Read on for a long winded story that illustrates once again how good our
old OM's are to this day -
I'm helping out at the local jr. college with a basic photography
course. I taught computer applications and servicing there a few years
ago so I have an in, and offered to help out one of the photography
instructors in exchange for some basic training in the use of the
darkroom. In all the years I've been taking pictures, I had never
learned any darkroom technique. A friend giving me an old Omega B-22XL,
a timer, safelights, etc. finally motivated me to learn and to start
shooting B&W again.
The instructor I'm helping is mid 30's and has worked as a professional
photographer for about 10 years at a few different jobs. He's worked
with all kinds of gear, view and field cameras, medium format equipment
plus the D100 and D2X. And he personally owns a lot of older Nikon
Manual focus stuff, plus a Rollei I've seen and who knows what else. But
he's never even handled any Olympus gear and the first night of class I
got a sort of dismissive comment from him when I told him I was going
to be using an old OM-4 to photograph things for the class.
I took an 8 X 10 enlargement in tonight to show him that I'd made at
home this weekend. Shot the previous weekend with my OM-4, a Zuiko 35-70
F/3.5-4.5, and HP-5+ at 200 ISO. Just a simple shot of some railroad
rail, some ties with ballast around them, and a bent spike. But with a
little work it came out pretty nice, and you could just about feel the
splinters in the ties and taste the rust on the rail.
I show it to the instructor. He kept going back to it and said a few
times, "that's just wrong" or "something is just wrong with this." When
I finally asked him what he was saying, his comment was - "It's surreal
it's so sharp. It's like it was enhanced in Photoshop or something..."
and he had this stunned look on his face and was shaking his head.
Ha! Welcome to 1990.
All I could say was "The Olympus glass was good and the cameras were
wonderful. You've missed out if you've never used one." I didn't bother
to tell him that probably wasn't the best piece of OM glass I could have
used for that shot. It was just on the camera at the time. I just may
offer to let him use my OM-2N for while...
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|