From: "frank theriault" > > Most people that I know, even snapshooters (especially snapshooters!) > are digital these days. Geez, I just saw ads for bottom of the line > Sanyo and Sony 6 meg zoom p&s cams for like $70! That's like about > the cost of 3 or 4 rolls of colour including processing? >
I hate them. They take crappy snapshots. You can do better with disposable film cameras. The problem is they all offer ONLY live view for composing the picture; no view finder. So you end up with the camera focused willy-nilly without regard to the subject, and motion blur out the wazoo from holding the thing out at arms length; especially indoors. I run a mini-lab. It's a digital hybrid with kiosks where the customer can enter their digital images and get RA4 process color prints. Most of what I get is crap anyway - it's all young girls taking the same pictures over and over again. Group of girls in nice party dresses all squeezed in cheek to cheek. Same group of girls at table in some club with umbrella drinks. Endless succession of various drunken louts they've met at the club. Rinse & repeat. I give them the best prints I can, even though the subject matter doesn't deserve it, and actual image quality I have to work with is usually pretty low. Comes from trying to squeeze the maximum number of images on the memory card instead of just buying another card and setting the camera to the best quality it can produce. Every once in a while I get a heart breaker. I had a customer yesterday with 300 some images of a once in a lifetime cruise of the Greek Isles out of Istanbul, with the Blue Mosque thrown in for good measure. She took a 8 mega-pixel digital point 'n shoot with Live View; a package deal including a 512MB SD card at a cost less than $100. More than half the images were motion blurred, back focused or otherwise impossible to get a good print from because her camera ONLY has live view for composing images. > For something like a county fair, they should just have categories for > amateur and pro. Or maybe amateur, advanced amateur and pro. Leave > it to the integrity of the entrants to classify themselves. Forget > about separate categories for film and digital. They should make it > about the photographs, not the camera type. > > cheers, > frank Categories should define the rigor of judging criteria. The amateur who wants to be judged by pro standards should be able to compete in that category, although I guess it's not fair to let actual pros into the amateur category. Don't know how I'd enforce that. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
