Actually it does. It’s a great camera. But remember I am no pro. Photography to me is a hobby.
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Is Photography fun?
- Thread starter jwolf6589
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I plan to take a few shots with iPhone to instantly text to people or share on FB. Also iPhone can do geotagging. But majority of pics will be with Powershot.
It will be. Just like video tapes and cassette tapes I don’t see an attraction in 2022.
I used a power shot back in the day. Until I was at a wedding with a backlit window and the shots were garbage. That’s when I knew it was time to upgrade to real gear.
My moment of revelation came one afternoon way back in 2005 when I was out on the boardwalk trying to get some specific shots with the Coolpix 8800 that I tended to use more frequently than my film SLR because I loved the whole digital thing.... I was getting frustrated because I could not get the CP 8800 to do what I wanted it to do, which essentially was to act like an SLR, and suddenly the penny dropped: it was time to set aside the Coolpix and go for a DSLR.
The very next day I was at my local camera shop and handling my first DSLR, the Nikon D70. Eventually traded in the film camera and lenses on lenses more suited to the D70 and haven't shot with film since. Within the very first few days, that D70 demonstrated to me that my decision was absolutely the right thing to do.
I was sitting on my deck tinkering with the settings, still learning the menu of the new camera when I suddenly smelled smoke and saw it wafting over the lake. WTH?? I jumped up, camera still in hand, and ran out my front door to the parking area and then saw a truck on fire on the road which passes by my community, with the fire department beginning to tackle the flames. My inner photojournalist sprang to life, and I moved closer to the scene while still staying out of their way, and began firing away....the D70 was so quick, so responsive, and exactly what I'd missed for a long time. That was a momentous day.
The very next day I was at my local camera shop and handling my first DSLR, the Nikon D70. Eventually traded in the film camera and lenses on lenses more suited to the D70 and haven't shot with film since. Within the very first few days, that D70 demonstrated to me that my decision was absolutely the right thing to do.
I was sitting on my deck tinkering with the settings, still learning the menu of the new camera when I suddenly smelled smoke and saw it wafting over the lake. WTH?? I jumped up, camera still in hand, and ran out my front door to the parking area and then saw a truck on fire on the road which passes by my community, with the fire department beginning to tackle the flames. My inner photojournalist sprang to life, and I moved closer to the scene while still staying out of their way, and began firing away....the D70 was so quick, so responsive, and exactly what I'd missed for a long time. That was a momentous day.
Most of us are not pros. Please stop confusing being competent with making a living from it.
The camera doesn’t make you take better pictures. That is up to the photographer to learn how to do it. A camera can hold you back if the conditions are not perfect. A Polaroid can take a nice photo but it’s not meant to do a lot.
Hasselblads (worth thousands or tens of thousands) used to use Polaroid backs to check for exposure and lighting before taking the shot on medium format film. Instax is resurrecting this option.
Hasselblad-Instax – A 48-hour project to merge a Hasselblad 500C/M and a FujiFilm Instax 9 — blankensmith
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant...
I'm the person @Sheepish-Lord hates. I'm very definitely a "Slow photographer". Deliberately so. That said, there are rarely masses of people around when I'm changing settings for stuff I shoot. I like big, heavy, slow. Slowwwww. It takes me 10 minutes to unpack and set up properly, 10-30 minutes to get the few shots I want, another 10 to re-pack and make sure I've got all my bits in the backpack. However long to hike to where I want. Perhaps 15-25 pounds of kit, depending. I won't be able to do that forever, but it's what I like to do now. I enjoy the optics, the framing (I mostly get that wrong still - my hope for this year is to "get better"), the decision points, the post processing, the printing. It keeps me sane or at least more so than I would be otherwise
I should add of course, that I use my iPhone with the best of them in the usual ways. I love all image capture.
I thought I was a slow photographer until I got into large format...then I realized just how slow I could be.
In general, I'd say it's pretty safe to say that there's a correlation of increasing film or sensor size also increasing the amount of time you spend per frame.
12 shots/roll in my Hasselblad make me a lot more deliberate than 36 shots in 35mm or basically unlimited in digital. The fact that I rarely pack more than 10 frames on an outing in large format, and each of those costs me anywhere from $2 to $20 depending on the film type, means that I'd darn sure better make it count every time I open the shutter. Plus, even though the Hasselblad is fiddly to load(although I've done it enough that it's second nature and I don't generally struggle with it) the interlocks make it difficult to do something too stupid. My Bronica, when I still had it, was even more fool proof since you couldn't even pull the dark slide with the back off the camera. In large format, there are zero interlocks and it's easy to fog, double expose, or shoot a blank frame if you miss a step or aren't consistent in coding your exposed/unexposed holders.
