Analogue Backlash

You might have noticed that long playing records (LPs), (or 33 and a third to us oldies) have made a bit of a comeback. They do periodically resurface, and new records pressed are hellishly expensive over here in the UK right now, somewhere in the region of £20 or so, but of course there are squillions of legacy LPs floating around for next to nothing in the charity shops.

Let's be clear: LPs are a pain in the arse in general: they scratch easily, have to be turned over almost as soon as you've sat down and take a fair bit of real estate to store. But here's the thing, the sound quality from an unscratched LP is superior than a CD, with a much better frequency range. That assumes your hearing can still handle the range, but hey ho, there's the nostalgia trip too.

And if they are better than CDs, then consider the MP3 and other compressed formats that we use all the time. We really have allowed music quality to sink.

I haven't bought any LPs, and stream with the best of them, but I do occasionally dig the LPs out and give them a spin.

Another retro area is photography. I wasn't impressed by my first digital compact, a Fuji, quite some years ago, but when I got my Fuji Z2 I declared I'd never buy a film camera again. In 2008 I bought a digital SLR, an Olympus E-510 kit with two zooms and I've been pretty happy with that, even though I know the best digital cameras have only 5 EV stop range compared to film's 7. To keep this simple, it's the visual equivalent of LPs versus CDs - CDs are clearly good enough but if we want more....

So earlier this year I ate my own words. To be fair, I need to share a bit of an anecdote with you. Back in 1976 I was using a Yashica rangefinder camera for my photography, and was looking to move into the SLR field. The camera of choice for me back then was the Contax RTS, a truly ground breaking camera with lenses designed and made by Zeiss, a body designed by Porche and electronics designed by Yashica that broke the mould. I couldn't afford a RTS back then, and in fact I struggled to afford a Yashica FR SLR, an affordable take on parts of the RTS, sharing the lens mount.

I had a few of these cameras over the years, replacing when others became damaged, but I never found myself in a position to buy a Contax. Then, somewhere along the way Yashica were bought out by Kyocera, a photo copier firm that didn't improve the product in my opinion. To be fair, some photographic giants disappeared as a result of the digital revolution, including Kodak, credited with inventing the digital camera in 1978, so I guess Yashica was just another casualty.

But there's a film revival going on; in Japan you're not considered a photographer by many unless you're toting a classic film camera. So far this doesn't seem to be pushing up the price of old film cameras, but that may happen. Or the fad may fade.

Anyway, I was browsing eBay just after Christmas and someone was selling a Contax RTS with a few lenses and accessories. There were a few duplications in the kit for me because I've been using legacy Yashica lenses on my Olympus DSLR for a while, but it looked tempting. It had been brought out of an attic after twenty years and was a 'collect only'. The location was a fair trek away and would have meant either a ten hour turnaround or an overnight stop, but I prepared to bid. I didn't actually place a bid on that one - it went over £200 with ten minutes to go and given the camera was untested I wasn't prepared to go further.

However my appetite had been wetted and within a week I had bought a near mint RTS plus a couple of additional lenses, a flashgun and a cable release that's unfortunately for a later model. Since then I've added a second body, two motor-drives, the correct cable release and some other bits and bobs. Four films through and I'm getting back to grips with focussing myself, checking exposure, adjusting f stop for depth of field and lugging the lot around. I'd forgotten how labour intensive traditional cameras are, or how much workload DSLRs take on, and my word, how heavy the old beasts are.

I'm having a whale of a time and will start processing my own black and white negatives soon. I picked up a negative scanner, which actually is a fixed focal length digital camera in reality, and that does a passable job of converting the negatives to digital images and I can get the odd really good shot printed the traditional way.

If, like me, you've felt a little jaded with the ease of digital photography and want to put a bit more of yourself into your photos, then why not go online and pick up a classic camera. You could pop an LP on the turntable to listen to while you search.

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Android Used On Digital Mirrorless Cameras

We've all got used to carrying around pretty good cameras day and night.  Most of us have a decent camera in our smart phone and plenty of us have access to one in our tablet computers.  Despite this convenient flexibility, many of us also cart a compact digital camera around. 

It makes sense, really.  For one, the cameras on phones, while much better than those available just a year or more ago, pale into insignificance against some of the compacts that can be picked up for a trivial amount these days.  Plus they offer a lot more flexibility, hard coded into the camera and many have physical zoom lenses (as opposed to digital zooms which rarely stand up to close scrutiny).

Also they mean that we don't have to choke up our phone's memory storage too quickly, leaving it available for ad hoc opportunistic photos when we're not carrying our compact camera.

However some of us want a bit more flexibility when we take photos - I'm one who likes to have the capability to control depth of field and to choose the best aperture for a photograph.  I also like to select the best focal length for the shot.  Not all the time, but there are some photos that a compact camera or a smartphone just won't do justice to.

My current go-to real camera rig is an Olympus Digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) that I've had for about four years.  Which means it's officially archaic, given the rate of change in technology these days.

For those who haven't been exposed to SLR cameras, let me digress.  These cameras are designed with a prism mounted above and just behind the lens.  The light enters the lens, gets focussed and then hits a mirror leaning at a 45 degree angle, directing the light into the prism.  90 degrees later the image is presented to the photographer's eye.  Because of this arrangement the photographer can see exactly what the electronic sensor will see when the shutter button is pushed.  Out of focus - turn the focus ring on the lens and watch the image snap sharp, too far away - push the lens to bring the image closer and larger.  Thanks to the magic of technology all of the technical information regarding shutter speed and aperture size are pushed to the same viewfinder the photographer is looking  through.

And the key flexibility of all of this is that the lens is interchangeable - that is, you can fit longer or shorter focal length lenses to give yourself maximum flexibility with the image.  Wide angle through to telephoto, no problem.  When the shutter release button is pushed the mirror lifts, obliterating the view momentarily and the shutter opens to expose the image to the sensor.  Then everything returns to normal, with the whole process taking a fraction of a second.

In the last couple of years camera companies have started to move away from the mirror/prism model, relying on a semi-transparent glass plate that both allows light to travel to the sensor once the shutter is opened and to the viewfinder, although this is far from ideal, because you're splitting the available light.  The upside is that you get rid of the moving mirror, one less mechanical thing to synchronise and go wrong.

But the ultimate way forward, right now at least, is the mirrorless system, where the sensor is continually exposed to the light through the lens and feeds that image to an electronic eyepiece.  Technically they could have done this years ago, but the electronic screens used in video cameras, for example, were pretty crude and us photographers like a bit of quality.  Today, those viewfinders are of a high enough quality so the mirror is lost and so is the prism, a weight saving.  Job done?

Not according to Samsung, which is about to launch a mirrorless camera with android built in.  It's not clear yet if the camera takes a mobile phone sim card, but even if it's just WiFi then it will be a boon.  First, you can download any amount of photo editing apps direct to the phone, so you're not just tied to the Samsung firmware.  But perhaps more importantly you can upload photos on the hoof - to your cloud storage for safety or to the local paper if it's a newsworthy snap.  Reuters may be on your email contact list with this camera.

It's a role reversal, having email on your camera instead of a camera on your smart phone, but one photographers are going to like.

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