Photography

Unexpected Complexity of Using Film for Wedding Photos

Well, not unexpected if you ever did it, or know anybody who did it. But quick searches don’t find any discussion of it online, including in modern blogs by people who say they shoot weddings on film all the time.

I’m sure the exact details varied by photographer; in fact they would have had to, to take full advantage of their equipment. My knowledge comes from the late 60s and early 70s, mostly (I knew people doing weddings professionally then). Anybody serious used medium format, Hasselblad if they could possibly afford it (one friend started with a pair of Mamiya 124Gs, and upgraded to Hasselblads while I knew him; I bought one of his Mamiyas).

There are a few photos you just absolutely had to get. Specific portraits and group shots, the ring exchange, kissing the bride, feeding each other cake, the first dance; things like that. Of course you wanted good shots of all of those, and you wanted lots of other good shots as well, but if you didn’t manage to get those basic shots, it was going down on your permanent karmic record. No five star ratings for you!

There are two big areas where film was more uncertain while shooting the wedding, and the complex scheme I’m going to describe was carefully designed to protect you so far as possible from both of them.

First of all, you didn’t know if your camera was actually working. You could tell if the flash went off, and you could tell if it made the right noises, but that level of observation wouldn’t detect most problems below “camera is locked up”. You couldn’t, of course, just check the images on the LCD on the back!

Second, when you sent your film to the lab, you didn’t know whether they were going to screw it up. All the film sent in at once was very likely to go into the machine all at once, and if the chemistry was borked that afternoon, too bad!

What to do?

Well, what you do is exactly what you do for pretty much every problem of unpredictable failure. You employ redundancy!

Specifically, you make sure that you take each absolutely necessary shot multiple times, using different cameras and on different rolls of film. And you then carefully manage the rolls of film to be sure they don’t all go to the lab in the same batch.

In fact, you need four copies to be really sure, you might have one bad camera and the lab ruins a batch, so you need two copies on different rolls from each camera to be really safe. This is much easier if your cameras have interchangeable film backs (one more reason Hasselblad dominated wedding photography for so long).

I suspect people used their own made-up terminology, but I learned this as “A rolls” and “B rolls”, and the rule was that A rolls went to the lab in a different batch, on a different day, from B rolls, so they couldn’t both be ruined in the same accident. Similarly with an “A camera” and a “B camera” (no doubt some high-end wedding photographers, especially those using a second shooter, had more than two cameras, but 2 Hasselblads with some duplicate lenses and flashes was a stretch for most photographers).

So you had to keep track, in your head or on paper, of which of the required shots you had in AA, AB, BA, and BB forms. And the rest of the time, you needed to use both cameras a lot, not just using one and having a backup.

While at the same time doing your actual job as a photographer superbly; this added complexity saves you from some lab and camera failures, but doesn’t protect you from your own errors.

Most of the time, that’ll give you 4 versions of the key pictures to pick the best from, which is nice. But what’s vital is to protect yourself from having no versions of one of the key pictures.

I do hope the people shooting weddings on film today remember this. I can’t believe that labs are so much more reliable today that lab failure is now off the table, and the film cameras are decades older which isn’t likely to make them more reliable either.

Useless Film Developing Trivia

I would occasionally, back in the day, require extremely fast film. I encountered a recommendation for processing TRI-X exposed at EI 4000, tried it, and found that it produced very useful results. (Contrast was high, shadow-detail was low, but grain was startling small, and if properly exposed it lead to a very satisfying rendition of the scene for late-night convention parties and music sessions. The film had a strong curl, and a high level of base fog.)

I just ran across a pointer to the details of the process, which I hadn’t quite remembered, and a citation to where it originally from. I don’t expect to ever use it again (though the materials are still available!), but I’ve been unhappy not remembering the details, so I’m documenting them here, as well as where a re-discovered them.

