Oops! Now that you explain it, I remember the cartoon!
At Kata Tjutain Australia in 1999. Group I was with hiked the short trail there and were heading out when it started to rain. A lot. I had been shooting a lot of pictures (35mm, SLR) and was out of handy rolls of film when we got back to the parking area. Got to the photography area, with the sun to the west and heading down, shining through the rain. And there was a gorgeous rainbow from one end of the rocks to the other. By the time I got to the bus and got another roll of film, the rain had stopped, the rainbow was gone.
I do not miss having to deal with rolls of film in the least.
I love digital photography, not least because, heck, you just shoot everything, and keep the good results. Electrons are a lot cheaper than film!
But I was very new to digital when I took a tour of Carlsbad Caverns. I should have worked on the manual settings instead of relying on auto settings. I got a whole lot of very blurry pictures. Wah!
We were paddling a tandem sit-on-top kayak in St Martin, midway between Friar’s Bay and Grande Case, when a huge sea turtle surfaced right next to us. We stared in awe, but no picture was taken. He stared at us for a few seconds and was gone.
A diagonally-angled naked branch on the top of a beachside tree with a crow resting on the very top. Only had my iPhone with me but it still flew away before I could take the picture.
Manual settings is what I love most about my PowerShot, cause I can avoid blurry photos, or alternatively for very low lighting, simply hold the camera still for a second. Carlsbad caverns is one of the better places to take advantage of this for me.
Back when I had a film camera I once put my thumb through the shutter when putting the film in. I thought I had put it back on track correctly, but I hadn’t. I lost two rolls of film because of that.
The one shot that I missed because of it was of the Washington Monument, blue sky, full moon, and a bunch of colorful kites flying right in front of it. I couldn’t believe it when the film didn’t come out. I’ve not gotten a chance to get that photo again. :mad:
Not mine but a friend’s, who is a pro photographer.
During the London terrorist bombings back in 2005, she was near the site of one of the bombings. Police and ambulances were there and everyone was running in one direction away from the entrance to the tube station, including abandoning their cars on instruction from police.
Apart from a traffic warden who was calmly ticketing one of the abandoned cars.
She said it was one of the few times she didn’t have a camera on her. She couldn’t sold that picture time and time over.
Just visualizing these from your descriptions is wonderful! SanVito’s pic, in particular, is so clear in my imagination it ought to be real! It’s definitely funny!
Ludovic: I probably would have made the same mistake even with the settings right (in Carlsbad Caverns) because I didn’t have any way to brace the camera to hold it still for longer exposures. So, next time, manual settings and a light travel tripod!
Comet Hayukatakie (sp?) 1997 give or take. It was only good for a few days, and only great for 2. I took a damn good if not great photo from one of the top five darkest places east of the Missippii.
So I did get the photo.
I have only once accidently thrown away negatives. Guess which ones I did before I got any decent prints? Guess I’ll catch it again when it comes around in 20k years.
And a bonus. Took another lifetime proud sorta series of photos that cannot be recreated. Guess which ONLY time the pro photo shop developing machine ate my film while processing it?
I guess as some sorta karmic compensation OTOH one the best photos I ever took was with a 3 mega pixel point and shot camera that I held over my shoulder pointed backwards.
Back in the day, I spent a couple of years photographing San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders games. Now, because I wasn’t really a proper photographer – I was just a sports reporter lucky enough to be able to indulge himself going to games and having some fun – I missed tons of great shots. But the one that sticks out in my mind is Terrell Owens’ winning catch in the 1998 NFC playoffs against the Green Bay Packers. I probably wouldn’t have gotten a particularly good shot even if I had tried, given the lack of sufficient zoom on my camera. But I didn’t even line up a shot. Instead of acting like a photographer, I acted like a fan and just watched the play unfold.
Just yesterday. Late evening, storm clouds gathering as I drove along a back road. I looked up to see the sun behind a cloud that took up maybe 50% of the horizon, well away from any other clouds. The cloud was dense enough to be nearly black, the sky was dark gray/black. The fringes of the cloud were bright blue and pure white streamed out from behind the cloud evenly in all directions. Ansel Adams would have died to get that shot. No filters needed, it was dramatic and perfect.
Dennis
This thread is so depressing…but also, in a weird way, kind of uplifting. At least we’ve seen some really wonderful things!
