"Now That's A REAL Camera!"

JDP · Sep 7, 2010

daleeman said:
Was out with the Hassy on Sunday, ...... She asked if I would photograph her as she started to undo her blouse buttons... the wife gave me the look and "that" never happened. So it still is a good thing to shoot film.

There are some great stories on this thread!

I must remember to take my Hassey out more often (without the wife).......

totalmotard · Sep 7, 2010

Was out at the park the other day with the Walzflex and somebody asked me if it was a Hassleblad. I only spent $25 and I get the same street cred as you Hassy guys.

Terrence Brennan · Sep 8, 2010

Ken Nadvornick said:
Spent the day today at this vintage WWII-era aircraft show looking for some subject matter worthy of my last rolls of Kodachrome. And did I find it!

During the fly-over portion of the show I needed to change rolls. So between passes I hunkered down under the wing of a parked aircraft and quickly did the deed.

As I finished a nice fellow who had been watching from a distance walked over and whispered, "Whew! And I thought I was the only one here with a REAL camera..." I looked up and he was grinning and holding a Nikkormat FTN with a small Nikkor zoom.

The remaining photographers - in the hundreds - were all walking around holding some sort of strange, alien-looking, handheld, computerized gadget at arm's length. Many of them even missed some of the better passes as they stared transfixed down at their gadgets. Not really sure what was up with all of that...

I proudly showed him my Kodachrome 64 box top in its holder on the back of my Nikon F2. He smiled broadly and quietly nodded, then turned back to the flight line as the next aircraft* approached for its photo op.

Ken

* For the record, that next aircraft was this B-25D Mitchell medium bomber. I had never seen a B-25 in person, let alone one in flyable condition, let alone one actually airborne right over my head. Oh my. That is one impressive aircraft. How in the world Doolittle and those boys got even one of those things (the 'B' model, I believe?) off the short deck of a WWII-era carrier I can't even begin to imagine. But they did. Sixteen of 'em.

"Real" cameras are so few and far between these days that whenever I see a photographer with one, I always go up and say hello.

Last year on Remembrance Day, I spoke to photogs with a Leica, a Hasselblad, a Contax rangefinder as well as one shooting with a 16mm Bolex!

FWIW, these folks also have a B-25, but it's a B-25J: http://www.warplane.com/

jamesgignac · Sep 8, 2010

CD55 said:
I hear someone say "Now that's a REAL camera right there!".

Heh, almost the same situation here - but it was my step-sister's son's first birthday. Had my Bronica ETRSi and received very similar comments. I also brought out my Hass 503cx...I don't know my family is pretty hilarious when it comes to things that they don't understand - nobody wanted to try using (or even holding, for that matter) the camera when I offered. Maybe the 1-year-old would have but I didn't ask him

ntenny · Sep 8, 2010

(aircraft show)

Ken Nadvornick said:
As I finished a nice fellow who had been watching from a distance walked over and whispered, "Whew! And I thought I was the only one here with a REAL camera..." I looked up and he was grinning and holding a Nikkormat FTN with a small Nikkor zoom.

Is there something about analog photography and aircraft? I had essentially the same thing happen recently at the Flying Leatherneck Museum---I was walking around with my AE-1 and nearly bumped into a young guy with an Olympus SLR of similar vintage. We stared in amazement at one another for a minute and then exchanged pleasantries about the virtues of E-6. I forgot to ask if he was an APUGer, alas (in my defence, I had a cranky two-year-old to manage at the same time).

-NT

cfclark · Sep 8, 2010

ntenny said:
(aircraft show)

Is there something about analog photography and aircraft?

I think it depends on whether your camera is propeller-driven or jet.

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 8, 2010

Terrence Brennan said:
FWIW, these folks also have a B-25, but it's a B-25J: http://www.warplane.com/

Nice collection! I especially like the Lancaster bomber. And, of course, the Spitfire. What a symbol of grit and determination.

And I like the fact that their philosophy is to fly some of them. There is nothing more distressing than a display hanger full of beautiful vintage aircraft - but not an oil pan in sight. It's an insult to the designers and engineers who created them, never intending for them to be doorstops or paperweights.

Sort of like a lot of Leicas??

:eek:

Ken

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 8, 2010

ntenny said:
Is there something about analog photography and aircraft?

