I haven’t been in an antique store in a couple of years and the last time I was I wasn’t interested in any cameras. Yesterday I wandered into one and found two. The Wirgin Wiesbaden Edina and a Kodak DC 120 Zoom (1997 digital). The Wirgin Wiesbaden is a 1950s vintage 35mm film camera and it was loaded with film. The Kodak has a 10 mb memory card. Both cameras work. the display screen on the digital is not working properly but the camera works. I need to get the film developed out of curiosity. From what I can tell there doesn’t appear to be anything on the memory card but I will check when I get to my compact flash card reader.
Yesterday I wrote about challenging myself with older gear well now I have two more pieces of older gear to try out.
Photography workshops, do you really need one or do you just need a guide? It has started to appear as if the workshops being offered are really just guided photography trips. To me, a workshop is an event that provides training. Merriam-Webster defines a workshop as; “a usually brief intensive educational program for a relatively small group of people that focuses especially on techniques and skills in a particular field.”
Years ago, I went on a photography trip that was billed as a workshop. While the guys who were the workshop hosts were nice guys and had scouted the locations well I didn’t believe either one was a much better photographer than I. The problem I often found was there were about 12 of us who paid for the workshop and in many of the shots I wanted to take there often appeared to be a photographer standing somewhere in the frame. The other problem I found was there were so many of us that when we all, or at least several of us, found a composition we liked we lined up like we were at the firing line of a shooting range. When we traveled between locations it was a convoy of vehicles. I’m almost certain that most of us all came away with a number of nearly identical images.
A few months ago, a friend and I went on another photography trip. It was just two of us. We had, as best as we could, scouted out locations virtually. We could also decide on the fly to try a location. We still got a decent number of photographs and this time we weren’t in each other’s way. At one time I saw there was a service that you could sign up to be or hire a local photographer to be a guide. You could offer your services as a guide to your area and if you were traveling to another area you could search for a guide. Maybe we need more guides and fewer group trips billed as a workshop.
Photographer Clay 