Dustin McAmera

I'm so ashamed: I'm 58 and feeling my age... I found I was doing ever less with my (several dozen) film cameras, and in particular I had a backlog of developing and scanning. For good or ill, my solution was to draw a line under that and get, finally, a modern digital (I have a Fuji 'bridge' camera from about 1998 or '99, that I needed for work then, but I have never even been tempted to buy a DSLR: too big, too expensive). So now I have a little Canon mirrorless, and I have turned into mount-adapter guy, and it's all small enough that I take it out with me on trips that are not primarily about photographing, and I am photographing something several times a week. But... it's not the same activity as it used to be. So I have also let myself buy some large-format film holders, and a couple of lenses: I'm the couple having a child to save the marriage. I keep coming back to the idea of joining a club, but I think what I really need is just one collaborator, maybe two.

I see that 'Moderator' appears where I have 'Yorkshire, mostly on film', and Tony Parsons has 'Norfolk and Good' (which I failed to get for ages, incidentally). These used to be editable in your Account, as a thing called 'Custom Title', which is no longer accessible to edit. If it were, I might change mine, since I don't do much with film now, sadly. Anyhow, I only wonder if the guy in question has found a way to hack that entry and gave himself the subtitle of 'Moderator', whether or not he has any powers.

.. whereas the Graphic View 'coulda been a concertina'. I too would like a Foton. The Camerawiki page shows the advert JDM posted, and one from November the same year, when the price had fallen to $498. I'm not particularly impressed at Canon abandoning the M cameras.

Ian Jeffrey (Photography - a Concise History, Thames & Hudson, 1981 - but I expect there's a newer edition than mine!) is the first art-photography book I bought. He refers to the same sort of visual joke as Rodeo Joe in talking about Eggleston. He refers to the photo of a brown dog drinking from a beige puddle, and says it seems the brightly-coloured dog is draining the landscape of colour. But he goes on in his next paragraph: 'Mainly, though, the Guide has to do with picture-making rather than observation and metaphor. [ ... ]William Eggleston founds his pictures on sets of a few distinct hues clearly stated: green/red, red/blue. Whatever else is there connects with these dominant primaries. [ ...] In most cases a central motif or emblem pairs two primaries which are then mediated across the remainder of the picture.' He notes that Eggleston's pictures are mostly suburban, and suggests that the occurrence of colour is different in the city. So maybe you could write down a sort of recipe for it (or program an AI).

With their content of old-fashioned furniture and decor, and their off-natural colours from old colour processes, what some of these pictures convey to a modern viewer is a view of an old world; even nostalgia to some (people of roughly my age will have seen those furnishings during their childhood). Whereas Eggleston was using processes that were the state of their art, and the subject matter was also current stuff. (or was it? Maybe Eggleston had been away to university and become cosmopolitan, and was now photographing the quaint old south where he was a child; maybe there was an element of nostalgia for him even when he took the photos? Perhaps I should get the book and read the photographer's blurb) Anyhow, a lot of what has been posted in the OP's 'banal' Flickr group looks like simple pastiche; photos of old-fashioned artifacts, rendered in an ever-so-slightly-brown colour palette. Those artifacts stood out to the photographers because they aren't typical of our lives any more.

My understanding (which is probably not the best) is that Eggleston didn't just choose colour; he chose dye-transfer printing, to get the strongest colour he could; and some of his photos only make sense to me as opportunities to revel in the colour for its own sake. Some of them I can also see a composition; and I'll take photos of commonplace things myself if I see them form a neat composition (often don't see it any more when I download the picture). There are some of Eggleston's photos reproduced at SFMOMA: Eggleston, William They aren't all one neat genre. The child's tricycle is 'banal'; a commonplace object, certainly; photographed close-up and at an angle that lends it drama. The green pillar, draped with coloured cables and lamps, is less of an iconic object, and is simply a nice composition, with the strong, blocked colours. I wouldn't call that banal. And you would never call the four little black girls in the field 'banal'. There are a number of possible reactions to that photo, some disturbing (and that series is called Troubled Waters). The colours (just the colours: in every other way, what a different picture) of that photo also reminded me of the Autochrome I used to illustrate the page on that at Camera-wiki (here - in the Flickr stream of George Eastman House); strong but restrained. Looking at it again, I suspect the father made everyone wear those nicely coloured cardigans because he knew it would make a good Autochrome. Maybe he was an Eggleston of his generation - 'I can do colour, so let's find some coloured things to photograph'.