(I once saw a cloud that bore a VERY close resemblance to a Star Wars Star Destroyer – actual size! By you know clouds! By the time I pulled over to the side of the road, the doggone thing had morphed, losing the keen edge of the resemblance.)
I think it is funny that most of theses involve film. I didn’t use it very long, but I am not sad to see it go.
The only super advantage film has over digital is that it can takes slighly fewer tenths of a second to put your old-style film-camera on target than a digital camera.
The guy who caught a falling aircraft popped the lens cap, wrapped the focus to infinity, and shot. I’d have to turn the camera on, and, on my smartphone, put in the security password. Then activate the app, then force the zoom (my phone won’t let me do a two-finger zoom; I have to move the little slider) and then shoot…which entails a few tenths of a second lost while it makes up its mind on the settings.
I’ve missed interesting pictures because it takes me so long to prep and deploy my d-camera.
I’m not entirely sure what this means. My dSLR isn’t any slower than my film SLRs for putting cameras “on target.” I only put that in quotes because I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say here. There’s no difference in, say, shooting sports with a dSLR vs a film SLR, other than you can just blast away with the dSLR and not worry about where you are in your roll of 36 exposure film, something you always had to be aware of at all times shooting sports. Timing film changes was an important skill to have. You don’t have to worry about that as often (or really at all if you’re using a large enough card) with digital memory cards.
Dynamic range (the range of tones the medium can record detail in from darkest to brightest) used to be one of the big advantages of negative film vs digital, but digital has caught up, if not exceeded it. The main difference, though, is once you blow your highlights in a digital file, there’s no going back to recover them. They’re clipped. With negative film, there’s a kind of roll-off rather than a sharp transition to “no detail” in the highlights, so you can recover a lot of detail from quite overexposed negative film. Plus, if you realize that you’ve either severely over or underexposed something before you develop the film, you can make up for that (with some sacrificing of quality) by adjusting your development times.
Hah, this is always me! My camera is inevitably set to whatever passing artsy experimental picture crap I’d been up to, not what I’d actually need.
Lining up the awesome shot of a dragonfly sparkling in sunlit dew…and guess who had been tinkering with long-exposure multi-shot compositing of the night sky the last time he’d had out his camera? :smack:
I’ve demonstrated that I can have someone toss a ball into the air, and starting with my DSLR off, and at my side, I can turn it on, raise it to my eye, and take an in-focus photo before the ball starts it’s downward motion.
What part of what I said wasn’t clear? My smart-phone requires me to turn it on, enter the security password, activate the camera app, do some preliminary work with settings, and then push the button…and even then there are a few tenths of a second lost while it auto-focuses and adjusts exposure. The total time lost is in the whole seconds. A point-and-shoot camera takes a little less time – no password to enter. A DSLR still needs to be turned on, which isn’t true of a film camera.
Nice… But you still have one step that a film-SLR doesn’t: “turn it on.” I don’t know what the start-up process is for a d-SLR, but it is not instantaneous. (i.e., even if it were internally instantaneous…you still have to push the darned button to turn it on, and there’s a quarter-second lost.)
I’m not actually arguing in favor of film. Far from it. I only noted that there is one (and perhaps only one) advantage to film: it takes fractionally less time to go from a cold stop to taking pictures.
The perversity of the universe expresses itself preferentially against the arts!
(Your 12-foot tall sculpture of Herakles is going to chip in the most embarrassing possible place, toward the end of the sculpting process, rather than at the beginning. “Almost done…almost done…one last finishing stroke…[clink]…oh, poop, he wasn’t intended to be circumcized…”)
(Your 1,200,000 word novel about the evils of the North Korean regime will be finished only two days before the regime falls.)
You presumably have the camera on when you’re walking around with it. Even so, my SLRs all need to be turned on, too. But, hey, let’s go with something like a Pentax K-1000 or Nikon FM-2 or something of that nature. You still have to focus the thing, as without electronics, you don’t have the luxury of using AF, plus you have to cock the shutter, which takes time, for every frame. So, maybe in the case that you have a pre-focused and pre-cocked manual camera you can take a single photo slightly faster than with a turned-off dSLR, but that’s about the only situation I can imagine it being faster. 999 times out of 1000, if I’m out taking a picture, the dSLR will be as fast or faster, as I’m not walking around with a camera turned off and, even so, even if the thing is off, you can flick your thumb to turn it on before you even get it to your face to frame and take a photo.