Early Morning Leeds

My walk to work has a certain…charm! There are shots there that I’ve been thinking of capturing for a while and decided that the quiet mornings between Christmas and New Year would be the perfect time to take the camera out. I also wanted to capture it on Tmax 3200 and get some nice grain and atmosphere on the images.

Car wash and bus stop

The project was fun and has given birth to a new rule. Rule 25: learn from your mistakes.

Both pictures were taken on a Nikon F301 with Nikon 35-70 AF lens. Not a bad combination, but I learned some valuable lessons. Firstly, it had been over two years since I ran a roll of film through a camera, and I made some rookie mistakes. True, the lighting was bad and with the lens wide open I was really pushing my luck. If I’d thought about it a bit more carefully, I’d have waited until there was a bit more light, or underexposed the film and push processed it to give me an extra stop.

I also learned that my eyes aren’t really up to manually focusing a camera anymore, so I’ll have to get an auto focus body to replace the F301. My last lesson? Centre weighted metering isn’t the same as matrix metering. Funny how you forget these things when you get used to digital.

Anyway, it has taught me a few things, which is always good, and I’ve added a couple of rules to my list for next time…

Rule 26: Shoot Film. Shooting film is not the same as shooting digital. It requires thought and discipline. Something I hadn’t realised I’d put aside with the D90. I need to shoot more film to keep my skills honed. (And because it’s fun to shoot with some of these older cameras.)

Rule 27: Review the basics. I recently heard a story about how Vince Lombardi would often start a new season by showing the players the football and saying, ‘this is a football’. It may seem like sucking eggs, but his record speaks for itself. A photographer is never too experienced, and never too clever to review the basics from time to time. (and I’m neither, so need to remind myself even more!!)

Let’s see if I can do a better job with my next roll.

CNV00014_cl — Leeds Skyline - part of it anyway.

The End is Nigh…

In what will have been the news of the day for many togs, Kodak announced that they are preparing to file for bankruptcy. From comments on many forums, you’d think Kodak was dead and buried. It may look like it, but they’re only preparing, not filing. The end is not here. At least, not yet. Problem is, whichever way you look at it, it’s easy to think that they’re toast.

What will happen is anyone’s guess, but my guess is that Kodak is simply too good a brand name to pass up and there’ll be vultures in the wings just waiting to pick the corpse apart. By the look of things, Kodak are struggling to find a buyer for their digital patent portfolio, which means either there’s nothing worth having (unlikely) or the vultures are waiting until Kodak stop kicking before swooping in to buy them at bargain basement prices. I would imagine that we would see the various divisions split into separate entities, so Kodak will, I’m sure, live on, but it will be a very different beast to what it has been.

A sad footnote was added to the Reuters story…
“Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 when one of its engineers developed a prototype that was as big as a toaster and captured black and white images. But it failed to capitalize on that innovation…”

How ironic. They pioneered their own doom. Like many tech companies, Kodak failed to remain at the forefront of digital technology and their attempts to catch up were too little, too late. (Strangely, their strategy seems to have been very similar to Fuji, who somehow managed to pull it off.)

Speaking of Fuji, they marked the day by announcing a slew of compact and bridge cameras. To say they did things the same way as Kodak is a little unfair. Fuji was proactive about keeping it’s film business alive while most people were engaged in the film vs digital battle. it also pulled a rabbit out of the hat with the X100.

It doesn’t have to be bad news either. Most photographers are starting to lament the loss of Kodak film stock, but Ilford have shown you can take a loss making business and turn it into a profitable business. The right vulture could surely do the same with a brand like Kodak, couldn’t they?

No One Uses Film Anymore…

…or so say’s Nikon.

Maybe it’s the time of year getting to me, but I came across a couple of black and white competitions and decided to enter. I’m not usually one for competitions as experience has taught me that I never win them, but I this time I thought, ‘what the heck’. It’ll be an experience.
One of them happened to be Nikon’s Inframe webzine’s photo of the month competition and there was no limit to the number of pictures I could enter, as long as they were taken with a Nikon camera. So it was time to dust off my old negatives (or scans of old negatives) and submit some of my older stuff. What a surprise to learn that only images taken with a Nikon Digital SLR or Coolpix were eligible. I guess Nikon don’t think anyone uses their film cameras anymore. So that’s it then, everyone has gone digital. It’s official. Nikon say’s so!
Seems a shame for Nikon to exclude film photographers, especially since there is not shortage of buyers for Nikon SLR’s on ebay. Indeed, it would appear that despite what Nikon thinks, there are still plenty of togs shooting film.
I’ve contacted Nikon and it should be interesting to see what they say, if they respond! Until then, I’ve got a post Christmas project involving a couple of rolls of Tmax 3200 and an F301 that has been stood on my desk for far too long.

Come on Nikon. remember some of us still use film.