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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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Comrades, Arise!

(Ricoh GR) In their own unique style, the squatting Mainland Chinese tourists have become an eyesore a common sight in the usually narrow walkways around the more busy areas in Hong Kong since the r eturn of Hong Kong's sovereignty to China (Editor-in-chief's note: Officially banned phrase for political incorrectness) Chinese Communist Party resumed sovereignty over the city. Hordes of the likes are too generous in their estimation of either the width of the sidewalks or the number of people passing by them, so stretching out an array of luggage cases in a disarray fashion for making rearrangement or taking a recess never seems to be too unedifying a bother to them. No location can dampen their determination in doing so, not even if it is right at a shop front, which is a somehow laudable national quality potentially in a positive way. Well, there are always two sides of a coin. Through the artistic eye of a photographer, can't these scenes be reproduc...

Final Verdicts: GF2 in Action

(The rest of the GF2 review posts can be found here ) It is widely believed that the GF2 is a paradoxical downward-upgrade version of the GF1. So, after all the discussions of its bells and whistles, how does it perform in reality? First things first. Which or what kind of cameras should we measure the GF2 against for that matter? We believe that potential buyers of the GF2, maybe except for serial fad chasers and the diehard loyalists, are attracted by its smallness in size with a larger sensor to achieve better image quality, especially at ISO 800 or above. However, given the less satisfactory handling with for example just one dial, the GF2 cannot assume the place of a primary camera. Put together, these assumptions suggest that the GF2 is more suited to be used as a backup camera for social and street shots. Let's grill the GF2 on this basis. In the Hand An obvious merit of the GF2 is size. It feels much less bulky in the hand than the GF1 or the NX100, and just lik...

New Low Prices

The window shopping some hours ago has almost provoked my AgIDS illness. Just in case you’re in Hong Kong or are coming here, and have the money to burn (All in HK$/ body only): GX200 = $3,280 GRD2 = $3,380 LX3 = $3,180 G10 = $3,280 Prices are available form a gear shop on the 1st floor of the Mongkok Computer Centre. Besides these new low prices, I found that Wing Shing Photo (55-57Sai Yeung Choi St., MK Tel: 2396 6886/ 91-95 Fa Yuen St., MK Tel: 2396 6885) is offering a Sony A700 + Carl Zeiss Lens package for HK$9,980 (hopefully, a bargain will make it some hundreds cheaper).

GX GARNERINGS

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