OK, here are three unrelated topics for today.

1. My “new” camera: Lynn is really sweet. She saw this while out at an antique show and bought it for me. It’s a Kodak No. 3A Folding Pocket Camera, Model B-2, Serial no. 48805-A, and was made (as far as we can tell) around 1910. If you search the web you can find several sites with information on old cameras, download manuals, and even buy roll film to use in them. The camera appears to be in working order, except that the shutter sticks at slower speeds. It would be interesting to run some film through this one, but I doubt I’ll get around to it – I have so many photo projects on my list already. There are some very interesting features like a minimum F/Stop of F/128! The camera had an optional back (alas it didn’t come with this one) with a ground glass screen for focusing. Without the ground glass, you estimate the distance to the subject and use the distance scale on the rails to focus. It also has a perspective shift, but again this can only be used with the ground glass. To me it is very interesting to think about how much photography has changed in 100 years. Today’s cameras are much more sophisticated tools, but they still capture photons and to be good, the prints made from the captured photons will still have the same characteristics. Additional photos of the camera are posted here.
2. Stock photography: As an experiment, I’ve joined the on-line stock photo agency PhotoShelter. I plan to post some of my photographs to see whether there is any realistic market for them.
3. Software review: I haven’t wanted to join the Aperture vs. Lightroom debate, but here goes anyway. I tried both programs when I first started shooting in RAW, and ended up selecting Lightroom for my use. At the time, my main computer was a Mac with a 1.5GHz G4 CPU. Lightroom would run on it (although slowly and I had to close everything else). Aperture performance was just too painful. I’m sure Aperture performance has improved since then, but Lightroom has improved too. Another item to note when selecting which program to use is the frequency of software updates. Lightroom RAW support is built into the program. I believe that Aperture relies on RAW support built into Mac OS X. Lightroom supported RAW format on my Canon G9 from the very first time I used it. OS X still does not support G9 Raw. I also like the fact that Lightroom is cross platform and Adobe includes both versions in the box. My $.02.

©2008, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.