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Dick’s Rant

21 Aug

Posted at 08:51h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

It's Also known as Not Working. And you'll encounter this all through your digital photographic experience. You also encountered it all through your analog time too, but to a greater extent. You could fall down the analog stairs in the dark quicker and it hurt more when you hit the bottom. Why? Because there were a lot of those falls from which there was no recovery. When you made a real mistake with exposure or film handling or development or fixing, whatever you had done until then went well and truly out the window. I've got slides exposed in my first days of 35mm shooting that make me cry - mistakes that wasted opportunities. I can also remember darkroom errors that killed whole photo shoots - and they could be as simple as mis-reading dilution tables for the chemistry. Okay - you could do it royally with digital as well - you can format off an entire card and make everything disappear. However, the camera generally makes this harder by one step of permission before it will obey - some do it in...

19 Aug

Posted at 09:38h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Not the band - the real midnight oil that we burn to keep out photography going. There was a day when it was just that - safelights and enlargers with lamp wicks inside and very long exposure time. In later times it changed to electricity, but we still burned the midnight developer and fixer. And many of us went into the early AM with the thing, as it was easier to get a decent darkroom light-tight when there wasn't all that much light outside. If you are a modern digital worker who has never had to develop film on the road in a motel bathroom* I urge you to talk to an old-timer who did. There was a fine art to sealing a door with towels and getting a large developing tank under a very small faucet that is lost nowadays. Also getting the smell of fixer out of the room before you checked out...

17 Aug

Posted at 09:18h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Note: On no account is this instruction sheet to be shown to the general public. Once you have read it, scrape off the letters and dispose of them safely. The On-Line Department has issued a set of guidelines for internet trading that must be followed by all staff. a. When listing an item do not use images from another shop's website if it also contains their trademark, name, phone number, or picture of store owner. In particular do not copy and paste their image if it has a lower price than ours. b. If something has been discontinued by the maker - in 1956 - it is probably better to have a small notice in the on-line catalog that is is a special order item. No need to mention how special. c. On occasion items may be repeated several times throughout the on-line catalog as a result of small data-entry errors. It is as well to have them exhibit the same price wherever they appear...

14 Aug

Posted at 09:43h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

No really. Go ahead. I won't scream. Because if you feel it and it seems loose, I can tighten it. The maker of my photo tripod included a natty little Allen spanner that can firm up the leg lock. If I have lost the spanner, the technician at Camera Electronic can do the job for me - and check out all the other things to which a tripod may be prone. a. Corrosion - With the exception of very few specialist tripods, they can all go manky if you stand them in salt water or chemicals. This may not be evident from the surface but can affect the joints. b. Sand - And other particulate matter. This also gets its entry into the sliding joints of a tripod as well as the locks and screw parts. Enough grit and enough wear can loosen or jam any tripod. They don't mention this in the advertisements but lots of the beaches in  Western Australia are made up of sand...

12 Aug

Posted at 08:35h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Why should I advertise Nikon D6 cameras in this weblog column? I cannot possibly sell one of them to any of the readers. Is it all just a waste of electronic space? Well, my detractors would agree with this. All that can be said about this Nikon flagship camera : a. Has been said by Nikon. b. Has been said by Ken Rockwell and DP Review. Ken's piece will be the one with the saturated colours and the bit about sending him $ 5...

05 Aug

Posted at 09:10h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

If you have always sighed to own a Leica camera but quailed at the price of the new ones, there is an opportunity for you now in the secondhand shelves of Camera Electronic. Ignore the gold-washed Leicavich 35mm camera - that's just an ex-Soviet Fed faked up for the sucker market. Buy it for a talking point, if you fancy, but know what it is. Look more closely, however, at the Digilux 2  sitting behind it. The camera with the silver finish and leather strap. It's not new - and it's not ex-Wetzlar - but it is a genuine Leica made in collaboration with Panasonic of Japan and it has a genuine Summicron lens ( probably made in Yamagata ). All this is good. The camera will not have the screen or the resolution of a new Leica Cl or M10. You cannot expect that. It has nowhere NEAR the number of numbers in its price tag as those modern cameras, however - and there is your advantage. The rest of it is made to very high standards indeed and can serve very well. And,...

03 Aug

Posted at 09:28h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Don't wince. This isn't a bulletin with viruses or politicians in it. It's concerned with cameras. Briefly, Olympus - the makers of the Zuiko lenses and the Olympus OM-D micro 4/3 cameras - will be selling their imaging division to a Japanese consortium in September. Some people have imagined that this will be the end of Olympus cameras - I suspect it will be nothing like that at all. The consortium - Japan Industrial Partners - is very likely to get the camera division in toto - and that will mean R&D, plans, tools, machines, patterns, materials, and perhaps even factories. I would think that it will also receive the bulk of the optical workers that the camera division has been using for the last decades. it would make sense to transfer the people skilled with the brand at the same time. So what does this mean to you, the Australian camera user? I would suggest that it means you'll have an opportunity to get some very good camera gear and lenses in the next few years: a. There will be a flurry of...