Michael G. Slack (in Darkroom Photography, July/August 1979, p. 13) reports pushing Kodak Tri-X Pan to EI 4000 (with extreme contrast increase) by developing for 5 minutes at 75 F in HC-110 replenisher diluted 1:15 (like Dilution A, but starting with replenisher rather than syrup).
Michael Covington, https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/hc110/

A Few Confusing Photo Terms

Photography has been around for quite a while at this point, since perhaps 1835 (images had been recorded photo-chemically before that). Recently, we’ve undergone major upheavals as the commonly-used photographic technology changed from chemical to digital.

The accumulated terminology from this time, and from related fields, ends up being something of a mess.

Edit

When newspapers and magazines started using photos, the people who chose the photos were fairly quickly labeled as “editors”, in parallel with the people who chose the stories to be published.

When photography went digital, the computer term “editor,” for a program used to change text documents (including computer programs) was borrowed for programs that manipulated digital images, like Adobe Photoshop.

So now, “editing” photos can refer either to choosing photos from a set to use for some purpose, or to adjusting the appearance of photos while getting them ready for use.

Print

With daguerrotypes, the original material from the camera was exhibited (after processing), but most other chemical photographic methods produced a negative image, and an additional processing step was needed to produce a positive image for display. This also made it possible to produce multiple display images from the same photograph. Later, methods of enlarging from the negative to produce larger positive prints were invented (and better negative materials, so that the images could tolerate being enlarged).

So, a “print” was a positive copy of the original negative photo, or as a verb, the act of producing such copies.

Photographs were also widely used in publications, where “printing” meant using printing presses to produce many copies of the publication.

Today, many more photographs are looked at electronically than as physical prints, but sometimes, for lack of other terminology, photographers, especially old-school ones like me that still remember using a darkroom, might use “printing” to describe the process of manipulating a digital image file to get it to the form I want to present. (The other obvious terms are “edit”, see above, and “manipulate”, which suggests rather too strongly changing the photo to show things other than as they actually appeared.)

“Digital printing” is sometimes used (in contrast to “darkroom printing”) to emphasize that computer tools are being used.

Ansel Adams is frequently quoted saying something like “The negative is the score; the print is the performance” (Adams initially trained as a pianist). In an interview by David Sheff published in Playboy magazine (1-May-1983), on page 226, Adams actually said “Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance.” Less pithy, but about the same meaning.

Particularly when talking about making prints for exhibition, there is a large range of things that a first-rate printer will consider doing. These fall in the general categories of color adjustments, density and contrast adjustments, and local adjustments (of those types, but applied to only parts of the photo).

We are sadly lacking any commonly-understood term for preparing the best version of an image.

Manipulate

In the darkroom days, “photo manipulation” meant changing a photo to show things other than as they actually were. As with movie special effects, the purpose was to entertain, usually (of course on some occasions people also altered photos as part of frauds; the Soviet Union was famous for editing people out of historical photos as they gradually became unpopular).

Greater changes were possible in the darkroom than many people today understand, especially if you used advanced techniques like dye-transfer printing. Commercial portrait studios routinely did major retouching to the faces in the photos of their clients even in black-and-white, and of course Hollywood publicity photos took that to whole new levels.

However, today, using digital tools like Photoshop, any 10-year-old with a little experience can accomplish those same effects, in less time.

The distinction between “printing” a photo and “manipulating” it was clear to most people (especially to people who never did actually manipulate photos; the line is fuzzier than one might think, and of course simply choosing camera position, direction you’re looking, and exact moment of exposure already hugely abstracts the complexity of reality into the clarity of your photograph). But taking a mole off a person’s face in a portrait, or smoothing down creases and lines, were common, nobody thought of them as unusual in commercial portraiture (most amateurs didn’t take the time to learn how to do such things).

Anyway, many of us aren’t comfortable using the term “manipulation” for ordinary preparation of a photo for display that doesn’t alter the scene shown.

“Retouching” is often used for small adjustments that aren’t thought of as changing the photo significantly, especially cleaning up people’s faces.

