I got my first experience with Real Photography (LOL!) with a Praktica - yes, an East German camera - that my aunt brought here from England. It used universal screw-mount lenses, and I got some nice results from both the stock Pentacon 50mm lens and a 135mm Vivitar before the camera’s East German workmanship inevitably caught up with it. I then spent some years with a Minolta SRT-202 and XG-1 before going digital for good.
In some ways, I’d like to see a true match-needle DSLR, but that ain’t happening.
Make no mistake-- this video is a very slick commercial for LightRoom CC, with the aim of targeting entry level photographers who would spend their whole budget on a camera (instead of cheaping out on a camera, and spending the rest on software).
Beautiful object. Pure function, no stylists were involved.
My first camera that I could adjust things on was a second-hand Kodak Sterling II folder that someone had traded in. I got some surprisingly sharp results from it on 620 roll film, showing that a 6x9 cm negative size really does matter.
This guy shows what it could do (pics not mine):
That was my first SLR too, or something very like it (it had the Pentax screw mount). It survived a backpacking trip on Baffin Island that saw a couple of more expensive SLRs bite the dust. I used it for a couple of years, then replaced it with an Olympus OM-1.
This reminds me of when I was editing photos from my son’s first year. Pics were almost all Nikon D800 with various nice glass (200mm macro, 80-200 2.8 VR2, 17-35 2.8, 50 1.4 maybe a couple others) or they were taken with my iPhone SE. I got good photos from the iPhone but great photos from the D800. The iPhone photos were a lot of work to bring up to where the D800 started at. Of course unlike this video these were far from ideal shooting conditions. Bad light, subject won’t hold still, no chance of using off camera light or any sort of support.
I do have some large blowups taken with my Sony RX100 III that look great and didn’t take much work in post - I need to get that camera fixed, it’s a real nice compromise between power and portability.
Since my son’s first year I’ve sold the D800 and bought a D850. I took a picture in the dark of my boy sleeping. Manual focus, crazy high iso, slow shutter speed, super fast glass, hand-held. It was a little soft from noise reduction in post but I still ended up with a usable picture taken in the dark. It’s amazing what you can do with a really good camera if you know how to use it.
supertelephoto zoom lenses tend to fall apart at the long end, and to a birder, that’s really frustrating.
I have a 300mm f4 Nikkor . Optically, It’s a great lens, but it’s not stabilized, and the screw drive AF is really slow. However-- it’s sharp enough to resolve the vanes of bird feathers, and it imparts a nice creamy quality to backgrounds. It will have to do.
I tried using a 1.4 teleconverter, but sadly, image quality drops off a cliff.
It’s way better than the Sigma 70-300mm zoom it replaced-- through that just might have been a shitty lens.
I hate to say I could tell by the pixels, but… I didn’t have any trouble identifying most of the photos correctly, mostly because the cheap lens was especially poor. The easiest thing to spot was chromatic aberration, the green/magenta halo on highlight edges. Another tell was the amount of highlight detail, like the shine on the ring… was it blown out, or was there still some detail in there?
I still use Helios lens with my D5200 DSLR and it’s excellent, especially for macrophotography. My other favourite is Gorlitz Meyer Optik 50 mm f/1.8 lens. It has a bit better low-light performance than Helios, and also has very interesting bokeh, both with aperture fully open:
I also have Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f/3.5 lens that I use for scientific measurements (Digital Image Correlation). It’s sharp and has very low distortion.
I was introduced to zenit SLR’s by my brother and dad
and did not know the advantages of through the lens tech
but it changed my outlook on photography
I read a story by an author who described how as a kid he had only seen photos of dead relatives and was convinced they were somehow killed and stored in the picture when no one wanted them around any more. He was totally terrified when his parents wanted him to go to the photographer.
And having watched (most of) the video, he used different lenses on each camera - in fact did not eve mention lens differences. I guess he was trying to say “can you do good/pro photography with cheap GEAR”, not with a cheap CAMERA.
I’d be interested to see same lens on two very different cameras and see the results.
(and R is mirrorless, not DSLR, so I guess an adapter would be needed to use the same lens.)
More like mooing at tsetse flies. Our guide pointed out that he was an old buffalo as evidenced by his swollen, wrinkled eyes and muzzle, and his deeply grooved horns.
How would that work? I can see the possible advantages of pretending to be rich, or a pilot or something like that, but photographers are mostly skint, and often annoying, why would anyone want to pretend to be one?
I inherited one of those when I was a kid, it was actually a perfect tool to learn how to take pictures. As I can recall, a person would focus it by aligning the refracted clear blue side in the viewfinder with the clear side. There wasn’t any light meter built in, so you had to either use a handheld one or simply evaluate the light conditions yourself and put in the correct settings. In fact I still have the handheld flash and a box of old flash bulbs that have never been used.
That was one of the ‘finalists’ I was considering before being swayed by the 83x zoom on the P900. Which, to be honest, was overkill – anything beyond a ‘half-zoomed’ photo had such tight depth of field and was so hard to keep steady from a safari jeep that taking photos of moving animals was impossible. But it was still a very capable camera and its built in wifi was extremely handy.
What blew my mind was that in my group of travelers, only four people had actual cameras. All of the rest were just snapping shots (and ‘zooming’) with iPhones and complaining about how blurry their ‘zooms’ were. Even a cheap, $75 point-and-shoot zoom camera with like three buttons would be better than that on a two-week African safari.
I love the Helios 44 lens they usually came with. I use that lens often on an old hacked GH2 with an M42 mount convertor. Incredible glass, and stopless aperture which as I shoot video mainly is perfect for me.
The Digital Rev series, I think called the cheap camera challenge, was revealing in this respect. The ways in which skilled photographers can extract good pictures from terrible cameras was fascinating and somewhat depressing, as it was harder to blame the camera.
