Hi Mike,
you wrote:
>> Hello again everyone. My family and I are spending the last week of June
>> and the first week of July on a (guided) tour of Italy and Greece. I'm
in
>> dire need of photographic advice.
[snip]
>> My latest thought is to take three bodies. I'm thinking of keeping a
>> different speed film in each (100, 400, 800). I will definitely shoot
>> prints, not slides. (I shot slides on my honeymoon 25+ years ago and my
>> wife hasn't let me forget it since.) I'm also thinking of picking up a
>> table top tripod for shots from hotel windows or whenever a convenient
>> height ledge is available. From my review of Gary Reese's lens tests, f8
or
>> f11 would be the optimal f-stop to use for most of my lenses. I want to
>> keep the shutter speed up so as to eliminate camera shake. I'm afraid
that
>> throws me to 400 or 800 speed films.
[snip]
My first reaction is that something's wrong if you think you really need 800
(or
even 400) speed film in Italy and Greece in summer. There should be more
then enough
light to allow easy use of 100 film, even with a polariser. Keep the fast
stuff handy
for interiors or slow zooms, but not as a staple diet.
As a counterexample, I was in Venice last November and used 50- and
100-speed slide
film (Velvia and EBX). Weather was a mixture of sunny and overcast, with a
polariser
used (rather too much) when the sky was clear. The results have been
excellent. I was
carrying one OM4 with 24/2.8, 50/1.8 and 85/2. Surprisingly, the 24 got the
least use.
I'm not about to try to talk you out of taking prints, as non-photogs
(especially - dare I
say it - women) always seem to loath slides. (I don't understand this
myself, it seems
to me that a well-projected slide is a finer window onto the past than any
6x4 print).
My point is rather that striving for optimum apertures and fast shutter
speeds in
order to guarantee sharpness is slightly futile if the results are limited
by the
grain and resolution of the film, whatever the type.
If you are *never* going to make prints bigger than 6x4 then 400-speed (and
maybe
even 800) should be fine, but neither do you need f11 and a high
shutter-speed. Such
careful technique only becomes important at greater degrees of enlargement,
but good
pictures deserve to be enlarged.
I would suggest taking one body to load with 100 and to use with the shorter
prime
lenses (24, 35 & 50/1.4) and one with 400 for a longer zoom (maybe the
75-150). Then
if you move indoors you can just swap the fast primes onto the 400-speed
body.
Try to avoid constantly changing lenses, pick a prime and work with it
unless there
is a compelling need to change. This approach can also allow you to travel
light.
The prime lenses should all give excellent results anywhere between f5.6 and
f11, and
will still be acceptable wide-open for low-light work.
I've no great experience with current colour-negative films, but everthing
I've read
suggests that 200-speed films are best avoided, being a poor compromise.
These are purely my personal views, feel free to disregard them. I'm sure
you'll get
a wide variety of advice :-) Hope I've given some food-for-thought, though.
Regards,
Brian
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