[rollei_list] Re: Digital Advice
- From: Peter J Nebergall <iusar4s@xxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 20:20:50 -0700
Bravo!
Digital is getting better, but it is about convenience. Naturally
replacing the polaroid, the instamatic, the plastic zoom autofocus 35mm
p&s, and filling a niche for the "gotta get it now" boys, folks who live
on the internet, and those who haven't learned (& never will) that
"virtual reality" ISN'T, digital is their toy. What can they do that I
can"t with my Leica IIIC? Computer animation?
I live near the Univ of Missouri J-school. I'll go to events with 2
Contax IIs and a Super Ikonta, and kick their digital butts. Its about
skill and experience -- and digital is changing so bloody fast, can
anyone master that medium?
Peter Nebergall
On Wed, 28 May 2008 22:43:15 -0400 Marc James Small
<marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Allow me to whine here as I have whined for
> years: a solid digital experience takes a LOT of
> money upfront and a LOT of money every year to keep up with the
> Jones's.
>
> Mark Rabiner sagely commented about the
> differences between results in digital b&w
> obtained from conventional cartridges on
> conventional printers and those obtained with
> special cartridges on high-end printers. Right
> on, my friend, but you have just jacked the price
> up by a factor of several hundred if not a thousand percent.
>
> Others have been disputing the qualities of
> higher-end digital cameras though I have been
> amused to note than none have yet suggested the
> Leica M8 with its apparent catalogue of
> woes. (Trust me, if I won the Mega-Millions
> Lottery last night, I'd buy an M8 and hire Mark
> or Austin to teach me how to use it, and make it
> worth their while, but it seems that it a piece
> of remarkable capability which has a learnig
> curve steeper and nastier than the North Face of
> Everest, placing it on par with Photoshop.)
>
> Again, to do digital properly, it costs Big
> Bucks. Thousands for an appropriate
> printer. Thousands for the specialty dies and
> the specialty rag papers. Thousands for a camera
> body, Thousands for the newbie lenses now
> cropping up. Thousands more for the new computer
> you need, and thousands for the 18 extra
> hard-drives necessary to process
> everything. Then $899 for the latest version of
> Photoshop, and $2,750 for a workshop in Boca
> Raton (plus the travel costs of $3,750) to learn how to use it.
>
> And, next year, you have to buy new and sell off
> and who will pay you for last year's printer or
> thousand-dollar cartridges or last year's Photoshop?
>
> So, by my calculations, it would take around
> $17,500 to pick up a really competitive digital
> kit, with an annual cost of around $5,000 or so
> to keep up with the Jones's. Six or seven years
> back, Bob Shell and I had a discussion on this
> List and my estimates were then around $30,000
> for a start-up cost and $12,000 annually. Bob
> didn't argue with my figures but sternly told me
> to suck up and pay the freight.
>
> I spent forty years accumulating the perfect
> analog kit for me, a mixture of Contax RF and
> Leica RF and Roleiflex TLR gear with some exotica
> such as Retinas and a Werra III RF. I picked up
> a full darkroom kit including two great enlargers
> with great lenses, APO-Rodagons on the Beseler
> 23-CXII. I never could afford a JOBO but I had
> the rest, Kindermann tanks and Hewes reels. And
> then reality went and rained on my parade and
> digital came out. Argh. And I cannot comprehend
> Photoshop 5, now eight years or so old. I do
> miss the days when I could mix EP-2 color
> negative chemistry from scratch, but, now, that
> was in the longago though to me it is only twelve or fourteen years
> back.
>
> In any event, to do digital RIGHT costs a lot of
> money and will continue to cost money. Some
> months back, to be fair, I came across the
> plaints of a professional photographer in the
> 1920's who said the same and the prices he set
> out were, adjusted for inflation, on a par with those I am
> suggesting.
>
> We are really turning into three or more worlds:
>
> -- pro digital photographers
> -- pro chemical photographers
> -- advanced (VERY rich) digital photographers
> -- advanced chemical photographers
> -- digital snapshooters
> -- chemical snapshooters: when you meet such,
> get their name and address, as they might well be the last to be
> recorded.
>
> To do digital correctly costs huge
> monies. Analog was nothing like this in my lifetime.
>
> Pace Richard Knopppow, but I do own a Baby Speed
> Graphic which I had overhauled back in 2002 but
> have never used due to an absence for
> film. Maybe I ought to fuggedaboutit (a term
> invented, I believe, by Studs Terkel but picked
> up and popularized by the late Herb Caen in the
> San Francisco CARBUNCLE; Caen was the father of
> three-dot journalism) and just stick with chemistry.
>
> I lack access to the sort of funds you folks toss
> about as a norm, and I suspect that this is true for others on the
> List.
>
> Marc
>
>
> msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
>
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