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94/268/1-1/16 Photographic print, black and white, Overland car jumping a 'fallen bridge' in a promotional stunt, typed caption verso, Sam J. Hood, photographer, Australia, mid 1920s (Front)
Overland car jumping a "fallen bridge" in a promotional stunt, 1920 - 1929

Do you want to really? Can you bear it?

Recently, the author went shooting with the wall-flower, an old Minolta Dynax 7 film camera.  The shooting was great, like kind of having a nostalgic trip with an old mate. There is a big BUT though. 
In this digital photography era, our expectation of a camera's functionality has been tossed up so high that the restrictions of safe shutter speed, ISO speed dictated by the film and no instant switches between colour and B&W image recording, to name a few, have made film cameras so very unfamiliar and inconvenient. What might start as superfluous gimmicks to embellish a digital camera have evolved  more towards the core functions, or actually are now so. The inconvenience of doing the exposure tweaks with all the aforesaid restrictions is, well, inconvenient. The recent experience makes a supporting footnote for this statement. 

Does it follow that then, as many older photographers claim, photographers coming not from the film era have less definite photographic skills? At least one thing is sure, it was much tougher in the film days to end up with the right shot for a decisive moment as captured by the photographer of the shot of today.

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