I think so. In the case of vintage aircraft and analog cameras, both are finely-tuned, beautifully executed works of mechanical art. And both perform their respective functions with style and a dash of bravado. They harken back to a time when excellence mattered. And when people still possessed the taste to appreciate it.

Ken

Worker 11811 · Sep 8, 2010

This is a bit of a side trip but bear with me...

I was recently watching a video documentary about the Apollo 13 moon mission. The one where the spacecraft almost blew up... the one they made the movie about.

The most interesting part of the documentary was not really the story of the mission and how the astronauts were brought home to safety. I was almost captivated by the behind-the-scenes footage of the men at Mission Control, trying to figure out how to bring our boys home in one piece.

I don't want to sound crass or uncaring but let's think about this: Why did we work so hard just to bring three men home?

These were three men who volunteered for the mission. They knew the risk they were assuming and they understood that something could happen at any time. Gus Grissom died in his capsule before it even left the ground. Lovell, Swigert and Haise knew that the same thing could happen to them.

Yes, I believe in loyalty to your brothers. I believe that no man should be left behind if you can do anything to help. But, let's just think about the sense of scale, here. We put the best and the brightest minds in the world to work on the problem. No expense was spared. The whole world watched while we did every last thing that was humanly possible to bring our men home

And we DID IT!!

More people than that die in car accidents at the hands of drunk drivers every day.
More children starve to death every day.

But for seven days, back in 1970, the resources of the entire world were focused on bringing three men home from space.

Since the days of Apollo 13, we have lost approximately a dozen men and women in the Space Program in two disasters. (Challenger and Columbia.) Both of them were attributed to slipshod behavior and shoddy management.

There was a work ethic and a sense of purpose that existed back in the pioneering days of the space program that I don't think exists anymore.

Further, I think that lack of work ethic is becoming pervasive in our society, in general.

I think that is showing up in the way consumer equipment like cameras is being built and marketed today. I'm sure there is a sense of nostalgia at play here but I think you could hold an older camera up against a new camera, even a film camera, and I bet there would be no comparison between the two.

lxdude · Sep 8, 2010

sun of sand said:
i'm cool with people asking stuff and making comments
i dont really care
film is old
some of the cameras look cool compared to the plastic ones they know now

but what im really sick of
the people receiving these comments rushing online to tell us that they too have experienced it

apug is about photography
not fkn film
this site -the areas I check- is becoming more and more a film clubcult

interestingly ill be seen as an ahole while most others participating in "the" thread think of these comments as coming from aholes or they behave like aholes in responding to them

Is an ahole the opposite of a hole?

I think it's all part of the "modern analog photography experience", to coin a dopey term.
Even when I don't agree with you, sun of sand, I enjoy your posts. They have a free verse quality to them.

Jeff

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 8, 2010

Regarding the successful return of the astronauts, they made it back precisely because the engineering that went into the effort worked perfectly. There was enough well thought out design and redundancy in the system that the required resources were available exactly when and where they were needed.

How many times over the course of the STS program did you turn on the evening news and hear that an earlier launch attempt had "aborted" and "failed?" Not a huge number. But occasionally it happened.

Were they failures? Absolutely not.

Ever watch the NASA cameras pointed at a shuttle just prior to launch? The computerized launch sequence logic tests each engine exhaust bell by moving it in every possible direction just prior to ignition. It's quite the beautiful ballet to watch. But if there were to be any problem whatsoever exposed by this test, the launch sequence would be halted prior to engine ignition.

A failure? Nope. Any engineer working on the program would tell you it was a successful sequence completion. The system worked exactly as designed - no engine start and no launch under those conditions. Not the expected ending, but a good ending nevertheless. A reason to celebrate. Especially for those software engineers who created the logic to do exactly that.

And so it was with Apollo 13. Why did they make it back home alive? Because it was possible for them to do so. Because even with an onboard oxygen tank explosion (preordained something like ten years earlier when the insulation on a wire was inadvertently nicked), the mission remained within its successful performance envelope. Everything needed to get home was already present in that closed system of docked command-service-lunar modules, hanging 1.25 light seconds away from Earth. Not present by accident. Present by design.