Farty Towwels was also excellent. +1 for the Beeb. I have no recent street material; might manage a lane...

Off topic, I discover that banalité is more interesting than I thought.

God lends you his lenses? What a nice guy!

I certainly wouldn't buy a Trip now, with a selenium meter, and that funny square aperture. Several Olympus rangefinders roughly the same shape which you might get for the same money; but like John, I'd want an SLR. I wouldn't bother with AF; we did many things well in the past, but AF wasn't really one of them.

The HC110 concentrate is quite viscous; if you mean to use a syringe with a needle, penetrating a self-sealing rubber top, I think you'll struggle to get it to flow at an acceptable rate. I draw it up with a pipette. That has its problems too; quite a lot stays in the pipette when I drain it out, so I wash it out a couple of times with the water I'm mixing the concentrate with. I haven't done this with HC110, but if I were to divide a batch of developer, I'd just use a number of rigid glass bottles with good quality screw lids. The one you have open and part-used will have air in, but the rest might keep better. I don't think HC110 degrades that fast anyhow.

I bought a Fujinon W S 180/5.6. It's in a Seiko shutter, and the guy in the store warned me that it isn't any of the standard Copal-shutter sizes. I measured the diameter across the threads (at the centre, where it will sit in the board) with a caliper, and it's 46mm. So for mine, a Copal #1 hole (41.6mm?) would be too small. I have a board, and I will have to make the hole myself. I don't have a drill-press, or drill bits in big sizes like that, but I have drilled lens-boards successfully before by drilling a circle of small holes, then joining the holes with a small file, then filing and sanding (with emery paper wrapped round a piece of dowel) until it's right. I have owned this lens for a shamefully long time without getting on with this job! Good luck with yours!

Oh hey - I wasn't expecting a test! No - I'm at least half-serious. As photographers go, I'm a reasonably good camera operator, but hardly an artist at all. But that's ok; the world is full of people who paint, and are not Monet, or whoever they would like to be, but they are happy if they can keep doing it. I am happier the more effort I put into getting out there and photographing stuff (even if not very well). Perhaps it's how I rake my gravel.

Photographed when it was newish, in October, and I think it's already gone.

Is that much of a secret, that you sometimes do your own focusing? I think most of us young hipsters are doing that.. My secret is that I'm not very good. I've been taking pictures all my adult life, and I'm not much better than when I started. I don't think that's much of a secret either. It's a mercy that I still enjoy doing it; maybe that's the secret.

There is also the Large Format Photography Forum, which has a forum called Darkroom: Film, Processing & Printing, and a separate one called Darkroom: Equipment. Obviously, the focus of the whole site on large format affects what's in those fora, but they may be worth searching for some problems. They go back to about 1998.

A plumb-bob:

They haven't reintroduced it: the mirrorless cameras all have an LED focus-assist lamp, back to the original EOS M in 2012. I guess it must reflect the different way AF is done, since the image is already on the sensor while a mirrorless camera is focusing.

With my phone.

..and curses, and Nazi rivals, surely, not to mention losing your hat?

I bought a Post Office coat like that from a government surplus shop when I was a student. I doubt I looked that good in it though, and I got sick of being asked directions to places.

I didn't suppose they could be mounted - it would be odd to allow it when they won't cover. I only have an APS-C mirrorless (and so far only one full-frame EF lens); but I understood the same adapter will do for EF-S and EF lenses. Is that wrong - would I need another adapter for EF-S lenses?

In principle, I suppose, not having to cover the periphery of the full-frame image might allow Canon to do an even better job in the centre with an APS-C lens; but I would expect they'd settle for the easy win of the lens being smaller, lighter and cheaper. On a full-frame camera body, there's a big difference; the EF-S lens presumably doesn't mount at all. If it does, the picture doesn't go all the way to the edge of the frame. So the APS-C camera user wondering which lens to buy just needs to think 'How likely am I to get a full-frame camera in the next few years?'.

I thought I remembered this feature. Page 207 of the manual for my EOS M50 is titled 'Preventing the AF-Assist Beam from firing'. So this camera at least has the thing.