Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

[OM] Another young photographer, stunned by the quality of old OM gear..

Subject: [OM] Another young photographer, stunned by the quality of old OM gear...
From: Jim Sharp <jsharp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:36:31 -0500
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
==============================================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz