imagemeister wrote:
Well, it certainly is NOT cheaper to make a GOOD zoom - and today at this moment - of the available lenses out there, there are zooms that equal primes in their range - but, they are more expensive than a single prime - but cheaper than multiple primes !
i grant that some zooms are equal to a specific prime, but not all primes in all ranges. in re: missing photos due to changing lenses, never had that problem - from cycling on the boards in the LA Olympics to the old soviet near east. knew what i was going to get, planned for it and got it.
i think this goes back to the (very old, and am tired of it as you) film vs digital issue. film is limited in that you are using a camera, not a computer with an attached lens. now, please, i'm not being harsh or condescending.
but, most of the image making world is relying on the bits and chips to make up for imperfect human activity. i doubt i've ever taken 10,000 photos in my entire life, and yet users today blandly speak of 200, 800, 1,000 images taken in single situations.
this to me, sad to say, speaks of lack of preparation. again, letting the onboard and desktop computers be the conveyences rather than craft and expertise. the electronic ability to move lenses in and out of focus, determine "perfect exposure", do not good images make. but it does allow users to avoid the addmittedly hard and difficult chore of actually learning. with image making driven by the electronics industry, rather than users, everything begins to look like a drive to the bottom.
i, and most likely you, judging from your photo, have spent a lifetime learning the craft of photography. and yes, i have wandered far afield here. but the images i'm seeing indicate a paucity of expertise and mediocrity i've never before seen. and it concerns me.
one salient concern is the fact that the ubiquitous instruction books have gone from 42 pages m(film) to over 250 pages (digital). one deals with basics, the second with computer programming. something most users are not comfortable with. the manual does not get read. the user puts the camera on automatic and begins firing off the shutter button. and never learns a damn thing.
maybe since aps sensors are so popular, kodak should reintroduce aps film cameras. i mean, what the hell?. why did anyone accept that? why did anyone buy a digital camera before anything came out in full frame?
and of course the answer was, you don't have to know anything and will get perfect exposures wthout negatives and all those paper prints. and that's exactly what we now have. lousy images.
photos taken by amateurs in the 1940's and 1950's were a hell of a lot better, with their unmetered kodak folding bellows cameras than what is being seen now. and the reason for that is simple, they knew what they were doing and did not have to go through 80 rolls of film to document a family event.
even though they were amateurs, the understood the basics of light and composition. one of my teachers used to say that light was 10 percent of photography and if you didn't know how to read that, you had no business with a camera. elitist? i don't think so. he simply cared about making a good photograph.
so, if i've bored you, made you angry or upset, i apologise. but i can not let go the degradation of image making that i'm seeing today. the highly manipulated images lack credibility and one cannot determine what was actually seen and what the image communicates.
anyway, thanks for your patience. i'll now probably be "drummed out of the corps", ah well.