An anonymous asked: "question for both of you, if that's ok - why the specific equipment selections?"
I can respond clearly instead of burying it at the bottom of crappy blogger comment pages.
When I got my first camera, it was a 110 format point and shoot that I loved to death. I think literally; I don't remember what happened to that camera.
After that, I graduated to my first self-chosen camera - I loved the APS cameras that let you choose the print size. I got a kodak P&S camera that I still have, and actually used a couple times a few years back. I don't remember how much it cost, but it went around the country a couple times with me. Then my grandparents got me a Nikon 35mm point and shoot that I rarely used because I stopped taking pictures for many years. I still have that, as well.
About 2002, my mom switched systems because someone got her a Canon Rebel film camera. She liked the features and such, and so gave me her old Pentax MX and two lenses for it: the smc-P 24mm f2.8 and the smc-P M 135mm f3.5. I started buying Kodak Max 800 film because of the aforementioned shake problems, though I would run a black and white roll here and there. I never much got into B&W, so I tend to miss the things people who shoot color tend to miss, most notably Aperture Priority metering.
My dad elected to get me a pair of Tamron zooms for Christmas one year, a 28-80 f3.5-5.6 AL and the now-discontinued 80-210 f4.5-5.6. He also found/bought a smc-P M 50mm f1.7. I used the zoom so extensively that I started to get itchy for a body that supported Av mode. That led me to the near quixotic quest of finding a pentax film SLR that didn't have the crippled K mount (like the ZX-30/60 and *ist). Surprisingly, the Ritz had something like that in stock, which led me to the Pentax ZX-L. Probably the most versatile film camera they'll ever sell short of the MZ-S, it supported almost all of the functionality of the previous pro models (excepting power zoom, the useless panorama mode of the PZ-1P, and something else I'm forgetting) while adding the wireless flash control and high-speed flash sync of the MZ-S. I don't believe in flashes, so that didn't matter to me, basically.
Anyway, over the years my film taste shifted to the Fuji Superia 400 film that came oh-so-dirt-cheap from Target and the like to Kodak Ultra Color 400 film. Eventually, I discovered Agfa Optima 400 and didn't turn back. I shoot 400 because I tend to have some severe ADD when I shoot - I will go from macro to wildlife to ... well, that's really all I do... in the course of a single roll, so I need to plan for the highest quality at the worst conditions. For me, that's birds in trees. I got some what-I-would-call fantastic results with the last two types of film, so I wasn't complaining.
What precipitated the shift to digital was a combination of things. First, I can't get consistent quality film processing here. Most of the places that are well known (ESPECIALLY Ritz) are very good at throwing your film around in the cutting process, and more often than not, dragging the blade across the first frame to pass through after a cut. Techlab, a place that ONLY does film processing and printing, was guilty of the same, sometimes even worse than I got from Ritz. I found a good place to go, but the expense of taking upwards of 8 rolls of 36exp film a month had become prohibitive. Enter graduation; I told my family I wanted a camera and they obliged. I got the *ist DL because it was cheap enough (body only) to enable me to get the DA 16-45 f4.0 and DA 50-200 f4-5.6 lenses. Had I known what was up earlier, I would have forgone the longer lens and ordered one off of Willoughby's, but that's a bit of live and learn.
So, in summation: I was gifted into Pentax, I've stuck with it because the lenses are of high enough quality to justify not having fast extreme telephoto capability, and I justified my shooting media by way of "wildlife."
blah blah blah!
No comments:
Post a Comment