give you some resolution, by golly! But at the same time, Playboy and National Geographic were shooting on cameras with much larger formats than 35mm (those being magazines that specialize in tantalizing photos of beautiful places you’ll never get to visit in person — rimshot)
   35mm was good enough for most newspaper use.
   Once we switched to digital, yes, the cost of the “good” cameras was jaw-dropping, and we were probably only in the mid-range for that.
   And once I went back to the newsroom — at eeny-weeny weeklies — I found that a little slip-it-in-your-pocket point-and-shoot was good for about 85 percent of what I needed. The two big exceptions were sports and, as you note, low-light, at which point they were worthless.
   At one paper, we had a photog with good equipment (her own) and the sports editor had a slightly upscale camera that worked well enough.
   At the other, a simple Rebel did well enough to get us through things like night football. But I wasn’t shooting the games, so I don’t know how many shots were wasted or impossible.
   Distance, bad lighting and speed are a tough combination for even a mid-range camera.
   I think that, if you’re serious, the investment is worth it. I’m a pretty mediocre guitarslinger, but I still have a mid-level Gibson because I used to play in coffeehouses and bars. I guess a Silvertone will do if you don’t take it out of the livingroom anyway.
   Come to think of it, I bought the Gibson because I had a roommate with perfect pitch and he couldn’t be in the room with my other guitar, whatever it was. It couldn’t be tuned close enough to true for him to not go mad.
   This only improves the analogy.

5. Brent

   The thing about Baby Blues is that men can dress up as X, but women seem to only dress up as “Sexy X” (according to the costume makers). So a woman doesn’t have to be a saloon girl, she can dress up as a cowgirl… so long as it’s a Sexy Cowgirl. They can be a zombie, if it’s a Sexy Zombie… and so on.
   A slightly related thing (in that its also about how companies currently market to females) is in toy aisles… looking down a boy’s aisle you see a variety of colours, a girl’s aisle is pink with lavender from end to end. Which is hilarious when you consider that pink used to be the boys colour within living memory. But now pink is feminine… and so we get products with special female versions where the only difference is that they made it pink.