Regretting Photographs not Taken

Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer (a site I’ve followed for years) has lately acquired a side gig writing occasional articles about photography for The New Yorker. The latest one, The Secret Art of the Family Photo, has sparked interesting conversation both at TOP and at Ann Althouse’s blog.

The questions of what a good family photo is, what purposes it serves, and how that changes as the photo ages, are interesting (or at least should be) to nearly all photographers and many families, it seems to me.

One way I approach thinking about what personal photos I should take is to look back at my old photos and see what I especially value, and what I miss (I have my own photos going back to 1962, and my mother’s further yet). (Note that this is about “family” photos, snapshots for the photographer or the immediate family; art, or documentary work for a larger audience, is another barrel of fish entirely.)

Places I Lived

Specific regrets in this area include the two places we lived in Zurich in 1966-67 (I have some interiors from one of them, as background to photographing us there), college dorms and dorm rooms, the interior of my Bozo Bus apartment, and my first apartment in St. Paul.

I do have some good pictures of the house my parents were in from 1963 until the 21st century, many of them from when Barbara was preparing to sell it, but some earlier too. I have at least a few before the wood siding was replaced, too.

I even have a couple of old pictures (plus modern ones I went back for) showing the house we rented from the college our first 3 years in town (across from the Junior High, a corner duplex we shared with the Jenkins).

Places I Spent Time

I’d like more from the Carleton computer center, though I have a few. The Highschool computer center I have more of, because I hung out there most of my free periods for 3 years.

I did a fair amount of photography around Northfield and around the Carleton Campus, which is nice to have.

Places I Worked

This is a subset of “Places I Spent Time,” of course.

I’d like photos of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, and the DEC office in Bloomington. I’ve got some of Dec’s Marlborough facility where I worked (MRO1), including some interiors (cameras were banned, but I got authorized to bring mine in to take some photos for a presentation to salesmen).

I’d like photos of the various desks I had, at various jobs, with my stuff.

I can often find modern, or even period, photos of the buildings for these categories. Sometimes they’re annoyingly different from what I remember. I always prefer photos from the time I was there.

Schools

I mostly don’t have pictures of schools. I found a picture of the high-school the other day, while scanning for our 50th class reunion, and din’t much care for it. The building is very flat and not interesting, is part of it, and nothing important happened outside it for me. But the old building at Washington school has been torn down, and I regret not having a picture of it (I was there for 1st and 2nd grade plus one summer, not sure which, for a science summer program).

No pictures at all of Longfellow, where I was bussed across town to do 3rd grade.

I did a bit better at college, partly because I was shooting for the Alumni Publications Office, and partly just because I was shooting a lot while I was there. I have pictures of the brand new Music and Drama center that they just now tearing down, which I really need to get scanned.

I don’t have much for photos from the Kung Fu class I was in (a roll or two of an aborted project towards a book on Southern Praying Mantis Kung Fu that I was going to illustrate; mostly details). No shots of the other students there or the instructors I worked with. Again, I was busy doing other stuff, not really free to take photos. (I do have the people who got me into the class, and others they got into the class, from social photos outside the studio).

Places I Visited

For big trips, I have done fairly well here. Early on I couldn’t afford enough film and processing, so everything is a bit thin, but from 9th grade on that wasn’t a useful excuse any more. (B&W film that I processed myself was about a penny a frame then; the paper for big prints cost enough to notice, but little snapshot prints didn’t use up that much.)

When I knew I was passing through a place because it was interesting, I took pictures to remember, but when it was my ordinary place to be, I often didn’t (and have pictures mostly by luck, interiors as background to something involving people).

People

I’ve generally done fairly well on documenting people that I saw much of. Same for pets, who are not precisely people, but in terms of photographic regret act about the same.

Things

My particular areas of interest, computers and photography, lead to my working with or owning some interesting equipment.