The art of engineering can often be reduced to the art of risk mitigation. It's not a dramatic excess to say that Apollo 13 truly was NASA's finest hour. To NOT bring them home alive would have been a monumental waste of the already designed, engineered, available, and paid for resources.

Regarding today's work ethic and missing sense of purpose? I absolutely could not agree with you more...

Ken

EricO · Sep 8, 2010

Paul Green said:
Once on seeing my yashica 124g someone said "Where do you put the coal"...

That is funny! This summer I took my Mamiya RZ67 out to a parade and someone asked if it was a video camera.

Worker 11811 · Sep 8, 2010

I am in no way saying that bringing our men back alive was not the right thing to do. It was.

However, people at Morton-Thiokol were warned that the rubber seals on the solid boosters could fail catastrophically and they shipped the rockets anyway. NASA was warned that it this could be a problem but they accepted the rockets anyway. Richard Feynman told NASA that he thought the failure was due to poor seals in the boosters and they ignored him, too. Feynman finally held a press conference, on his own, where he demonstrated how the rubber was prone to failure and, finally, NASA came to agree with him.

People at NASA knew that ice and insulation fell from the launch towers and boosters during launch and people asked questions whether it could cause problems. Those questions were ignored and people who asked them were quietly censured. It wasn't until after the shuttle burned up that NASA accepted the fact that falling debris could cause problems on the shuttle.

When Apollo 13 exploded, an unrecognized error might have caused an unseen nick in the insulation on a wire which ignited the oxygen in the tank. When NASA engineers and scientists were posed with this theory they came right out and said, "Yes, this could be the cause." Then, in their next breath, they said, "How can we make sure it doesn't happen again?"

When I first posed this question about the space program I warned that it would be a side trip. My point is not to argue whether NASA does its job, nor is it to argue whether we should have brought our men home. I say, "Yes!" to both. NASA does a fine job.

My point was to say, as a society, there used to be a work ethic which created a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of quality workmanship which does not seem to exist today.

My example was meant to say that, even in a fine organization such as NASA, the changes in these undercurrents are visible. The video documentary on Apollo 13 which I refer to was meant to be an example of that.

ntenny · Sep 8, 2010

Worker 11811 said:
My point was to say, as a society, there used to be a work ethic which created a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of quality workmanship which does not seem to exist today.

I agree with most of your analysis, but I think this summary is an overgeneralisation.

The era around the Apollo missions was really NASA's finest hour; they got a lot of resources, including many of the best engineers in the world and enough resources to make sure those engineers were able to do their jobs to a very, very high standard. By the time of the shuttle, that lustre had faded a little; they were under more budget pressure and into the beginning of an era that might be summarised as "you must do more with less". That era has seen some very impressive successes too, but one of the lessons of the _Challenger_ is that "more with less" is not a good way to approach manned spaceflight.

But I think if you look elsewhere in society, to areas that draw the same kind of interest and resources as the NASA of the 1960s, you'll find similar levels of "purpose" and "quality workmanship". A good place to look might be the technical industries that eventually spawned the modern internet: the big workstation companies in the young Silicon Valley, the AI research communities around Stanford and MIT, the idea incubators of Xerox PARC and Thomas J. Watson and Bell Labs, and so on. That era too passed, as a lot of aspects of the computer business became commoditised; you can't really sell fine craftsmanship when your competitor's ugly plastic product works just as well as your beautiful handmade work of art and costs half as much.

To get back to photography, I'm not sure cameras ever really had a "golden age" of this sort. Those beautiful Weimar Republic plate cameras, the Juwells and Bergheils and the like, were accompanied by plenty of hack-job plate cameras that were a cheap black box with a triplet slapped on the front in an ugly two-speed shutter. And on the other hand, complain all you like about the modern digicam, but they're still making Hasselblads too.

As someone or other said, things aren't like they used to be, but then they never were.

-NT

wblynch · Sep 8, 2010

MBA mentality.. the virus that is bringing us all down.

cfclark · Sep 8, 2010

ntenny said:
I agree with most of your analysis, but I think this summary is an overgeneralisation.

