Blads are cool for sure, but $50K for a camera? 
RE
I could not justify it, at the level at which I work, but there are many who could.
I'm having trouble justifying a Nikon 850.
There doesn't appear to even BE a Nikon 850 yet. All the camera shops are selling are 810s. B&H Photo is selling that body for $2200. Now that is a reasonable price for a good camera. My original Nikon F2S Photomic went for around $750 in 1974 dollars. According to the
Inflation Calculator, that's equivalent to $3919 2017 dollars.
That was a truly beautiful camera.
As beautiful and powerful as the technology is in the latest Blads, I seriously doubt the Human Eyeball could detect a difference in shots made by the same Photographer
(Say Ansel Adams or Annie Liebovitz) between a Nikon D810 and a Hasselblad H5D at any enlargment up to Billboard size. You would have to do some sales job on an employer to justify paying for a Blad, particularly since in 2 or 3 years they'll have an even
BETTER one out! When was the last time you got a camera upgrade from the employer?
That aspect was one of the advantages to the old Film technology. The camera technology didn't change all that much, just lenses and films got better over the years. The same camera body would last 10 or even 20 years. My first real SLR camera after Kodak Instamatics was a hand-me-down Ricoh circa 1960 or so from Dad the Pigmen and lasted me until I got the Nikon in 1974. It was still working fine when I retired it. I only ever had one lens for it though, a 50mm. I always coveted having a Telephoto and a Wide Angle for it, but never got them. I finally got a 70-210 Vivitar Zoom Telephoto for the Nikon which was my Sports Photography lens while I was Photo Editor of the Columbia Spectator. I was usually in the Darkroom in the wee hours 2 or 3 nights a week developing rolls of film, making contact sheets picking photos etc for the once a week publication of the Spectator. Newzpaper photography was all B&W in those years. Film speeds ran up to 1600ASA, but mostly you tried to use 400 or less because the 1600 was pretty grainy.
I also had in those years a Polaroid SX-70, which was the penultimate of Polaroid Instant picture technology. It had a very clever Fold Up design and was also Single Lens Reflex, although no interchangeable lenses. For cameras of the era, this made the Polaroid very EZ to carry around for quick Snapshots at family events and so forth. Giving away snapshots was always welcomed and made you new friends (girls! lol). These were the
"Selfies" of the era.
The new Polaroid film technology got rid of all the messy chemical packages that came with the film itself and the Gel you had to wipe on to coat the paper once the developing finished. It was color too, unlike the early Polaroid stuff which was all B&W. The deficiencies of this system were of course many. Having copies made meant the photo had to be re-photographed which lost some quality. Then any Enlargement would lose still more quality. So you were pretty much stuck with just the Snapshot size picture people of the era dropped in Photo Albums full of their Personal Memories. My Mother had about a dozen of these albums including Pics going as far back as my Great Grand Parents over in Europe in the early part of the 20th Century, my sister inherited them when mom died and continued to curate them, I think she still does.
The Polaroid was really just a Gimmick though, and I only used it for a few years. The Nikon was my Workhorse, from 1974 until the Digital Revolution came to cameras, sometime in the 1990s I think. It was just before I went out Trucking I got my first digital camera, a Sony Cybershot not a lot different than an Instamatic except electronic, it did some Zoom
(electronic not optical) from Wide Angle to Telephoto and it made VIDS!
In .avi format at the time as I recall. I can't even find a pic of the original model I had on the net. I upgraded this camera 4 times since around 1995, 2 more Sony Cybershots with increasingly better CCDs for more Pixels and with Optical Zooms as well, culminating finally in my Samsung El Cheapo WB-250 which I have owned since 2014 but now is on its last legs and getting increasingly erratic and undependable
(to be fair, I dropped it a few times over the years. )At around the same time I bought the El Cheapo Samsung though, we decided to have the first Diner Convocation down in TX at Eddie's Toothstead, in conjuction with a Monolithic domes building workshop we all attended for a week. I decided I needed really
GOOD cameras to record this Historic Event.
So I went Camera Nuts and bought not one but
TWO cameras, the top of the line Samsung NX-300 Mirrorless system with two zoom lenses, one from moderate Wide Angle to Normal perspective, the other from Normal to moderate Zoom.
In
ADDITION to this camera though, I
ALSO bought a JVC "Prosumer" Sports Video Cam to do Vids with.
Both these cameras are still in tip top shape, and they will be the cameras coming with me down to Idaho to view & record the
TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN☼ on Aug 21st. I have on order the Filters I need, and I hope to get decent shots and a decent recording, even though I have never tried anything like this before and will only have one shot at it. The Total Eclipse itself only lasts around 2 minutes in even the best spots
(I have a campsite in one of them in Idaho, my campsite is only a few hundred feet off the DEAD CENTER line of the track), and at the moment I am not sure whether I will have anyone with me to assist or I will have to try and do it all myself. I am pretty sure I can at least get a few good stills and short video even by myself. My greatest fear at the moment is it will turn out to be an Overcast day in Idaho! Acccckkkk!
Despite the fact I own these two really good cameras, over the last 3 years I have hardly used them. That is
WHY they are in such pristine condition. They spend most of the time sequestered in their very comfortable perfectly sized camera bags I bought to protect them from injury. Most all of the pics and vids I have taken for the Diner over the last 3 years were done with the El Cheapo Samsung WB250. I can carry that in the pocket of my Cargo Pants all the time, there's not extra lenses to be lugging about and to take time to interchange and it's not so obtrusive in your face that you are photographing things, which sometimes people object to. You whip it out of your pocket, shoot a quick pic and it's back in your pocet before anyone notices you took a pic with them in it.
So overall these days for my Photography needs, it's this type of pocketable camera I need, not the semi-pro systems I bought for shooting Big Events. As mentioned though, the El Cheapo is not working too well and is not dependable any more so needs to be replaced, once again in the world of Planned Obsolescence. I could replace it with Samsung's latest in this type of camera, the WB-350, and that would be the more economical choice and quite good enough for Diner purposes.
EXCEPT that in the interim Sony has come out with the Cybershot Mark V, which is just the cat's pajamas of pocketable cameras and gets the highest reviews and ratings from every Geek and Camera Buff website out there. It's about triple the cost of the Samsung, but it's the
BEST. My Cheapskate side is up against my Quality side here in the Battle for all the Camera Marbles.
I won't be buying any other camera shit though before the
TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN☼, what I got is what is coming with me for this trip. I'll still bring El Ceapo along, it's still working for stills most of the time and is way better than my smart phone for quicky pics. The
TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN☼ will require the full setups with Tripods and the like, and even the Sony Mark V really isn't great for this task, although probably better than most low end DSLR cameras.
All that being said, if somebody bought me a Blad to shoot this with, I sure wouldn't turn that down. lol. More realistically though, I wonder if there is any way to rent a Blad just for a couple of days to make a shoot, and what that would cost?
Got any info on that Surly? Sorta the Camera Rental version of renting the Suburban. LOL. Same price range too.
RE
WELCOME TO KOLLAPSNIK.COM
Topic: The Path of Totality: The Last Great Adventure (Read 21152 times)
April 05, 2016, 03:30:38 PM