I don’t have pictures of the IBM !401 I was first paid for programming, or the PDP-8/L that Jeff Hoskins and I wrote the ultimate version of the “Target” game for (which contributed to many breakages of the joystick), or the PDP-11/20 that was my first PDP-11.

I do have some shots of the PDP-8/I, the first non-decimal computer I programmed (I was never paid for programming that one). My first exposure to octal, and to using the actual bit patterns; the IBM 1620 and 1401 were of course binary at the hardware level, but memory was organized in decimal digits (or full characters), and you never really needed to look beneath that to understand what you were doing; decoding the console lights digit by digit was easy.

I don’t have pictures of my Miranda Sensorex, or my mother’s Bolsey 35, or the Leica M3 I owned in college, or the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic system that I traded the Miranda for.

I have pictures of many later cameras, from when I sold them on eBay.

For cameras in particular (more than computers), I want photos of my camera; good photos of that exact model are much better than nothing, but are not entirely satisfactory.

I don’t particularly regret not having photos of bottles of particularly good wine (or cognac). It might be useful to have better written notes, but the field has changed so much that what I learned back when wouldn’t be much use now anyway (or, as at the time, it would be stuff I couldn’t afford; I’ve tasted pre-phyloxera port).

Events

I’ve done pretty well with documenting SF conventions I was at. But I have no photos from things like the Dragaera gaming sessions I was at, or Mike Ford’s magical 17th century gaming group. I was doing that thing where I was present in the moment (and, to be fair, also worrying about disrupting or delaying the games), and I definitely regret it.

I don’t miss snapshots from the Yes or Emerson Lake and Palmer concerts I was at early on. I did get photos from the 1991 Cropredy Festival we were at (with backstage passes), and I don’t find myself going back to them very often. Of course finding good photos of those groups performing is easy, but I don’t go around collecting them or even looking at them much, except by chance.

Transportation

I mostly don’t regret not having photos of my cars (or I have one where it’s the background for some people).

I don’t have photos from the 1958 Atlantic crossing (by ship), or the 1966 or 1967 crossings (on the SS France). I may have Mary’s photos in a box I haven’t looked at yet, I should check; hadn’t thought of that before. I do have pictures of the VC-10 we flew to Entebbe on, but no pictures of the other interesting airplanes I’ve been on (Caravelle, Comet, DC-3, Constellation, plus “ordinary” things like the 707 and DC-8). I dig out and even post the VC-10 photo periodically, so the others would probably mean something to me also.

I took photos at the shuttle launch we saw (from public access, so far away). Don’t think I’ve scanned or made any prints of them, but they weren’t much good, we were too far away for photography really. I’m glad I was there, and maybe should check the photos again but I don’t think they matter much.

Switching Camera Systems

Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer recently posted an article about not switching camera systems, which was sparked by Thom Hogan’s article on the topic. Very very briefly, Thom is suggesting that all the systems have gotten so good that most of the old semi-decent reasons for switching no longer apply to most photographers.

This is not obviously stupid.

And it got me thinking about my camera system switches. Several of mine can be described at least as unsuccessful (not always for reasons I should have anticipated though).

So, let’s see.

First Camera

Around 1962 (I have negatives dating from that school year) I was given a Tower Pixie 127 camera, for my birthday or perhaps Christmas. I had little input on this, and didn’t know anything about cameras, and had no previous camera, so this is not in any sense a switch. But that’s the baseline.

First 35mm Camera

I was given my mother’s old Bolsey 35 in 1966, before we went over to Switzerland for a year. It had become surplus when my mother got a Minolta fixed-lens rangefinder camera with a light meter in 1964, before our summer trip to Uganda (my father was going there to work on a project writing mathematics textbooks for the English-speaking countries in Africa).

Again, I had little input (though I could have ignored the camera). It doesn’t tell my much about my system switching behavior.

I soon bought a little light meter for it (a Biwi Piccolo, bought in Karlshafen am Weser), and shot some Kodachrome slides with it as well as B&W negatives.

