[OFB Cafe] Photographers?

[dep]

said Timothy Butler:

| 	How do you like your 500?

i love it. i got it when the second generation of 500 f8 mirror reflex 
nikkors came out; stupidly, i got rid of the huge and wonderful (and 
ancient -- i got it in 1968 or 69) 500 f5 nikon mirror lens. either one is 
pretty much a tripod lens, though it was possible to shoot football with 
the f5 (even won a national award in 1968 for a football picture i took 
with it) because it was fast enough that focusing was very easy. no depth 
of field, though.

| 	I've been considering Sigma's 180-500mm, 
| which is optically stabilized and appears to be pretty good. I have a
| 70-300mm f/4-5.6, which is relatively good for most telephoto work,
| but 500 would be handy for birding and such.

what i would do -- i had one of these and much regret selling it, 
especially now that i'm where the sky is clear at night -- is get one of 
the meade or celestron products. i used to throw the old nikon f on one 
for an effective 2000mm f11 (meaning that you couldn't use tri-x to shoot 
pictures of the moon or they'd be overexposed). but fast enough to make 
decent pictures of mars, jupiter, and saturn. a 500 wouldn't, i think, be 
all that big an improvement over your 300.

| 	I hear many good things about the 18-200mm, Nikon's famed vacation
| lens. That was almost enough to make me go with Nikon -- actually, I
| wanted to go with Nikon for a long time, I just ended up elsewhere for
| a variety of reasons.

the 18-200 is amazing. the existence of, the possibility of, an 18-200 is 
itself remarkable -- the photo magazines were all going crazy in the late 
60s when nikon brought out the 50-300 auto nikkor zoom, which was the 
world's largest normal lens, among other things. it was, of course, also a 
terrible lens -- not as bad as the awful 43-86, but still a veritable 
pincushion and barrel store.

it's kind of funny -- if one grew up on nikons, it's very difficult to 
shoot anything else. the story behind that is kind of fun. first, the 
reason the switch was difficult: nikon focusing rings turn the opposite 
direction from anything else. infinity was clockwise (shooter's point of 
view) with nikons; counterclockwise for everything else.

the reason is, back in the rangefinder days there were two leading brands: 
leica, from ernst leitz gmbh, and the zeiss icon contax. both had superb 
lenses, some of the best ever made right up to now. leicas focus 
counter-clockwise, with the infinity lock clear to the right. (why an 
infinity lock? because they had cloth focal plane shutters that were far 
enough in front of the film plane that if the camera were accidentally 
pointed toward the sun for a few seconds, the sun's image through a lens 
locked at infinity would be out of focus enough to keep a hole from being 
burned through the shutter). the zeiss cameras also focused 
counter-clockwise -- sort of, though the lens barrel itself turned 
clockwise. but in some fit of insanity, the zeiss people put a little flat 
knurled wheel, vertical, at the front of the camera near the shutter 
release, that was geared to the lens mount, and it was thought that people 
would use this, which found infinity in the counter-clockwise direction, 
to focus. of course, nobody did -- everybody just grabbed the lens and 
twisted.

well. when japanese cameras of good quality began to be produced, canon 
used the leica model -- the screw thread mount was even the same -- and 
nikon followed zeiss, right down to an identical bayonet mount.

when nikon began manufacturing single-lens reflex cameras with the nikon f 
in 1959, they continued to focus in the same direction as their 
rangefinder lenses did, though now, of course, there was no little goofy 
focusing wheel. in that no one else that survived (except zeiss) had had 
the focusing wheel, they were all going counter-clockwise ala leica. 
(zeiss made some slrs, notably the leaf-shutter contaflexes, but i don't 
remember which way they focused. there were some zeiss-made focal-plane 
slrs in the 1960s, but the ones after that were made by yashica and don't 
really count.)

there are some who shot both nikons and leicas. i was among 'em. and it was 
a pain finding focus, often. but the leicas were typically used for 
wide-angle work, which mostly didn't need much focusing anyway.

ah, but i digress. what were we talking about?

| 	I think it grows on you in this sense. The art aspect becomes much
| more focused on the objective of creative framing, positioning of
| subjects, etc., rather than the the lighting and such which is easier
| to work with.

i guess. i was brung up in the editorial photography realm, which always 
means targets of opportunity. you can wait for the right picture, or 
change your position relative to the subject, but that's all. the creative 
work, to the extent there was any, took place in the darkroom. the mantra 
of the day was the search for "the telling moment." the picture that told 
the story, right there. the very successful ones became, too, very famous. 
the little naked vietnamese girl running down the road. or eddie adams's 
picture of loan shooting lem. stan forman's almost anything (he won three 
pulitzers, two back-to-back, the most famous being the one with the family 
falling off the fire escape, with the fireman on a ladder reaching for one 
of them). that's just always been the goal in the news biz. i got a few. 
one i took early one saturday morning in west fort lauderdale. a young 
woman had been found murdered about 8 a.m.; i was the early saturday guy 
so i went, talked to the young woman's sister for the story, and took 
the "cover" shots. then the medical examiner's people carried the body 
out, between where the sister was standing and where i was. the sister 
reached out one hand and put it on her dead sister's body. her other hand 
contained what appeared to be scotch on the rocks. i made the picture. it 
was a very good picture. another was of a guy name of john pucci, sitting 
on the steps between the huge columns of the putnam county, ny, 
courthouse, a large american flag waving above him. he was very small in 
the picture and the courthouse and flag very big. he was lost in his 
thoughts. it worked well in the paper the next day, because an hour after 
i took the picture john pucci was found guilty of murder 2 and that spell 
on the courthouse steps was his last taste of freedom from that day in 
1979 to this one. those pictures are just right. i'm not sure if i'd been 
shooting digital i would have gotten either, because digital tends to run 
counter, it seems to me, to the telling moment. too often people shoot a 
burst of five or 10 and in there someplace will be one of an instant 
before and an instant after the telling moment.

| 	Of course, they keep making digital photography easier. My father
| bought my mother a Sony DSC-H50 for her birthday awhile back. It's a
| point and shoot superzoom (15x, goes to about 480mm equivalent). It
| had not only face detection, which made it focus on faces, it also had
| "smile shutter," which made it wait to take the picture until the
| subject smiled. It actually worked. But the pictures were noisy. I
| talked her into a Canon Digital Rebel XSi (450D for those across the
| pond), which has worked out much better...

i think that persons who cannot detect faces all by themselves probably 
shouldn't be taking pictures, anyway!
-- 
dep

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