ashleypomeroy

It's an old thread, but it pops up in Google searches and I thought I'd chip in. I have the same problem as the OP - a 14N with a handful of batteries and a charger, plus the fake-battery power coupler unit, but not the cable that connects the charger to the coupler. I don't like to use the batteries too often because there are no replacements. However I've found that you don't need that cable, or indeed the charging unit. I've been using a generic power adapter plugged directly into the fake-battery coupler. I'm not going to directly link to Amazon but if you google "Powseed 36W AC Multi Voltage" you'll get the chap, although I imagine any charger than can output roughly 7-8v at 3 amps+ would work. This particular unit comes with a bunch of different plugs and the biggest one fit my 14N. I set it to 7.5v, at which voltage it can deliver 4 amps. The minor voltage difference hasn't phased the camera so far. I've just shot 40 images over the course of an hour and a half and the camera is still working fine. Off the top of my head it's supposed to have 7.3v / 3 amps, but not many chargers put out exactly that figure. So as long as you have the fake-battery power coupler you can at least use the 14N tethered for the foreseeable future.

My word. What a coincidence. On the day I decide to look at film scanners -> google -> photo.net thread about film scanners -> the same names -> this thread.<br> <br> I've dipped in and out of Photo.net over the years. There's a core of useful posts. Genuinely good technical information. But on the whole I find the site melancholic; it was founded in the early days of the consumer internet with very high hopes, but over time the eyes of the world have drifted elsewhere. It didn't keep up with dedicated product review websites, the technical nitty-gritty about late-90s film cameras isn't going to have a long tail, and even the underlying forum software feels anachronistic. The people are predominantly of a certain age range. And time is forever moving on, moving us all towards our date with the inevitable.<br> <br> A few names keep popping up in the forums. The same half a dozen people posting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of messages over a period of a decade or more. Every forum on the internet has people like this; I was one of them a long time ago. I had a sudden horrible realisation that I was not as funny or perceptive as I thought I was. You either recognise your limitations and give up, or you work to improve them, or you never recognise your limitations and the world moves on without you.<br> <br> This thread's OP stood out. Because the name starts with JDM and it has a little "10" next to it and some rolls of film. One of the elite, the hardcore elite. I remember clicking on the OP's profile a few times, and it depressed me. It was the profile of a man who held himself in very high regard. Which would have been fine if there was substance behind it. But the photographic portfolio - presumably built up over decades, the cream of his crop - didn't stand out in any way. It had a negative effect; it made me want to disregard whatever the OP said, because on a fundamental level he was not operating in the same field. "Photography is a visual art form that magnetically attracts people who do not have a visual sense and are uninterested in art."<br> <br> Snapshots of tourist landmarks taken in full sun; the photographer had walked up to the subject, put it in the middle of the frame, pressed the button, job done! Next. And everything looked purple, the colours were strange in a way that didn't suggest it was a deliberate creative choice. There was no attempt at composition, no visual style. The photographs were uninteresting treatments of dull subjects. They lit no spark inside my brain, and I had no desire to look at them twice. I can barely remember any of them. You have to think about the longer term. What are you going to leave behind? On Photo.net and all the other forums - Manual Focus Lenses, Rangefinders.net - the legacy is page after page of "lens tests" and resolution charts but nothing of any lasting value. They don't work as lens tests because they're too informal and they don't work otherwise. They kept you amused; you could have built something of lasting worth.<br> <br> I'm younger than the typical long-term Photo.net user. I was aware, back then, that time is forever moving on, moving us all towards etc. Pushing us towards the edge of the cliff, with your generation going over the edge first, my generation following. In practice you will just fade away, stop posting, go and slowly vanish. The internet is a transient thing that has a churn, leaves no legacy. Do you ever think about Galen Rowell, with his technically brilliant but dull landscapes that wowed people in the 1990s? He's not going to last. People will not think about him in the 2030s. He was a technical photographer, and technology moves on. The next generation will see it happen to my generation, and so on forever. It happens in all fields to everybody, novelists and filmmakers and pub bores and nowadays forum posters.<br> <br> I'm going to quote at length from myself, which is bad form, but I'm a terrific writer and there's no point writing the same thing twice. Look at these snappy short paragraphs with aggressive clipped sentences and not the slightest hint of sentimentality, just cold hard truth.<br> <br> "Some photographers have a knack for producing arresting images with black and white film. Most don't, but why do they persist? The world of awful internet photography is full of people who shoot with black and white film because Henri Cartier-Bresson shot black and white, and they want to be like him, so they copy his gear.<br> <br> But Henri Cartier-Bresson shot black and white for solid practical reasons. Film was, for him, the paper on which his art was drawn. If you want to become Cartier-Bresson you have to copy the things that inspired him, otherwise you're only imitating a surface. You are Gary Numan to Cartier-Bresson's David Bowie. And you have to accept that the things he was inspired by might not be relevant any more. Cartier-Bresson is as much Paris and the lives and times he passed amongst as he is black and white film, and Paris isn't coming back.<br> <br> Much as I am suspicious of the Lomo people, there is something to be said for photography as an extension of a life lived. Put the best camera in the hands of a boring person and you get nothing; give a thinker or feeler or life-liver a cheap point-and-shoot and he or she will bring back something, from a world of dreams and life.<br> <br> For Cartier-Bresson photography was not the process of photographing things with black and white film, it was the act of capturing the emotional truth of a scene, or the act of generating a new sensation with an image, or perhaps he was simply paying the rent with some grab-shots of cute Parisians. Arty girly touchy-feely stuff, practical business stuff. Internet photographers never talk about that. They're not photographers at all, they're gear enthusiasts. They aren't fighters in the arena. Their faces are untouched by dust and sweat and blood.<br> <br> Neither is mine. There's a point when every DJ realises he is just a DJ, and that no matter who hard he can rock a party he's still playing records made by other people. Photographers are DJs whose records are the stuff of human life. Eddie Adams watched as another man's brains were blown out, he did not pull the trigger. He watched as real life happened in front of him."<br> <br> And inevitably this will appear with wonky formatting because Photo.net doesn't have a proper WYSIWYG editor. Let it be said that JDM von Weinberg and his mates inspired me, but not in a way he expected.