I’ve restored this cute little Japanese half-frame 35mm camera with a metering conversion from selenium to CdS, and the addition of adjustable focus. Here’s the story. My collection includes different cameras for different purposes or moods. Sometimes it’s great to slow the process down, and agonise over the precise technical details of every shot. Other …
It was last year while I was on holidays that my trusty old camera stopped working, the journey continued but I was forced to store the camera away and had to wait until I was back in Stockholm to have it fixed. There was only one problem, I knew no one in the city that …
One of the Last Technicians in Stockholm – a reportage by Daniel Morales Read More
Buying for life means maintaining for life. This is true of anything; if you want for your leather boots to not dry out and crack, but to live up to their brand reputation as lasting generations then you have to be sure to moisturise and brush them. They won’t do this themselves as part of regular wear, it’s something you need to take responsibility for. Buying for life doesn’t just mean finding the brand that everyone else recommends, it means making sure that product is designed to be rebuilt, accounts for wear and tear, and taking active care, participating in the maintenance rituals in order to ensure that longevity.
The moment digital photography became accessible to the greater population without significant barriers to entry, film became a luxury good.
I do not mean that film photography entered the same plane of inaccessibility as the Rollex or the Bentley (although there are film camera makers in those echelons to be sure). I simply mean that, for the vast majority of working professionals, photographing on film was no longer a requirement to put food on the table.
I underline this transition chiefly for this reason: once film became a choice, and not an absolute necessity, it entered the economics of emotion. This applies both to the hobbyist and the professional. We see this in the wedding industry with “hybrid” shooters offering medium format film in their wedding packages. Are they offering film alongside digital because it has higher resolution? Because it is a cheaper, easier workflow? Of course not. They are offering it chiefly because it differentiates their brand in an over saturated wedding market, because it has that “look” and because their clients have the desire to say that their wedding was shot on film.
Those who shoot rangefinder cameras on a regular basis are probably aware of (they may even feel plagued by) vertical rangefinder misalignment.
A camera rangefinder works by superimposing a (generally central) patch reflected from a position slightly to the side of the viewfinder into the direct vision viewfinder. When the calibrated rangefinder shows that both images coincide horizontally, we know the object in the patch is in focus. All quite practical, but there can be issues.