This camera eventually lead to my starting to do my own darkroom work, a couple of years later, so having a 35mm camera was important.

First SLR

This was all my choice, and did represent acquiring a new system (I didn’t lose the Bolsey; though I didn’t use it much any more). I chose a Miranda Sensorex with the 50mm f/1.4 lens. Largely, I chose this because they got the highest ratings in Consumer Reports review of SLR cameras.

Getting a serious interchangeable-lens camera was certainly the right choice for me at this point. In the next few years I acquired a Tamron 200mm f/3.5 lens and a 28mm (going both longer and wider than the usual choices at the time). I took a lot of photos with this setup, through high school and into college. This was the camera I wielded for the Norhian, my highschool yearbook, and which I was shooting when I built my own darkroom and started doing all my own B&W printing and processing.

It was not a particularly good choice. One thing I learned from this is that Consumer Reports’ reviews are not really good guides for expert users. While I wasn’t an expert user when I bought it, I was heading that direction, and various limitations became apparent (in range of lenses available, particularly).

Leica

Getting a Leica M3 was an excellent choice. Over the next 2 years I added 90mm Summicron f/2 and 35mm Summicron f/2 lenses, and used them a lot. This was one of my main cameras when working for the Carleton Alumni Publications Office (their full-time professional quit during a hiring freeze so tight that the people who were responsible for a lot of the fund-raising couldn’t replace a key employee; so they ended up using a number of student photographers a lot, including me).

The rangefinder focusing worked better than early 1970s microprism screens for focusing in dark situations, and I did a lot of shooting in the dark (late night parties and music sessions, stuff at science fiction conventions) or by flash in rooms that might be pretty dark. The lenses were faster than the wide and telephoto choices I had previously had, too, which helped. And the non-reflex viewfinder meant I could see the exact moment the flash illuminated, so I had a better idea whether I got the shot than with an SLR.

I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have been as well off getting a Nikon SLR body and f/1.4 lenses, though. I might have lost some on focusing still, but I could have extended out to the 135mm f/2 lens to get a longer reach (I owned that lens later, it’s wonderful). The pricing of Leicas was going crazy, and it became less and less of a viable option for a price-conscious user as things went forward, but I’m not sure I should have known that when I bought the M3.

Pentax Spotmatic

Shortly after getting the M3 I swapped the Miranda for a Pentax outfit, with more lenses and longer ones (out to 400mm).

I picked it specifically as an adjunct to the Leica; I’d be using it for longer or wider lenses than I could support on the Leica (well, than there were frame lines for; I could use wider lenses at least with an auxiliary viewfinder, but then focusing and framing would be separate windows).

Pentax had a wide range of lenses, and very high optical quality in general. I never bought a prime lens for it (it came with such a set I never really moved to add to it; it was a decade later that I went out as wide as 24mm for the first time). Stop-down metering wasn’t particularly a problem, by my standards at the time. This may have been a good choice, at least as a simple swap for the Miranda.

I don’t see this as a mistake, more as the correcting of a mistake. But the more I think about it, the more I think that with 2020 hindsight (okay, I’m 2 years late) my best choice would have been to buy a used Nikkormat or Nikon F first and just stick with that, adding lenses and bodies here and there. Where’s the transtemporal mailbox?

Pocket Instamatic

Don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of any of the other gear.

The technology was hyped and interesting (they gave up on holding the film really flat, and instead calculated the lenses to focus properly on the film as the cartridges actually held it). It was my first step back into a “toy” camera, and I used it for a lot of snapshooting. The small size was convenient, but I never worked with those photos in the darkroom.

This was clearly a mistake. The idea of a “toy” camera, something smaller to keep with me more of the time, was good, but there was no need to step down this far. At that point there were very good small rangefinders like the Olympus 35RC or the Canonet QL17 with f/2.8 lenses and pretty good rangefinders, and light meters or even auto-exposure. I didn’t actually carry the Instamatic in a pocket, so these would have worked as well for carry I think, and much better for photography (and I could use the negatives in the darkroom myself).

