Photography
( 3 items )
Why is there a photo section? After all, this is a school website.
I admit that it is an indulgence - I have enjoyed photography for close to 50 years (yes, I know I don't look old enough!), and am still as enthusiastic as ever. I hope that this might communicate itself to the boys.
I first developed and printed pictures at the age of seven, taught by my brother, a serious photographer even then. I remember the excitement of seeing the first monochrome images appear in the developing dish, in our darkroom under the stairs at home in Fleetwood. The Mother's Day card on the right was produced under the guidance of my older brother - it was done in about 1960, and shows my father, my sister, and me with my first watch, given by a fond uncle!
Having scanned this picture, I know that my brother would have been delighted with the ease of digital (he was killed in a motor cycle accident six years later). In his day changes would have required yet another trip to the darkroom.
I left school before 'A' levels to do photography at Blackpool Technical College, which was then - as it still is now - one of the best in the country for photography. Spent a year using large format cameras (mainly Gandolfi, field and monorail), and there was a good grounding in copying, including the technique of holding a pencil vertically on the object to check the shadow balance of the two lights. This is one trick which is still ingrained, if not on my heart, at least in my head. A job then came up in a Blackpool studio, so I left after a year.
The main business was passports and identity photos for the many conferences at the Blackpool hotels. Most memorable customer was Lord Longford. He came in for an identity photo for a conference and I, as a naive seventeen-year-old (though I believed I was worldly-wise then), thought he was pulling my leg when he told me his name was 'Lord Longford.' Not wishing to appear gullible, when he said this I just wrote Longford down on the slip! He was charming, and never said anything to me. Of course, I don't have a copy of the photo - they were done on Polaroid cameras: digital was an unimaginable dream then as, indeed, were computers.
At the studio we also did portraits, and I remember that I always got the babies. Perhaps surprisingly, I never seemed to frighten them. In fact they always seemed to smile! Some cameras were sold, and you can tell how long ago it was when a £50 sale was really exciting.
Ambition continued when I went to London to work at a Chelsea Studio. This lasted six weeks, as I couldn't afford to live there on that money. Best memory there was going on to an island in the middle of Battersea Park lake with several attractive (and very highly paid) models to work on the Yardley Black Label adverts. Of course, I was only the assistant, the pay was not good, and I moved to an office of the London Brick Company, where I became clerk in charge of Common Brick Allocations, changing from dealing with top models to hefty builders frustrated by the lack of bricks! Under pressure from my older sister, I
finally did 'A' levels at night school, and you can guess the rest.
Digital or Film?
During the last few years digital cameras have made serious progress towards becoming more popular than film. Indeed Ilford, one of the major film and materials suppliers, went into liquidation in 2004, though it has now been reborn and is still selling black and white materials. Some camera manufacturers are stopping the production of film cameras, to concentrate instead on digital. Bronica, a very famous maker of professional cameras, has also stopped film camera production. More and more manufacturers are moving away from film cameras and into digital - if they don't, in general they go under!
There are exceptions, of course. Two notable ones are Hasselblad and Leica. Hasselblad has always made medium-format film cameras for the professional market, and still make them. They have, however, now added superb-quality digital cameras to their range. Before you rush out to buy one, they are not cheap - you're talking around £9000-£20,000! Leica, in financial difficulty not so long ago, have continued to produce high-quality film cameras, have broadened the range to add reasonably-priced digital models (made under licence in Japan), and have now brought out the M8, a digital rangefinder camera. On the whole, though, if a company wants to be profitable, it goes digital. There is intense competition here, however, and developments are coming thick and fast.
I believe that digital is now preferable to film. Certainly it is now easy to go into many High Street processors, hand the memory card in, and get prints back within the hour, prints which are as good as those from a film camera. It is even easy now to crop and print your own photographs in a shop, then and there, and walk out with just the ones you want. Enprint-sized colour printers are available for around £100 - you just plug in the card, tell it what to print, and out comes a lab-quality enprint a minute or so later. If you buy a Canon one, the paper even has postcard markings on the back so you can send them to your friends.
Digital also has the advantage of immediate feedback, so that you can see if someone blinked, or whatever, and re-take it. It is also interesting to look now at Jessops. Almost everything is digital. Went to two branches to get some E6 (colour slide) processing chemicals. Found some in Maidenhead, but the assistant had to go to the stock room to get it, and he only had one of the concertina chemical bottles in stock. Also interesting that on Ebay colour enlarging equipment costing over £1000 originally is now available for less than £100, and sometimes it doesn't even sell at that price. I remember spending whole weekends in a darkroom producing just two or three colour prints. Though the colour prints are still as good as the day they were printed, now it is so much easier with an inkjet printer and a computer!
Each, however, has its place. My opinion, and that of many others, is that digital is preferable and as good quality as film. However, film has its own characteristics, as the silver halide grains are naturally random, whereas the pixels of a digital camera are, of course, regular.
My own regularly used photo equipment consists of:
- One Canon EOS 1DS Mark II body and a range of quality Canon lenses. The results are fantastic, but then at around £5000 street price for the body, they should be! The EOS 1DS Mark III has since come out, thus reducing the value of mine!
- An Olympus E-510 with two 'posh' lenses. Excellent quality, intended as a replacement for a digital compact. Very light.
Other equipment includes a Mamiyaflex C330 TLR, taking 120 film, and various old/antique cameras, including a Contaflex. Sad to say, they are just a collection, and will probably never be used again.
Do you Recommend Any Particular Camera?
No. They are changing so quickly that it would almost be a full-time job updating the information. However, general guidance is as follows:
- At least 6Mp - but see below
- Rechargeable batteries
- Optical (not digital) zoom. Digital zooms are a waste of time - you can do the same thing, better, on a computer.
- A famous make. These include (in alphabetical order) Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Olympus and Sony. There are others - if you want to read detailed reviews have a look at dpreview.com
. If you are looking for a good entry-level single lens reflex, the Nikon has superb reviews.
- You can get a new compact for about £100 upwards. Digital Depot and Warehouse Express
are good shops, and you will find others if you search the web.
Important - Beware of Megapixels!
It is tempting to think that the more megapixels, the better. This is not necessarily true, as the processor within the camera has a very significant influence. Also, the size of the sensor is important. If you can imagine eight million picture cells on a sensor the size of your fingernail, the resolving power of the lens becomes unable to cope. Further, unlike film the sensors have depth, and the light needs to strike them vertically; special digital lenses are available to alleviate this. If it does not, the corners and edges can show chromatic aberration, where coloured edges appear. Sometimes more megapixels can mean lower quality.
It is interesting that Nikon has brought out the D3, a professional-level camera. It only has 12 megapixels (my Canon has 17Mp, the newer one 22Mp). That was a definite decision by Nikon, and the results are, according to the reviews, superb. Time will tell if it is better than the Canon, but it may well be, despite the lower pixel count.
Extra-Curricular 
