ObiWon

First off Fred let me say that I probably know more about Autism and the associated conditions that you ever have or will ever know. Let me say that if truly measured the whole population is somewhere on the Autistic spectrum. My immediate reaction to you is to rip your arm off and bash you over the head with the soggy end! Fortunately for you, (and for me), I got some advanced coaching to show me that was part of the way that I should not think and even if it got me frustrated I should moderate my thoughts and actions to a more societal norm. I really should have been locked up in a home, put on chemical cosh drugs to restrict my anti-social urges as up until around the age of 11 I struggled to even talk. A normal conversation was not within my ability - then! Now the treatment I received was in many ways what a lot of the professions would call radical and risky. Part of it was to perform a weekly talk on stage to an audience of around 400, which would terrify most people. But, the diagnosis I received was in fact correct, my brain was running faster than most and therefore my speech could not keep up with the pace my brain ran at. OK I am not autistic per the normal measure, but that was because I was lucky to be taught how to handle it from about age 7. It helped that my Grandfather was the director of a mental health hospital and was not going to let his first grandson get locked up and forgotten. I passionately believe that the last thing you should do is put a whole load of autistic people together in an institution. OK it costs a lot of money to do it put they should where possible be in a normal environment and be coached to exploit their differences! I worked for over 40 years in the computer industry, probably because my thinking is more binary than decimal. I know several people who are more on that spectrum than I, but they are great programmers who work and earn a lot of money in the computer industry as they can see beyond what mere mortals can see. A failing I have is that as my dear Grandmother used to say is that I "don't suffer fools gladly" along with many other failings. Hence my patience with people who don't show social niceties can be measured in nanoseconds! The way I see it is that most people have talents that 99.999% of the population don't have and can't see. Yes there are some, probably way too many, whose talent can't be translated into $$$ and that is sad, but should be supported. So Fred, my appeal to you is to become part of the solution and not part of the problem which is where I believe you are right now. In the UK we used to have a charity called The Spastics Society until people realised that it and the name of it were part of the problem. When we talk about the Autistic Spectrum, that again is a part of the same problem, why should we not talk about the Normal Spectrum as we are all part of the norm we just fall on different parts of it. I have been called a retard many times. Sometimes because of my behaviour I truly deserved it! But labelling people as having retardation is really disgusting, on a level with calling people with other mental abnormalities spastics, which was the medical norm not that many years ago. Please do as you wish with this, but tell the families if they get hurt by what people say then they should consider what would have happened to me if circumstances were different. I will continue to call out people who I consider to be socially lazy as I have been through that struggle to understand why I should not deliberately try to demean others. Setting the lawyers on me over some perceived hurt cause because I took a different picture than they did can only be an act of a total RETARD! Regards Jim

Like I said Fred these pair were Social Retards which was an accurate description that was not intended to be offensive. Myself I consider calling somebody with an unfortunate condition like Autism a Retard to be totally offensive and you should be fighting the fact that somebody considers socially challenged individuals to be that.

Lets face it guys the world is changing. A cell phone camera can take a photo as good or better than any Kodak Brownie or Instamatic of yesteryear. Most photos that are taken today are really for the Web and that means they get compressed, squashed and mangled so they are only a shadow of the image the photographer took. Most Phone Cameras are made by Sony and are a variety of that companies Exmor range and typically cost less than $2.00. Sony only make money on then because they sell them by the million! At the other end of the spectrum the high end cameras are doing quite well. The APSC cameras both DSLR and Mirrorless are getting more capable by the week. Micro 4/3rds is growing quite well and the medium format digital market is growing as the products become more affordable. But the type of user is changing too. The pro-photographer these days is also likely to be very computer literate and therefore will gravitate to on-line first. This is where the retailer needs to change to meet the requirements of these guys. As a side note think about how much a savvy buyer can get for 100 notes? I say 100 notes very deliberately as this is a global market so it could be $100 or €100 or £100. Do your research and see what you can get for 100 notes or the equivalent in your currency, you may well be surprised. OK so it won't be the latest state of the art with all the bells and whistles that nobody really uses but it will be very capable. In my local town we have a very good local camera store who sell a whole bunch of good S/H equipment and a bit of new stuff from Canon, Nikon and Panasonic. About 85% of their product gets sold on the Web and their stock list is updated live from their sales. This is a way that many camera shops may need to go to survive. Jim