The insane choice that keeps attracting my retrospective eye was the Minox system. Much smaller negative, and would have caused darkroom problems for me (the enlarger in my home darkroom was a Durst M35, which supported 35mm only, and had no alternative negative carrier options, so no way to handle smaller formats (or larger), and the darkrooms at college didn’t have such negative carriers in place, though they would have been available for purchase). Probably would have been a mistake, but I don’t know.

Canon AF35M

Then I graduated, and lost access to the college darkrooms, and had no darkroom access. There was a 4-year gap between roll “ddb-396” and “ddb-397”. I regret this gap rather a lot. I could have set up a good enough darkroom in my apartment (Bozo Bus Building basement) and my first house, though it would have required buying an enlarger (since I had sold mine when I got to the good darkrooms at college).

And sometime during that period (not at the beginning) my camera gear was stolen, along with some other stuff, out of my closet at home.

After a while I decided I had to get back into at least snap-shot photography, so I bought one of the new breed of auto-focus 35mm compact cameras (successors to the Olympus 35RC and friends). It was a marvelous toy camera, and I still do things with the photos from it. The idea of a toy camera was, once again, proven good!

Nikon FM

Just a few months after that, I bought a Nikon FM and Nikkor 35mm f/2 and 105mm f/2.5 lenses. The FM had a brighter focusing screen and viewfinder than many older SLRs, and you could get especially bright focusing screens for it (which I did).

My thinking included that I might need to also replace the Leica for low-light work, but I certainly needed to replace the SLR for wider, longer, zoom, and such, so I’d try a modern SLR first before committing the money for the Leica (which during those 4 years had definitely gone up a lot). And in fact I never did replace the Leica, I got more bodies and lenses for the Nikon system instead.

I have no idea why I got the 105/2.5 lens. It’s a classic portrait lens, but what I knew I loved was the 90mm, and Nikon had an 85mm that was available in either f/2 or f/1.4 (nearly 2 stops faster than the 105/2.5). I somehow didn’t know about the famous Nikon 85mm? I would definitely have been better served by the 35/1.4 and the 85/1.4; and then adding the 135/2 rather sooner than I actually did.

Despite that lens selection error, this was one of my best system choices. Nikon was “the photographer’s camera” from the 60s through the 90s at least, and staying with the same lens mount that whole time would have been better for me.

Nikon L135AF

For some reason I got this to replace the Canon AF35M. This was a clear mistake; it didn’t expose as well as the Canon. I don’t recall brand prejudice having anything to do with the choice. Apparently if I’d gotten the L35AF, it would have been much better (at least so Ken Rockwell says).

Olympus OM-4T

This was one of my most carefully considered system switches. And it turned out to be entirely unnecessary (though one of the reasons I couldn’t have anticipated in 1987).

I had been waiting for Nikon to introduce spot metering in their SLR line. Olympus came out with their multi-spot metering. I thought that I could get considerably better slides (which have high contrast and a restricted brightness range, remember) without slowing myself down too much using multi-spot metering to evaluate the scene and pick an exposure that places things in useful zones (not full zone system, since I wasn’t proposing custom development to match the lighting!).

Well, the multi-spot metering worked fine, it really was easy to spot the high and low brightness areas and see them displayed on the bar as I shifted them around with exposure changes—but it didn’t in practice result in significantly better exposures.

I got a pair of these bodies, and lenses from 24mm to 200mm (including a second 24mm lens that had shift, to handle cathedrals and castles on a trip to England).

And then in 1994 (7 years was my longest run in any camera system to that date, to be fair) auto-focus became important, and Olympus completely missed that boat (until much later). The Olympus gear served me very well, but no better than what I’d had before would have, so the switch was not a good choice.

