All good things…
I took this picture last weekend using my Canon T2i which recently replaced my trusty old Canon Xti. Though at minus 15C, I was only up for a few shots before my fingers fell off but I knew back in the car once everything had warmed up enough to move again that I had a cool shot. Doubly confirmed when I got them downloaded on the computer. Which is one of the reasons I love Digital SLRs. Unlike the old days, I can shoot and check out what I’m getting in almost real time. None of this waiting for the lab to get your prints back to you crap or if you were more industrious, developing your own negatives and prints. Working in RAW format is so much easier than trying to decode how color is going to come out from your filter pack or your dial settings. Plus a decent amount of camera memory just lets you shoot and shoot and shoot. Infinitely cheaper than emulsion.
Obviously so because Kodak filed for bankruptcy this week. Even though they developed the initial technology, they just never seemed to be able to get it to work for them. Their corporate culture just couldn’t accept the fact that film was dying or at the very least withering. See the thing with dinosaurs is their size is dictated by their food supply. Lots of food equals big dinosaurs. Not so much food and things shrink to maintain the equilibrium. You want to look at a dinosaur today and you’re looking at a bird. A bit of a step down from a Brontosaurus or T-Rex.
So in it’s heyday when the brownie cameras were capturing frame after frame on emulsion film and Kodak rolled through every type of film camera out there from 8mm to 70mm, Kodak was king. Even Polaroid with their almost instant development only took a small piece of the market. I’m old enough I remember the ones you’d take and then have to wait the however many minutes before you pulled the wrapping open on the print. The later versions were a big improvement but for clarity you still couldn’t beat a real SLR camera.
My first experience was with my Dad’s Pentax K1000. I think he had a 35mm lens and a 120mm lens for it. Because of my uncle he also got into developing his pictures. Black and white at first but later color. I of course was interested in it as well, so I started hanging out in the darkroom and learned how to develop my negatives and of course how to expose a print and then move it through the various baths to get a finished product. That began my love affair with black and white photography. Color was a pain in the ass because you had to keep the chemicals at a very set temperature range and there were way more of them to piss around with. Thanks to the C100 process on color film it was a lot easier to have them develop a series of prints and then decide which ones to get blown up (if any).
Just after I got married, my Father in Law gave me a Canon AE-1 Program. It was a real workhorse of a camera though the last picture I ever took with it is this one.
Which as far as pictures go is pretty cool. Though the total cost to get this image was over two hundred dollars in film and developing, which is why the AE-1 Program now sits on my shelf and not in my camera bag.
When I finally bit the bullet and switched up to Digital at a level that was past the point and shoot. I did it with a Canon Xti. At 10.1 Megapixels it was pretty kick ass and with the ability to shoot three frames a second (without a motor drive) it really allowed me to get some stunning action shots.
But when I needed to slow things down, it was there for me as well.
But as good as it was, it doesn’t take HD video and while Canon’s first foray into that realm with the T1 wasn’t spectacular. The versions that quickly followed took up the slack and after a couple of years of waiting and a bunch of research, I settled on upgrading to the Canon T2i body and my daughter got the Xti and a couple of basic lenses with it (I’d upgraded to Image Stabilized lenses and what a difference that made).
At 18 Megapixels the difference in shots was astounding. A tech later explained to me that the volume of data allowed for another 45,000 variations in color within the chip. Which means the final image is always very close to what you shot as long as you got your white balance right. This really cuts down on your workload in post as it really just becomes an issue of picking the shots you like and converting them from RAW to jpg.
Because at the end of the day. My camera is how I record the cool things I see, do or have happen to me. It allows me to share sometimes how I see the world and at other times how I’d like the world to be seen. In the end aren’t those all good things?