The era around the Apollo missions was really NASA's finest hour; they got a lot of resources, including many of the best engineers in the world and enough resources to make sure those engineers were able to do their jobs to a very, very high standard. By the time of the shuttle, that lustre had faded a little; they were under more budget pressure and into the beginning of an era that might be summarised as "you must do more with less". That era has seen some very impressive successes too, but one of the lessons of the _Challenger_ is that "more with less" is not a good way to approach manned spaceflight.

I largely agree with this, although I'd also like to add that during the Apollo era, there was a definite goal in mind (get to the moon before the Soviets and get back alive), whereas in the subsequent Shuttle era, PR seemed to "wag the dog" to a great extent and NASA, by design or not, put a happy spin on just about everything in order to justify its funding. I don't know that this directly contributed to the two catastrophic Shuttle accidents, but it didn't help. NASA did learn from each of those, and is unlikely to make the same mistakes again (it also fixed the issues involved in the Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 accidents), but the approach to QA in the design process, before the missions, is what needs to be addressed to make sure the agency doesn't need to learn from future mistakes the same way.

All in all, 17 deaths over the long history of NASA is probably not an unexpected casualty rate--it's just that they have happened in such horrific and public ways.

What this has to do with cameras, I'm not sure, exactly. :confused: But an interesting tangent.

Worker 11811 · Sep 8, 2010

A generalization, it is but it illustrates the idea that I perceive a downward trend in many people's mentality toward "fastercheaperbetter" over quality and workmanship.

CD55 · Sep 8, 2010

jamesgignac said:
Heh, almost the same situation here - but it was my step-sister's son's first birthday. Had my Bronica ETRSi and received very similar comments. I also brought out my Hass 503cx...I don't know my family is pretty hilarious when it comes to things that they don't understand - nobody wanted to try using (or even holding, for that matter) the camera when I offered. Maybe the 1-year-old would have but I didn't ask him

The interesting part at the party I was with was my cousin, who has a Canon Rebel digital SLR, saying he really couldn't use the Bronica. I tried basically explaining to him that you just set the shutter speed and f-stop like any camera to get a picture but he said he would rather just "machine gun" his camera and that there is bound to be a good picture in there.

Nice interesting stories coming from everybody by the way! :munch:

Ken Nadvornick · Sep 8, 2010

CD55 said:
Nice interesting stories coming from everybody by the way! :munch:

Yeah. We sorta got off track. Sorry.

Ken

CD55 · Sep 9, 2010

Ken Nadvornick said:
Yeah. We sorta got off track. Sorry.

Ken

No need to be sorry Ken. Your story was interesting too.

Terrence Brennan · Sep 9, 2010

Worker 11811 said:
I was recently watching a video documentary about the Apollo 13 moon mission. The one where the spacecraft almost blew up... the one they made the movie about.

The most interesting part of the documentary was not really the story of the mission and how the astronauts were brought home to safety. I was almost captivated by the behind-the-scenes footage of the men at Mission Control, trying to figure out how to bring our boys home in one piece.
.

The book of the same title, with the authors being Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, is an excellent read.

Renato Tonelli · Sep 9, 2010

While shooting a family event with a Rollei 3003 I was asked several times "how many megapixels does that camera have" - eventually I got tired of explaining that I still shoot film and answered "30 megapixels". I could tell by their expressions that they were impressed.

Sirius Glass · Sep 9, 2010

Renato Tonelli said:
While shooting a family event with a Rollei 3003 I was asked several times "how many megapixels does that camera have" - eventually I got tired of explaining that I still shoot film and answered "30 megapixels". I could tell by their expressions that they were impressed.

If you are shooting 6x6 cm at 4000 dpi you are getting 90 Megapixels.

Worker 11811 · Sep 9, 2010

Sirius Glass said:
If you are shooting 6x6 cm at 4000 dpi you are getting 90 Megapixels.

I bought my Yashica-Mat for $75.00, including the Gossen light meter.
And, I'm getting the functional equivalent of 90 MP?

Can't beat that with a stick!

fschifano · Sep 9, 2010

Worker 11811 said:
I bought my Yashica-Mat for $75.00, including the Gossen light meter.
And, I'm getting the functional equivalent of 90 MP?

Can't beat that with a stick!

It's not that simple. Scanners, unless you spend megabucks for an ultra high quality unit, aren't going to translate all that into useful data.

"Now That's A REAL Camera!"

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