Just a general comment rather than a direct post related to this story. I stopped photographing weddings around the early to mid 1990s as the whole procedure was then descending into a sad mess IMHO. I have done a few personal part shoots since then and every time it has convinced me that I was right to get out of, or rather off the Wedding Circus as that is what it has become. Two good friends got re-married a few years back after both their original partners had died. The Groom was a very good friend and not a bad photographer himself and he asked me as a favour, as I was there as a wedding guest, to take along a camera and take a few candid shots as I knew the family and was able to get a few photos I knew he would like. I turned up with my standard kit which in that case was a Bronica ETRS, my standard wedding camera, which immediately upset the 'Official Photographer'. Also the fact that I had got there 90mins before the ceremony and had chatted to the Minister as I had called him earlier in the week and told him what the family had asked me to do. The wedding arrangements had been made by the kids from both sides as a present for their parents, so what contract had been signed I did not know. His attitude was frankly appalling, as was the attitude of another pair of photographers at another wedding a few years back. This pair of social retards had been contracted to shoot the ceremony and reception, but the bride had been a neighbour and although she was then living miles away, was to be based at her parents house just 3 doors away from where I live as she had been brought up there. So her father had asked if I would mind taking some shots of the bride getting prepared, her mother getting into a total tizzy, her friends trying to calm everything down and her father getting dressed up in his 'monkey suit' and having a stiffener or two with another couple of neighbours. So a fun morning was had by all and I shot a whole bunch of shots on a Sony DSLR. Everything went great right up to the Bride and father going off down the road in a vintage open top car. I then gave the father a disk with a whole bunch of jpgs as they were going to print off those that they wanted. I thought that was the end of it until I got a letter from the 'Official Photographers', who I had never even met, solicitor demanding that I provide them with the original memory card with all the shots that I had taken. They got my usual 'go stick it where the sun don't shine reply' and a note that the memory card was A) my property and B) had been reformatted and re-used several times since then and what planet were they living on. I also called my neighbour and asked him just what was going on? The story as I found was a problem I had caused by giving them three A4 prints I printed on my Epson R800, one of the Bride on the threshold of the house, one of Bride and Dad sitting in the back of the open top car and one of Mum looking like she was about to have a major panic attack like any good Mother of the Bride! I did not think they were exceptional pictures just good personal shots and a record of that part of the day. The issue was that the quality of my shots looked to be far better that the official photos of the rest of the day and the Groom's family who contracted the photographers had asked them why their quality was not as good as mine. The upshot was that I gave them a disk full of the original raw files and said for them to go sort it out. I then got into that awful spiral where they said they could not read my raw files as they used superior Nikon cameras???! Which bit of F-off do you not understand, your Nikon uses a Sony made sensor the same as my camera but you are complaining that my quality is better?? In the end they used an external processing house that I have also used in the past for some clients, who processed the raw files both cameras and 'colour matched them'. I know the guys and when I asked them what they did they said the processed the Sony files as per my camera settings and produced jpgs as near the same as my file and processed the Nikon files to match - Simple! The lessons from all this and the previous stories are Simple too A) Don't shoot Weddings! B) if you have to shoot a wedding, even as a freebie favour, then get somebody to sign a document that absolves you from anything and everything that happens as a result. These days I am waiting to hear of some poor photographer getting sued because the couple have divorced over a dispute about the pictures the poor sap took at their wedding! Regards Jim with tongue firmly jammed in cheek!

On the basis that I was shooting people at a live event and got more pictures then better is a coin that flips both ways ;) So yes I got more usable shots the client decides if they are better and as of now they are happy to use a few of them so did I get or miss a shot? Who knows Jim

Hey Ed are you related to my old mentor when I did my apprenticeship? He always used to tell me I did not take enough photographs and explore the task enough. As to lenses my experience is with Minolta/Konica Minolta/Sony since really about '85. I have a lot, some would say too much, of the old expensive Minolta glass that goes back to the 9000 and 7000 35mm film and many modern lenses can't seem to keep up with them. I have been toying with the idea of moving to "Canicon" to stick with the OVF but now I am thinking about staying Sony which means the SLT range, hence the A65 as a cheaper intro to test the theory, it was that or a Nikon D7000. I delved into Olympus as a small portable travel DSLR but have not moved to their mirror-less range, but the Evolt and 4/3rds lenses are great, but then I would need to trade them. (Anybody else got the suspicion that somebody is on a money making scheme here?) But thanks for your input

I am a 'dyed in the wool' user of SLR's DSLR's and waist level viewfinders who thinks that electronic viewfinders are the work of the devil and should have been strangled at birth! But I am feeling a disturbance in the FORCE as I am finding myself magnetically attracted to the EVF on my Sony A65-shock horror! I am of the habit of carrying 2 cameras on assignment typically with a fast 35-70 zoom on one camera with a mid range say up to 200mm zoom on another. At the weekend the main camera needed a 55-200 zoom so I stuck a 35-70 on the A65 and set off. Classic got it all wrong and really the 35-70 was the right lens so I ended up shooting more with the A65, with the EVF. OK I confess that I am guilty of performing a bit of chimping in the quiet moments. ( The event was about Hot Air Balloons but the wind was a bit gusty so the experienced pilots were the only ones flying.) Hence the action was the people on the ground so the 35-70 was the best lens. I had set the camera to show me the histogram on the LCD, but forgot that I get it on the EVF too! Lightbulb Moment I was able to shoot more without taking the camera down to glance at the LCD. For shooting people as I wandered round I reckon I shot 50% more at least. Yes the image in the EVF is still not as clear as the optical viewfinder and some of the other information can get in the way, but 50% more images to choose from is significant. So would you think that I need some treatment? I have found I am drawn to the reviews of the Sony A99 MkII now and my fingers are itching on the credit card. Has anybody else had this experience or am I alone? Jim

