Warbirds

[Caz]

Caught a picture of this old gang using my Olympus OM1. Not too shabby I thought.

[desertwomble]

Wow! Pretty darned good.

Where did you take the pic?

DW

[delph_ambi]

Excellent photo.

[delboy]

Superb! I'm so tempted to get up to Lincolnshire and enjoy the WWII Bomber Tour where you get to look inside an old Lancaster. One of these days!

Derek

[Ed]

Good one. Not an easy shot to get right with a light emitting background, and the flash isn't going to help much, is it?

[JonP]

Great photo. Lovely camera, the old OM1. Still got mine somewhere.

[Ed]

My old camera's not exactly a classic, but I sat and pondered over whether to throw it away the other day. It's still in perfect working order, hardly used. Trouble is, it's 35mm, so pretty much defunct by today's standards. It's a Canon EOS10, and I paid around £1,500 for it in 1991. Still seems like sacrilege to throw it away. The good thing is all the old lenses fit my new EOS 400D, which was a big part in my decision on which digital camera to buy. Funny part is I spent less than a third of the price of the old camera on the new one, and it's twice as good. Still miss the old days of 35mm and darkroom processing, though. There's something magical about watching the image appear from a blank sheet of paper.

[digitaldeath]

£1,500 you were lucky.
I went digital in 98, Kodak/Canon DCS 520, £10,500. Only they had me in an arm lock. I had a DCS5 (£4,500) which was faulty but when they refunded they wouldn't take back the  £5,000 dye sub printer they told me to buy to get the best from the crap duff camera. Lovely camera, only it has a 2.1Mp chip and is  probably worth about a £100 now. To add insult to injury after 18 months Canon brought out the 1D, twice the camera at half the price.
The joy of leading the field.
Did I mention about having to eat a handful of cold gravel for breakfast and licking road clean wit tongue?

[delph_ambi]

 

Good grief. Your printer cost more than my car (and I bought my car new, not second hand). I use a natty little Fuji point and press for digital, and a Kodak Retina (circa 1930) and elderly Pentax SLR for 35mm stuff. Very basic. Mind, I don't take brilliant pictures, so there's probably a moral there somewhere.

[delboy]

Wow, all these figures make me feel better about my 35mm camera devaluation. I have a Nikon f6. Beautiful camera, hardly used. But now they go for a pittance on eBay. Still, I only lost a few hundred on it.

I bought it as my reward for finishing my first novel manuscript. I wrote "The End" on the novel, put it in a bottom drawer (and am yet to get it out again) and went and treated myself to the camera.

I must reread the novel sometime...

Derek

[digitaldeath]

It was necessary to use the right kit when working, only the debarcle with Kodak set me back somewhat. I budgeted £7,500 to be spread over 3 yrs then it shot up to £25,000 and needed additions after 2. The kodak printer wasn't any good once I had a better camera as the punters couldn't accept dye sub. In the early days it was layered more. Now I could do with upgrading but I am not earning enough to pay the rent!
Too many cheap good quality digital cameras, the world and his wife imagines they are david bailey. [who?]
Maybe I could become a famous writer.
Look, a flying pig.

[delboy]

Writing, music, photography... all the arts, it seems, are going the same way. Next thing there'll be a big movement for dance to move out of the academies and onto the street...

[Bec]

Good pic, Caz. 

[Caz]

Where did you take the pic?

DW

I snapped this one down at Southend sea front. The battle of Britain flight always fly in low for the air-show and I was standing up on the cliffs that over look the seafront, so at a guess I was a hundred foot or so above sea level. I also used a 210mm zoom lens. 

Good one. Not an easy shot to get right with a light emitting background, and the flash isn't going to help much, is it?

Even though the OM1 is manual there is a small indicator inside the camera that shows what speed and aperture the camera should be set to. It's fairly idiot proof, which is a blessing, and I got lucky pressing the shutter button at the right moment.
I took a few pictures with my cheap, £50, digital camera after I ran out of film and they're rubbish so I'm going to stick to 35mm from now on. For £4 the film was developed and the prints put onto CD, bargain.  

[Ed]

For £4 the film was developed and the prints put onto CD, bargain.  

Wow - that is good, isn't it.

What I like about digital is that you immediately see whether or not you've taken a decent photo, so gone are the days of taking 36 exposures and keeping just six of them after paying to have them developed. I quite often got contact sheets done first if I'd taken a lot of pics, then picked which I wanted enlarged from them.

£1,500 you were lucky.
I went digital in 98, Kodak/Canon DCS 520, £10,500. Only they had me in an arm lock. I had a DCS5 (£4,500) which was faulty but when they refunded they wouldn't take back the  £5,000 dye sub printer they told me to buy to get the best from the crap duff camera. Lovely camera, only it has a 2.1Mp chip and is  probably worth about a £100 now. To add insult to injury after 18 months Canon brought out the 1D, twice the camera at half the price.
The joy of leading the field.
Did I mention about having to eat a handful of cold gravel for breakfast and licking road clean wit tongue?

I anticipated that type of thing happening, and that's why I held out so long, but I guess it's a different kettle of fish when you have to earn a living from your camera. I had grand ideas about being something of a photo journalist at one time, but soon realised it wasn't for me. I nearly bought the EOS 1, but didn't think it was that much better than the 10 to warrant the extra price tag. Likewise with the 40 D vs the 400 D. It had a few more features, but not enough to make the difference for me. Mine's 10 mp, which is plenty good enough for me. A few years ago when I first looked at going digital, you could buy a digital back to fit the EOS 10 for crazy money, and it was state of the art at 2mp. Knowing how fast these things move forward, I decided to bide my time.