And yes, I enjoy it. I enjoy getting dirty on the technical side, I enjoy the places I go to photograph, I enjoy the stories I can tell behind each one and the memories that each photo evokes(the memory of being there when I took it) and just everything else.
That looks like a great project. I started with a Polaroid camera in high school and took alot of good pictures. My pictures that were used in the high school paper and yearbook always looked better, with more snap than normal b&w photos. When I switched majors to photograph, I had a summer job in a commercial studio, where I learned to develop 8x10 b&w negatives in trays by hand. We used very large format cameras for all the studio shots. I later was able to buy a Hasselblad 500C with one extra lens and a SuperWide C (no through the lens viewing) with fantastic sharpness. Phenomenal cameras, but they didn't make me a great photographer. The most fun I had taking pictures was when I rented a helicopter for an hour and took arial shots of RIT's new campus being built.Hasselblads (worth thousands or tens of thousands) used to use Polaroid backs to check for exposure and lighting before taking the shot on medium format film. Instax is resurrecting this option.
Hasselblad-Instax – A 48-hour project to merge a Hasselblad 500C/M and a FujiFilm Instax 9 — blankensmith
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant...isaacblankensmith.com
I used a 4x5 Sinar view camera that had been in a fire and I rebuilt it, but new bellows and bought a few lenses for it. That is a camera that takes time to be set up on a tripod. By adjusting the film plane vertically, straightens the vertical lines and makes building look proper.
Taken from a hillside, couldn't quite get all of it in the frame. Circa 1965.
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Photography is fun. But only if I’m using a proper camera. I don’t really enjoy iPhone photography. It’s just for snaps.
I agree. I use iPhone all the time at work to take and send photos but it’s not fun. Powershot is fun.
Yeah and it probably cost way too much. I bought a poloroid in 1999 for like $40.Hasselblads (worth thousands or tens of thousands) used to use Polaroid backs to check for exposure and lighting before taking the shot on medium format film. Instax is resurrecting this option.
Hasselblad-Instax – A 48-hour project to merge a Hasselblad 500C/M and a FujiFilm Instax 9 — blankensmith
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant...
Oh now that is just wrong! that is 48 hours that could have been spent processing gorgeous square formats...Hasselblads (worth thousands or tens of thousands) used to use Polaroid backs to check for exposure and lighting before taking the shot on medium format film. Instax is resurrecting this option.
Hasselblad-Instax – A 48-hour project to merge a Hasselblad 500C/M and a FujiFilm Instax 9 — blankensmith
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant...
You mean Hipsters will pay thousands for a polaroid landcamera?
Wow! that is beautiful and crispy sharp. Nicely done. I mean I hope you painted your castle since then but wow look at the details. Bravo
The current Esperanza Mansion after much renovation! Now a hotel, restaurant and ballroom.
On Keuka Lake, in the Finger Lakes of NY.
So which is it? The polaroid is cheap and takes bad photos or it's too expensive? I'm confused as to your line of thinking.
(ps...it's not the gear.)
I have an Arca-Swiss Polaroid back for my 500C(or really any manual wind camera-it won't fit an EL/M or any other motor-wound camera).
It's really just a 100/200 series Land Camera back half with a Hasselblad mount grafted onto the front of it. There's a interesting trick with a piece of high refractive index glass to set the focal plane correctly, but that's the sum of it.
At one time, these were decently expensive pieces. Then, of course, Polaroid went under and with them the 100-series films. Fuji continued making Polaroid-compatible pack film though, FP-100C and FP3000. I never used FP3000, but FP100C IMO was a far better film than anything Polaroid made.
Around 2015, though, Fuji decided to go all-in on Instax, which is a one-step film and not a peel apart film. With it they discontinued the FP films and destroyed the equipment.
The Impossible Project, as it was called then(now Polaroid), which makes SX-70 and Type 600 one-step film, had apparently tried to buy the equipment from Fuji but was told it was gone. Unless I've missed out on it, that means no one is making peel-apart film that will work in these backs now.
Consequently, it's more or less worthless.
When I heard of Fuji discontinuing pack film, I bought a dozen boxes of FP-100C. I gave in, though, and couldn't pass up ~$60 a box on Ebay...
Instax has a massively overfunded kickstarter campaign that is coming along nicely. ?
Hasselback Portrait | The Hasselblad Instax Back
Shoot Incredible Quality Instant Photos with your Hasselblad
But really my point was that the OP seems to waffle on whether things are cheap or expensive or worth it based on his mood at the time of writing.
eta: although the comments on the kickstarter aren't promising. hopefully just regular supply chain issues.
I shoot several camera brands. They’re all fun, because yes, photography is fun.