<p>From a practical point of view this always has and always will be Horses for Courses. 90% of my photos are for the Web and so what is the point in using more than jpeg? Once it has been cropped and had the life compressed out of it for a 800X600 or 1024X756 image any fine detail has gone up in smoke and the viewer will not have a high quality monitor correctly adjusted to see the benefits of the true colour rendering. The thing that worries me about raw is, that will software exist in 10, 20, 30 years time to decode the data? Oh and while I am on this particular soapbox what about the live of CD/DVDs? The computer industry gives a life of about 7 years for a disc unless you have bought certified archival media. Also the cloud is dependent on the company that runs the service not going out of business or the data centre being hit by a catastrophic disaster. Disaster recovery/prevention at this level costs a small fortune. (From experience in the industry I can tell you that the protection is inverse proportion to the marketing hype.)<br> There are solutions; hard disks and RAID arrays are probably the best bet in the long term. If you can use it to set up your own private cloud off site better still. Using Solid State drives in Raid arrays could be an answer but that technology is still in a great deal of flux.<br> Which brings me around to my particular solution, which is if I really, really want it I shoot it on film and if quality is absolutely desperate then that film has to be Slide! (Oh and medium format (645) to boot. Based on the fact that I have some 50 year old Kodachrome that is still as good as the day I shot them and I can scan or get them scanned at very high resolution if I need them!<br> <br />Final thought: don't lose sleep just take loads of photos and delete the ones that are rubbish!</p> <p>Jim</p>

<p>I find that using a fill in flash makes the portrait 'pop' especially if you can get a touch of 'catch light' in the eyes. My advice is to experiment and find a method that works for you, the essence of being 'professional' is to make reliable pictures that the customer likes. He who pays the money is the final arbiter of success, if they like it and pay good money for it then you are a winner.</p> <p>Jim :-)</p>

<p>This got me to thinking...........<br> Digital cameras like computers have a very short life before they are superseded by the next latest and greatest thing. All camera manufacturers are the same were this is concerned, but the flip side of this is that is is great for me as I can buy the camera that was rated the top notch camera a few years back for not a lot of money. Get a good slightly used example and you have a camera kit and lens that would have cost you ten time the money only a few years back.<br> Taking this a bit further a few friends and myself run a challenge. Buy a camera for £100 (about $145-$150) and use it to take pictures and publish them on Facebook and/or Flickr to be reviewed by your fellow Challengers. My first try was a Olympus E-510 which has now been replaced with an E-600. Olympus having moved to Micro 4/3rds means that what was once expensive kit sells for peanuts but takes terrific images.<br> So are these Classics? Probably not - YET. But I would argue that with the shortened life of the replacement cycles these days they soon could be. Long may it continue as for me and some of my friends this is GREAT!<br> The other upside is that I have been able to get a few converts to Photography as a hobby but showing several people that for the price of a new compact camera they can get a DSLR and a couple of lenses and maybe even a flash/tripod and bag that can blow the socks off a compact.<br> Jim</p>

<p>Nothing to see here please move on...............</p>

<p>I love and agree with the Dirty Harry quote :-)<br> In most cases the real objective of the images is to get a potential buyer to view the property - Period. It would be exceptional for somebody to buy on the basis of the pictures IMHO<br> Therefore the most important thing is for the images to reflect the key reasons why the property should be viewed and 90% of that is down to eliminating clutter. Highly detailed images that show flaws are probably not a great idea at this stage. A good compact should be able to do the job, and to get the angle wider then use the option to shoot in panorama mode and crop the result to give the effect you want. Take loads of images and edit ruthlessly!</p>

<p>About 98% of my pictures are used on websites, by the time they have been compressed, cropped and chopped up, then 3M Pixels are too much so is my 12M Pixel Olympus DSLR enough?<br> Tongue firmly in cheek :-)<br> Roll on Film Ferrania - I think I may get the Bronica ETRS out </p>

<p>Another Vote for PhotoFiltre :-)<br> Jim</p>

<p>Refurbished equipment is a great way to go. Just make sure you get it from a reputable dealer and that it is preferably Manufacturer Refurbished or is a return that has been checked out by a major dealer not an eBay seller refurbishing equipment.<br> I am currently using four refurbished cameras and quite honestly the cost saving has worked out at about 70% so you can't beat it. I also have bought a refurb TV, HD Video recorder and Blu-Ray player in the last 45 days so don't just think cameras.</p>