It started last March, when I realized the Pentax K10D was being discontinued and marked down to the point where, given my expected use of film, it would come close to paying for itself in the next few years.
Not quite paying for itself, mind you, but close. And, thought I, it would enable me to take better pictures with fewer hassles. (Boy, was I ever wrong.)
It was an extraordinarily complex camera. It took me a week to get it properly configured. But I expected as much; I gritted my teeth and persevered. It was much better designed, user-interface wise, than my ill-fated (can you say E18 boys and girls?) Canon Powershot A80. The controls, while numerous, were generally logical and intuitive.
Then I noticed that sometimes my subjects were frustratingly out of focus. In all such cases, the actual plane of focus was behind the subject. I started paying special vigilance to my focusing, and what the autofocus sensor thought about the focus.
It was exasperating: My eyes and the AF sensor would agree on focus, only to have the resultant picture be focused differently. It is said that digital photography offers instant gratification. In my case, “instant frustration” is more like it.
The last straw came when I finished up a roll of print film on my Pentax ZX-M by taking a few macro shots of emerging ferns. This is an entry-level camera with what is considered a sub-par viewfinder, and I was using cheap consumer-grade print film processed at the local Fred Meyer. And, because I nailed the focus every time, the results completely blew the expensive new K10D out of the water.
I sent the K10D back as defective. Its replacement arrived, complete with precisely the same problems.
Realizing that all remaining in stock K10D bodies probably had the same issues, I took time out from my busy schedule to run it out to the local repair depot. After much back-and-forth, the technician concluded there was nothing amiss.
I. Don’t. Think. So.
I’ve been using older manual focus cameras for years. I’ve simply never had these sort of difficulties focusing before. Never.
Six weeks is enough. If I can’t get my money back from the vendor, it’s going up on eBay. It’s back to Fuji Velvia and the Pentax MX for me. After recouping my funds from this DSLR debacle, I’ll spend my money on a few new lenses, a light table, a loupe, a film scanner, and a slide projector.
At this point, I don’t care if I end up spending more with film than with digital. I get better results with the old-school technology.
The amusing thing is the reaction of some hard-core digital aficionados. “Give digital another chance,” they plead. Like I haven’t already been doing that for six f*cking weeks already!
For Pete sakes, why should I give digital yet another chance? My spare-time interest is using photography to document the natural world, not troubleshooting an errant special-purpose computer. I troubleshoot enough computers in my day job, thank you very much.
What’s curious is, I’ve never lectured digital camera users to “give film another chance.” I respect their personal decision. The pleading only goes one way.
I suspect what’s at play here is quasi-religious fervor. Call it the Cult of Digital (a sect within the Church of High Technology). It’s high technology for its own sake; how well that technology actually works is irrelevant.
Even if digital cameras had the nasty habit of bursting into flames and burning people’s houses down, you’d probably have that crowd telling the fire victims to stop obsessing over their dead family members and lost possessions and “give digital another chance.”
(Inspired by my own personal experiences with the things.)
Despite all the shortcomings of digital, the new electronic cameras do a better job of focusing and choosing an exposure setting than their owners used to. Add to that how the crappy print lab is cut out of the picture, and they’re getting the best pictures they ever took, and getting to see them immediately. As such, they’re quite happy.
The vast majority of satisfied digital camera users fall into this category.
It being the process of showing movies (which are shot at 24 frames per second) on television (which is 30 fps in the USA).
Absent some sort of neat trick, there would, of course, be an extremely annoying 6 Hz flicker due to the difference frequency “beat note” between the two rates.
Long ago i asked someone who worked at a TV station (and thus who should have known better!) how they did this, and he answered “Do what? They just take a picture of the movie screen.” He then expressed mystification at my puzzlement as to how his explanation could be the case. His answer never made sense to me.
For good reason, it turns out.
After having an interest in living in some sort of collective situation for years, I finally was accepted into one. I’ve backed out.
Why? Mainly because, although the interest remains, it’s merely one interest amongst many. Living closer to nature and further away from the impact of automobiles (which I choose not to own for ecological reasons) is another.
It turns out that the collective house is in a neighborhood not as favorable for that second goal as my current one is. To be fair, few neighborhoods are. In fact, of all the neighborhoods in all the major cities I’ve ever seen, none are.
The first evening trying to fall asleep in my new bedroom, my first realization was: I hear cars. Cars on nearby Alberta St. (closer than my normal minimum standards for a nearby arterial). More distant cars I can easily hear because this part of town is flat and (unlike the little valley where my apartment is) sounds easily travel from afar. Cars cutting through on the residential street outside, faster (and noisier) than they are at my old place.
My second realization: I smell cars. The air coming in the window is like that in a parking garage, only diluted. It carries an unmistakable mixture of rubber, hot metal, brake shoe, and exhaust smells on it. Instead of coming from the forest, that breeze has traveled across miles of a city full of cars. Why shouldn’t it smell like cars?
More importantly, why should I have to smell it when I don’t even own one of the damned things?
At my old place, evening winds come down Balch Canyon; it smells like the forest and the creek when I’m falling asleep. I noticed that when I first moved in. In fact, I noticed that well before I moved in; it was my discovery at how much cooler and cleaner the air is in that part of town during summer heat waves that prompted my interest in living there. But smells fade when one lives with them all the time. I had grown to think that’s just the way evenings smell in the maritime Northwest.
It’s the way evenings used to smell. It’s the way evenings should smell, of course. Alas, it’s hardly the way they do smell for most residents these days.
If I was the typical suburbanite who complains about how dirty the city is while racking up huge mileage driving a polluting car to, from, and around Sprawlsville, the “hypocrite” charge would stick.
But, as I said, my little neighborhood is unique. It’s where a dense, walkable inner-city neighborhood collides with one of the largest urban greenbelts in the USA. I’m one of a select few who can eat his cake and have it too. Why shouldn’t I?
And, score one for having an insanely busy life: given other interfering interests and obligations, it was going to take so long to complete the move that I hadn’t given notice at my old place yet. And now, I’m not going to.
Yes, I’m giving something up that I still want. That’s hard. But it’s easier to give up on community (for now) than it is to give up the connection to nature I have in my current place.
It’s their conniving, elitist, amoral, Machiavellian power-mongering.
Case in point: the primaries process. In normal years, it’s a complete farce that cuts the residents of most states out of the decision almost entirely, while handing two states (Iowa and New Hampshire) a huge disproportionate influence over the whole process. All the while running up huge campaign bills that make the candidates beholden to the rich.
So what does the so-called “Democratic” Party do when Florida and Michigan decide to do something about being relegated to the sidelines by moving their primary dates up? Why, come down on the side of the rotten system, of course, Those people must be punished for attempting to have a say! Take their votes away!
Until, that is, it turns out that the whole thing is going to be closer than it has in decades. Then one candidate suddenly starts clamoring for the vote to be honored (despite it being trumpeted as worthless when it was held), while the other clamors for disenfranchisement.
Or is he clamoring for the states to pay for a second primary election (i.e. making the taxpayers foot the bill of your party bosses’ temper tantrums). I forget, and it really doesn’t matter. It stinks either way.
Anyone who thinks an establishment politician or an establishment party represents a change from the fundamental rottenness of the system needs to have his head examined.
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