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November 30, 2008
Doing time
In the steep cobbled back streets of Holmfirth, behind the church,
photo: Freitag.
lies the old gaol. The locals used to call it the Old Towser, except, being from Yorkshire, they’d say t’Ould Towser.
And here it is again, in a photograph I took 33 years ago:
Both photographs were taken with a Nikon, the old picture with my first 35mm camera:
The latest picture with the D200:
I got the ladders out and among the dusty boxes on the dusty shelves I dug out my first cameras. I wondered if my old Nikon lenses would fit the new Nikon – and they do. Whey Hey!
The old lenses are manual so there’s no metering or auto-focusing to be had. But then all that electronic jiggery-pokery does sometimes rather muddy the act of taking the picture.
Time was you just had three things to deal with: the aperture, the shutter speed and the focus. And these were dealt with physically with turny-rings on the lens or camera body. It was a simple, direct, dynamic process.
Now, for heaven’s sake, there must be millions of combinations amongst all the multi-function buttons, plus two display screens to look at as well as the viewfinder.
Posted by john at November 30, 2008 07:52 PM