Nikon N90

The N90 was a rather good prosumer body, but it was expensive, first body I bought that was nudging at $1000. Used to be lenses were expensive and bodies relatively cheap, but AF ran the bodies up, and then of course digital ran the bodies through the roof since the sensor and all the electronics were there. Those things also vastly shortened the useful life of the bodies, which most of us didn’t realize immediately. (They’re not repairable without electronic parts from the manufacturer, who don’t keep them available very long. After that it’s scavenging from other dead bodies.)

I rented one, and an AF lens, for the weekend to test whether I really needed AF, and sadly discovered that oh my yes, I got a lot more interesting pictures if I could focus that fast and that accurately. (Frustrating when the camera missed, but it didn’t miss more often than I missed myself.)

I hadn’t succeeded in unloading much of my Nikon gear during that 7 years, so it was fairly easy to slip back into the Nikon world.

So then over the years I added bodies and lenses and flashes and things.

I’d say that this switch back to Nikon as a very good move for me.

Then digital came along; but I did well remaining in Nikon (no system switch); my first DSLR was a Fuji S2, which was a great choice, then a Nikon D200 (maybe should have waited for the D300).

Then a D700, which was the most amazing camera I have ever owned. They put everything I considered valuable from their top-of-the-line D3 professional camera into the D700, plus at least 2 things I valued that the D3 didn’t have (built-in flash that was a CLS controller, and sensor cleaner)…and sold them for half the price of the D3. Mind you, it was still by a factor of 2 the most expensive camera body I ever purchased. I ended up selling a fairly special lens to finance it (but the lens had been better in theory than for me in practice, anyway).

It was a photojournalist’s camera, excellent for its time in low light, excellent AF. Not especially high resolution (it used the big sensor for big pixels). Fit me perfectly.

I thought I’d committed to APS-C format, and had revised my lens collection somewhat, when the D700 hit me, so that was expensive, undoing some lens decisions.

I suppose the change to and then back out of APS-C should almost count as system changes, even if the cameras had the same lens mount.

The D700 was the camera that made my first years of Roller Derby photography practical (light doesn’t look that low, but for action that fast I needed high shutter speeds).

Olympus EPL-2

This started out to be my new toy camera. With the 20mm f/1.7 pancake it wasn’t much bigger than the Panasonic LX3, and was much better in low light.

But it grew on me, or some of the lenses did. Also the video did, and getting the OM-D EM-5 opened up HD video to me fairly seriously; I used that camera for the Cats Laughing reunion concert movie “A Long Time Gone”, as well as for a lot of the still and video work used to promote the Kickstarter and provide the packaging and such.

And then I found myself maintaining two digital camera systems to near-professional levels. On consideration this seemed financially unsustainable, and after kicking this around a lot, I decided that it was time for me to get rid of that old flappy mirror thing I’d been lugging around since 1969, and go mirrorless. I sold off the Nikon gear (I really did sell it all off this time) and and bought an OM-D EM-1 mk II and some more Olympus lenses (the 40-150/2.8 is amazing; angle-of-view of an 80-300 f/2.8, much lighter, and much cheaper).

Fairly shortly after that, Nikon came out with their mirrorless system, and Olympus went through some major restructuring that leaves the photo division in a somewhat interesting position. So…I think this switch was great for me, but the world is rather making it less pleasant.

Conclusions

So, hind-sight certainly has huge benefits over what one knows when actually having to make decisions. I don’t really feel any of my choices were stupid or poorly thought out; the ones that I would like to retroactively improve were largely due to legitimate ignorance really, either in the present or of the future.

Still, it’d be great to send a letter back to myself, long enough to convince myself I had real knowledge of the future. Go Nikon from the beginning. 85mm! Get a toy camera early, but not a super-limited one. Get a Braun RL-515 flash even earlier. Take more pictures of where I live and where I work, especially early computers I worked with.

Oh; and buy Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in the IPOs.