My ongoing love affair with real film

 It's no secret, I love real, good-old-fashioned film!
 And this weekend I was reminded exactly why I've had this 40-something years-long love affair.
 I am in the final stages of putting together a film-shooting workshop that'll be called "The Magic of Real Film" and figured I needed to run a roll or two through some of the cameras that'll be used but have sat idle for some time.
 I wanted to be sure all the foam seal were still up to scratch and there were no light-leaks or surprises for workshop participants. So, out came a 70s-era Minolta SRT 100x. This was originally sold as a sort of trimmed down version of the famous SRT 101. It lacks a self-timer and the mirror lock-up facility but enjoys the same legendary build-quality.
 It is a totally mechanical camera with a maximum shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second and uses an obsolete battery to power it's lightmeter. There are work-arounds for the battery issue but I didn't bother, as I planned to use an ancient, small, shoe-mounted Kodak meter or a hand-held lightmeter because that is what workshop delegates will be required to use.
 I loaded the camera with standard, over-the-counter Fuji 400 colour film and sallied forth. Two lenses were used, a Rokkor MD 50mm f1.4 (55mm filter thread) and a Rokkor MD 28mm f2.8.

Forgotten

 For the past few months I've primarily shot digital images, as quick turn-around times were required and, as a result, I'd sort of forgotten just how beautiful real film is. But when the scans popped up on my computer screen I was in love all over again and it was as if my ancient bride was once again young and beautiful.
 The images are gentle and three-dimensional, the out-of-focus areas like cream stirred into melted chocolate. In a word, the pictures are gorgeous! They will easily print at 12" x 18" (30cm x 45cm)!
 Much of the credit must go the the wonderful Rokkor lenses. I've been a Nikon user for around 40 years, I still am but in MY OPINION the Rokkors blow the equivalent Nikons out of the water. They are, in my eyes, the equal (and may in fact be better) than the Leica lenses I owned when I had an M3.
 I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. My two best-selling images were shot with a humble X700 Minolta and 50mm f1.7 lens bought for under R300 (approx $27).

The only post-processing done to these images was slight adjustment of the levels in GIMP.

Moment critique!

I am always amused when new digital photographers and photojournalists talk about the newest, latest, all-singing, all-dancing digital camera able to churn out six to 10 frames per second.
I find it even funnier when they tell me how it's impossible to shoot sport -- or much anything else -- without a camera that can fire off photographs faster than a machine gun.
They seem to forget many of the world's greatest news photographs were shot using thumb-wound cameras with just a standard, manually-focussed, lens. At the same time, many of the great sports photographs were taken with similarly wound-on cameras fitted with a single-focal-length telephoto lens that also had to be focussed by hand.

How did we do it back then?

So how did we do it in the old days before feaures like autofocus, matrix metering and wizz-bang motordrives were even thought of? And how did we do it when we couldn't check the rear LCD screen to be sure we'd got the picture?
It was, and still is really quite simple. We worked like snipers rather than machine gunners. We anticipated the action, prefocussed or zone focussed, understood exposure and only needed to take a single shot at the critical moment.
To illustrate the point, last Saturday, I took a trip to Mandela Square at Sandton City, armed with a simple Minolta X300s and a 50mm and 28mm lens. There is a large statre of Madiba there that naturally attracts the attention of locals and tourists alike.
I took up a position near by, took a meter-reading off the palm of my hand, gave one more stop of exposure, pre-focussed and waited for magical photographic moments to happen.
Over the course of three hours I got a number of really good shots that captured wonderful vignettes of life in the Square and though I was only about 10 feet away from the action, not one of my subjects even realised the were being photographed. At the moment critique I simply brought the camera to my eye, pressed the shutter and lowered it. No shutter-lag, no whirring autofocus, no grinding motordrive to attract attention -- just a single, clean shot and kill.

Look closely at this image!