(This is the camera-geeking-enhanced version of half of the
LiveJournal post I just made about my day.)
Got some face-to-face time with friends today. Among them was one
who's currently an English teacher in China but came home for a
holiday. After using PHD cameras ("Push Here, Dummy") for however
long, she recently picked up her first "real camera" (her words).
It's a Phenix body that had been described to me earlier as "a K1000
clone". She wanted some pointers, though looking at her snapshots
I'd have to say she was doing pretty well despite not having a working
meter and just _guessing_ at the exposures! As expected from, well,
travel snapshots, some of her photos looked like snapshots. Others
were obviously more carefully composed -- she considers herself a
complete novice, but she revealed that she's been _paying_attention_
to photos-as-art for a long time. She seems to have a special knack
for mountain landscapes.
She said her meter didn't work because she drained the batteries
before she even found out the camera _had_ a meter -- she lost her
lens cap and the meter was active whenever light entered the camera --
which sounded familiar. We put the batteries from my K2 into it
briefly to make sure the meter actually did work. (Fortunately I
had dragged the K2 along to use _as_ a meter ... I nearly left it
home because I was already carrying my two working H1a bodies to
use up the ends of the rolls of film loaded in them.[1])
I'm hoping to get a chance to sit with her in a less distracting
environment to answer questions before she goes back to China.
I did find her a National Geographic quick-reference booklet that
looked like it might be helpful, at the Baltimore Book Thing (free
books every weekend!!!).
I expected a K1000 with a few metal parts replaced by plastic, but
it's not really quite a K1000. It's got a DOF preview button
(on the "wrong" side) and a self timer, it lacks a PC socket, and
it has over/under/ok LEDs instead of a match-needle. Looking at
her photos, I suggested she get a wide-angle lens to go with her
normal lens. Unlike me, her eye seems to be drawn mostly to subjects
that would benefit from a wider angle of view most of the time.
(I'm more of a telephoto shooter, though I wished I had a wide
angle with me in the coffeeshop tonight!)
Curious thing ... she has a completely manual flash -- no sensor,
no auto-mode, she has to check the distance and look up the
aperture on the chart on the back of the flash -- but it's fancy
enough to have a tilt _and_swivel_ head! It looks new. I had
no idea anyone was still making flash strobes without at least a
basic auto mode. (Then again, maybe it was ancient but just never
used until now.)
Another longtime Pentax user was there, and he complained that
he really wished his camera (uh, an ME Super, I think) had DOF
preview. Later, he was handling an H1a, was startled by the lack
of a flash shoe (I fetched the other H1a from the car and showed
him the clip-on shoe), even more startled by how little mirror-slap
he felt when he fired it (I'd finished the roll and unloaded it by
then), and wasn't sure he liked the butter-smooth feel of the film
advance as much as I do (though he did agree that it's unusually
smooth -- it's just that he felt it was _too_ smooth). Once again
I failed to resist the impulse to point out that those old pre-Spotmatic
Pentax bodies are a real pleasure to operate, a joy to the hands,
and fun. Ifwhen I get a chance to replace my handheld meter, I'll
use them a lot more often.
And then came the really exciting bit of the evening (next message)...
-- Glenn
[1] I thought it might be amusing to shoot the first few rolls of
2003 using each of my reliable-enough-to-go-shooting-with bodies
in order from oldest-model to newest. If I go on a shoot where I
need a feature that's missing from whatever body is next in line,
I'll abandon this plan, but so far I'm getting away with it. Next
up is the K2, since I've already put a roll through each of two
H1a bodies and the Spotmatic.
