More ramblings

Every 5 or 6 years I’m emptying out one of the cupboards at home and I come across my beautifully professional looking aluminium silver camera case.

I carefully open it up and gaze at the Nikon FE body nestling in the hard foam along with 4 Nikkor lenses, a flash gun, strap and various different size filters to fit the different lenses. (For the really sad, lonely and interested, the lenses are an 80-200mm zoom, a 105mm Micro, a 55mm Micro and the 52mm that came with the camera.)

When I first acquired this kit - over a period of months - I was going to get into photography in a fairly serious way and I read the right books and learnt about apertures, film and shutter speeds and got to the point where I could just about make the camera do what I wanted it to do under various different situations.

And then other things in life took over and when I next came across the kit, I found I’d forgotten almost everything I thought I’d previously learnt. But I was still keen so I started again and once more reached the stage where I could take a competent photograph.

And so it went on. I must have bought the Nikon about 25 years ago and when I came across it again the other week all the same old thoughts and feelings went through my mind. But before doing the usual thing and starting again I decided to have everything checked out and I took the case and its contents to a family run camera shop in Tottenham Court Road. I told the man the story about me trying to come to grips with photography at regular intervals over time and he took the case from me and asked me when I’d last used the camera. I hesitated, trying to remember when and he quickly told me that I’d answered his question - it was obviously not a recent activity!

Then, disasters! He told me that each of the lenses had mould in it and that it had already started to eat in to the lens coatings. Over time it would get worse. He was pleased that I had removed the batteries from the Nikon’s body but when he put new batteries into the camera it didn’t work in automatic mode at all. Basically, I owned a camera kit that probably cost around £3,000 and none of it was any good!

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I then decided to buy a digital Nikon which does everything and more that the old kit used to do. I know that the more sceptical reader will be saying that the kind man in the shop led me to believe that the old kit was no good so that I would buy a new camera but I don’t think so because I was there. Mind you, if you were a conman people would believe you wouldn’t they? No, I’m sure he was genuine.

A bit more bad news. I’m thinking that a bit like CDs and MP3 audio files that compress and thereby reduce quality - pictures have become degraded by modern technology. Today’s pictures are made up of pixels - each one being a single point in an image. From memory, I think that colour and mono prints were continuous tone and reason tells me that they would be superior to images made up of pixels. So like a lot of things in life, we’re sacrificing quality on the altar of expediency. I can feel a grumpy old man mode coming on!

All of this is to do with life really - none of it is too much to do with work. Except that if you need a quick, competent looking shot of anything, let me know - the new Nikon is really very, very good - it'll even shoot a 30minute movie! And it was never the composition of shots that was a problem - it was just the technical aspects.

Incidentally, the snap of all the old kit shown at the top of this blog was taken on the new Nikon.