2010-08-01

(1030) #093, Anikon

The point of my weekly project is that it would motivate me to take more photos. After all, if I'm committed to publicly showing at least one photo per week, it should shame me into taking better images, or at least more of them. I was in one of my periodic slumps, and it has worked to keep me active through a couple more in the 62 weeks since then.

But I never considered that there could be a time when I'm taking a lot of photos, but literally have nothing to show for it.

So instead of more images of doors and walls, here's a photo that I took this week of the reason for my lack of current material.

The flight deck of the Zeiss Ikon is one of the most beautiful control layouts I've ever seen. The focus and aperture controls are on the lens, and everything else is right here. Film counter and advance lever. The shutter button on top of the power/lockout switch. The position of the dial marked "A" means that the camera's in Auto Exposure mode, and rotating it so that the "A" is from -2 to +2 is the exposure compensation control. Rotated further, it's the shutter speed selection. Lifting that same dial changes the film speed / iso sensitivity; its current position one-third of a stop below the red "400" means iso320, since I like to expose colour negatives one-third of a stop over what the film is rated for.

And that's it. Sure, there's also a lens release button, a film door latch, a release button and rewind crank. But compare that to my D700, which I used to take this picture. It has twenty-eight different controls on the outside of it, and that's being conservative - i.e., counting the drive mode dial but not the individual modes, and the four-way controller as only one button. After a year and a half, I'm still not sure exactly what that camera does.

I'm almost done my seventh roll of film with the Ikon, and I'm using my Nikon F100 alongside it for this weekend. It's been an interesting couple of weeks.

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I have broken the links to hundreds and hundreds of photos, which will take a long time to repair. The workaround is to replace "photo.matthewpiers" in the link URL with "matthewpiers.smugmug". Awkward, but only temporary.

This is happening because I have revamped matthewpiers dot com. More of what I write and photograph will be going there, so check it out as well.

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