... or still learning in the seventh decade!
I do really enjoy my little Perkeo II, but I think I met my match Saturday. Last year I took some shots with it at the wedding of a nephew, purely as a bystander. I played the role of eccentric uncle to the hilt, fiddling with my 55 tear old folding camera amidst herds of digi-things and there were several shots that came out pretty nicely. So this year my sister encouraged me to "take some black and white" at the wedding of my niece. It also was outdoors, but in a wooded creek valley setting, and nominally, at six o'clock. So I ran some tests the previous week using flash (after learning two of the four electronic flashes here are no longer flashes) and played with fill flash, manual and also the auto mode on the Canon 188A I wound up using (I was afraid to try my 430EX).
Well, so much for fill flash, in a long standing family tradition, the big event actually got started more like 7:15, and down in the woods, it was bordering on pitch black!
I used the 188A in auto mode, high range to get the coverage I needed. Exposure wise, it worked well, but there's a few gotchas to keep in mind when using these all manual folders ...
* f/5.6 and below sure shrinks the depth of field :rolleyes:
* You can't tell much about what the lens is actually seeing. One otherwise decent shot has what appears to be internal lens reflections from something not seen in the frame looking like like blazing specular reflections from lip piercings -- or something!
* Some problems could be covered a bit by taking lots of shots, but in the time it takes this uncoordinated dude to change a roll, the ceremony would be over.
* And maybe the most frustrating -- I'm generally pretty good at estimating distances, I've not had much problem with that. But setting the distance, trying to read the 1.5 mm high numbers on the lens assembly in the dark (and with eyes that ain't what they once were), that was a challenge not fully overcome.
Between the above and competing for slots with the photo efforts of 30% of the attendees, I was wishing I'd brought my A-1 and a zoom!
Unh, better luck next time.
DaveT - who did post one of the shots in his gallery
I do really enjoy my little Perkeo II, but I think I met my match Saturday. Last year I took some shots with it at the wedding of a nephew, purely as a bystander. I played the role of eccentric uncle to the hilt, fiddling with my 55 tear old folding camera amidst herds of digi-things and there were several shots that came out pretty nicely. So this year my sister encouraged me to "take some black and white" at the wedding of my niece. It also was outdoors, but in a wooded creek valley setting, and nominally, at six o'clock. So I ran some tests the previous week using flash (after learning two of the four electronic flashes here are no longer flashes) and played with fill flash, manual and also the auto mode on the Canon 188A I wound up using (I was afraid to try my 430EX).
Well, so much for fill flash, in a long standing family tradition, the big event actually got started more like 7:15, and down in the woods, it was bordering on pitch black!
I used the 188A in auto mode, high range to get the coverage I needed. Exposure wise, it worked well, but there's a few gotchas to keep in mind when using these all manual folders ...
* f/5.6 and below sure shrinks the depth of field :rolleyes:
* You can't tell much about what the lens is actually seeing. One otherwise decent shot has what appears to be internal lens reflections from something not seen in the frame looking like like blazing specular reflections from lip piercings -- or something!
* Some problems could be covered a bit by taking lots of shots, but in the time it takes this uncoordinated dude to change a roll, the ceremony would be over.
* And maybe the most frustrating -- I'm generally pretty good at estimating distances, I've not had much problem with that. But setting the distance, trying to read the 1.5 mm high numbers on the lens assembly in the dark (and with eyes that ain't what they once were), that was a challenge not fully overcome.
Between the above and competing for slots with the photo efforts of 30% of the attendees, I was wishing I'd brought my A-1 and a zoom!
Unh, better luck next time.
DaveT - who did post one of the shots in his gallery
