The Tao of Walking Ridge

There are many great vintage film cameras out there that can be found at very affordable prices.  One with a particularly good lens for its price is a Konica Auto S2.  The Konica Auto S2 is a rangefinder camera with built in meter and shutterspeed priority auto exposure.  Unfortunately, the sensors in these cameras are reaching an age where they stop working.  Mine failed while in storage.  I now have a camera in mint condition, with maybe 200 rolls of film, and no meter.  This camera might bring at most $30 or $40 on eBay.  I thought of selling it, but it was my second camera and my first new one.  I’ve owned it now for over 30 years.

The Konica S2 lens is highly rated and the shutter works just fine without a battery in manual mode.  So the thought occurred to me to see if I could use it with the Sunny F16 rule.  When shooting outdoors, set the shutter speed to the films ISO rating and the aperture at F16 for bright sunlight.  This would make the Konica a poor man’s Leica, (most Leicas never had meters).

That is easy.  But what about some clouds?  Open 1 stop for some, 2 stops for overcast, 3 stops for twilight/heavy overcast, 4 stops for dusk/deep shadows.  Thinking of it this way is much easier for me to remember than the F stops for each.  It also makes it easier to set the camera up for a different shutterspeed.

Let’s say we are using 100 ISO film.  If we set the shutter speed to 1/200 (or 1/250, we are approximating stuff here) then we start one stop more open than F16 to F11.  The faster shutter speed has to be compensated with one stop more aperture.  Let’s say the sun is starting to set, there are a few clouds, our guess is F4 (F11 - F8 - F5.6 - F4, 3 stops more open).  Especially with print film, this is pretty close.  Bracketing, one more open, one more closed (F5.6, F2.8) should ensure one very well exposed shot.

That is the theory.  Now, if we have a light meter or a camera with a meter, we can practice.  Indoor lighting is very hard to judge, but judging outdoor lighting by eye can be done with practice.  See a picture, guess your exposure, check it with a meter.  When you become proficient at this, you will be able to set the camera very quickly within one stop.  Slide film would be less forgiving of any errors, but print film should produce very good results with this method, and allow you to use cameras with outstanding lenses (the main factor in image quality), cameras that are very affordable, and typically much more durable than new point and shoot cameras that are four times the price.

Rangefinders are particularly sought after for street photography, and the 45 mm lens on the Konica is also very nice for this purpose.

While travelling in the Florida Keys last year, I looked hard for a place to fly my kite camera rig.  Open spaces in the Keys are hard to come by.  I finally found one space on the southern tip of Marathon Key and was able to get this photo of the shore and Highway 1.

Most of the pictures from this shoot I converted to black and white.  This allowed me more lattitude to salvage some detail in deep shadows without worrying about funny colors appearing.  But this picture of Kat with Orchid Pool only worked in color.  It used to be that you had to choose BW or color and even the ISO (or ASA) before you shot with film.  But the digital darkroom provides greater flexibility after the image is taken.

Shooting a band is challenging.  Band members are in motion, at this venue the band was lit with colored stage lights.  The light is bright enough for human eyes, but not much for a camera.  With film, very fast film would have to be used, and this would often be black and white so that it could be pushed even more, used in light even lower than the film was made for.

My Nikon D100 with a 50 mm F1.8 lens can take some amazing pictures at 1600 ISO.  The noise of this high gain setting is still far less IMHO than the grain of 1600 (even 800 ISO) film.  The advantages of shooting with available light rather than flash are many.

In the picture below, both Kat and Dan (at the time in the great band Orchid Pool) are correctly exposed.  The further a flash travels, the less light hits the subject.  So near subjects will be brighter than far objects.

Also, available light provides a more natural top lit effect.  This results in a more three dimensional feel to the photo.

And for live performance, it is far less disruptive to take several photos without a flash.  Taking many photos is what allowed me to capture this moment.

The next time you go out looking for a neat picture to take, change lenses.  Put on a fixed focal length lens that you don’t typically use.  It will help you see the world in a new way.  This is not my idea, I’ve read it before, but it works.  I went to Greenfield Village and carried my (then new) Nikon D100 with a wide angle lense.  My favorite lens is a mild telephoto, 70 to 85 mm.  The normal 50mm lens on my D100 is about a 65 or 70 when you factor in the image sensor size.  This picture was a direct result of putting a lens on that I did not use a great deal and seeing what I could shoot with it.

I was really impressed with SimpleViewer and had used it to build a photo gallery on my website.  Then, after scanning over 100 slides, a customer wanted a viewer inclded with the CD that the picture files were to be written to.  Eureka!  (There may be an easier way, but this worked for me) I installed the directory on my website temporarily, ran the build gallery php script which builds the index and thumbs, and then just burned the files to a CD.  Not only did it work flawlessly, but it is broswer based, so it works in both Windows and Linux!  It would probably work on a Mac!  SimpleViewer is a great tool.

I was driving into Bay City one morning in the early 1990s when I saw a beautiful sunrise from a bridge over the Saginaw river.  I quickly parked and walked up the bridge to try out my new medium format camera, a Mamiya C200.  Of course, had I been using digital equipment I would have shot in color and chosen black and white or color later.  But, back in the day, I was loaded with Kodak T-Max film and though I had a commercial lab process the film, I did the printing in a darkroom in my basement.

I took three pictures that morning.  By the third picture, the sun was beginning to rise too far, and the effect was gone.  The first shot was the best.  Naturally, that was the negative severely nicked by the lab.  It was unusable, and I printed the second image.  Well thanks to my Epson 2450 trasparency scanner and some digital editing, I am now able to enjoy my favorite picture of that day.

Bay City - Saginaw River - Kodak T-Max film, Mamiya C220.

By memory, I think it might be the brig Niagra, which was visiting.  It is docked near where the Appledore IV and V call home.  A decade after taking this picture, I served as volunteer crew aboard Appledore V.