What beautiful colours Elephant. I too love the GoPro's - I think that they are incredible. I'm a huge keen surfer and all of the surfers that I follow film on these. Wonderful. Have lots of fun :)

Paul W wrote:

What beautiful colours Elephant. I too love the GoPro's - I think that they are incredible. I'm a huge keen surfer and all of the surfers that I follow film on these. Wonderful. Have lots of fun :)

Hi Elephant and Michael!

Yes I love the GoPro concept, price is great and it's the size of a matchbox with one even shooting in 4K. They have some great social media & a superb channel on YouTube. I love the way that its a young team of guys from university that set up the business and have remained true. Their marketing is clever in the way that they give most extreme sports guys one to document and blog!

Very nice. Like you, Elephant, I still use my iPhone 4S for taking pics & HD video. I've read that the new 6S may have a superb camera built into it, so that may be my next upgrade. But i'll go for a 128GB next time around as I use it for everything :)

Michael the Lumix are lovely! Highly regarded by Leica :)

I used a very nice Nikon DSLR at one of my radio stations and it was incredible picture quality wise, but just too cumbersome to the with me and too showy for walking around the city - I thought that i'd get mugged! There is a saying 'The best camera is the one that you have with you to take that shot' :) I agree!

Sweet. Back in the day when I was heavily into film photography, I always wanted both a Hasselblad MF camera (not too unaffordable if you wanted the basic kit with the waist level finder, one back, body, and the standard 80 mm lens, but any other lens got hyper expensive fast). I wound up with a Kiev 60 just so I could use the MIR 30 mm fisheye lense, and with a Rolleiflex TLR with the Zeiss Tessar lens that I traded my McIntosh MC240 for. I also had a YashicaMat 124G TLR MF camera which was a Japanese copy of the Rollei. I can well remember my initial impressions after getting the Rollei, what a piece of mechanical perfection! Turning the film advance on the Yashica was like turning the handle on a coffee grinder compared with the Rollei, which was just as smooth as silk and snicked home with a delightfully solid click. All other controls were just silky smooth as well, definitely a quality piece of gear that deserved its reputation.

Now, what I lust after but don't shoot cameras enough to justify is the digital version of the classic Leica rangefinder body and a few lenses, but all that kit, body and lenses, is eye bleedingly expensive. So, I settle for my old Minolta DSLR and a few lenses.

You told my story...

elephant wrote:

My Minolta and its lenses date back to 1975 !

 

Somewhere from then I lost my passion for stills however for a brief while I had a passion for capturing the family on video.

 

However I still lust after the great still photography cameras like Leica.

 

My GoPro was an experiment to see if I could reignite my passion before spending too much unwisely.

 

At the moment the jury is out ......

While I have a Sony Alpha 100, basically a rebadged Minolta DSLR after Sony bought Konica Minolta, I've never been happy with any modern auto focus camera. My favorite camera of all time, which I still have, is my 1976 Minolta SRT-201. Best camera I've ever owned, and the prime lens, a Rokkor X f1.7 50 mm, is the best lens I own. Wonderful bokeh on it, just buttery smooth out of focus areas and quite sharp. The 50 f1.7 I have for autofocus Minoltas sucks. Tack sharp but the bokeh is a spikey, edgy mess that looks bad. I'd read that the original Minolta lens designers were in love with Leica lenses which also were noted at superior in that respect.

Like you I used to have a major photography thing going on, but never got attracted by video. I don't like autofocus cameras, which includes my DSLR, because my main shooting style is not automatic, I do careful focusing by hand and use f stop to control depth of field, and evaluating that on a modern camera without a decent focusing screen/aid is almost impossible. If someone made a DSLR with a good manual ground glass/fresnel/split screen focusing screen I'd be all over it.

But there's lots of scenic things and historical things around where I live, so I should charge up the camera, hit the road, and do some photography. I wound up donating my substantial darkroom, even then I had a hard time finding a school that wanted it.