Tag Archives: Antiques

Collectors News Uses my photo for their July 2009 cover!

Cameras and Photography, VARIOUS,

Unless you’ve investigated the links to Lynn’s blog and web page over on the right, you may not know that my lovely and intelligent wife is quite an expert and author on collectible trivets, stands, and sad irons. I was the "photographer in residence" for her A-Z Guide to Collecting Trivets published in 2004, and have helped her with various collectible photos since.  She has a second book in the works and I only have a few more photos that I owe her (although it seems that more trivets arrive in the mail all the time).

She has also written several articles in various other magazines that I’ve done the photos for, so I’ve had my photos published with her words several times before.

Recently, she was interviewed by Melody Amsel-Areili for the monthly magazine, Collectors News and the article appears as the July 2009 cover story.  You can download a PDF of the article from their site.  Lynn provided 8 of my photos for them to use with the article.  They used three, and I was very pleasantly surprised yesterday when she showed me her copy of the magazine with one more of my photos used as the cover image!

This particular photo is one that I took in February of 2003 with a Minolta DiMAGE 7H i camera.  In looking at it again after more than 6 years, I’m impressed by the quality of the output.  It does have quite a bit more noise than my modern cameras, but it’s easily handled in Lightroom.  I remember the 7Hi  very fondly: 5MP, with very SLR like controls, including a manual zoom ring and even raw output.  I tried using the raw files but the work flow tools were still pretty primitive back then, so I shot in jpg format.  I still have the camera, although I haven’t used it in quite a while.  This particular photo was of one of the walls in our home where Lynn had displayed a number of her trivets and stands.  We made it to include in her first book, but ended up using a different version that showed a larger portion of the wall.   I’m really glad this one eventually found such a nice use!

Here’s the photo used for the cover:
The Cover Photo

Three things

Cameras and Photography, VARIOUS, ,

OK, here are three unrelated topics for today.

Kodak model 3A Pocket Camera
  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.