Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/10/14
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> You mention having to "remind" the thrysistor what it does for a living. I > recently decided to take my Vivitar 283 out of retirement of about 10 years. > I needed it as a good compact flash to use with my M3/M6's. I put a new set > of betteries in and the exposures were perfect first shot! What a great little gun it is - I had forgotten. > > Gerry Just used my own 283 today for a really interesting project. I contracted with Humboldt State University to do aerial photographs for quality control on a recently completed map of Northern California. It involves randomly selected points, from which we fly a randomly selected vector for twenty miles, shooting 10 stereo pairs along the transect. I hooked up the Vivitar 283 as an indicator of when the camera has gone off, and it really saved the day! Once I forgot to pull the magazine slide out of the Hasselblad film back and another time, I forgot to set the counter to '1' on an older style magazine. I could not hear the shutter, so when the 283 did not go off, I knew something was wrong and was able to quickly correct things. The 283 also did well, considering that it was hanging out the open door of the Coast Guard Dolphin helicopter, along with the ELM Hasselblad, all mounted on a steel plate jammed under my seat with a bit of shock mounting. The view of the North Coast out the open door was spectacular below my feet. The only scary part was reaching out the change magazines with nothing but 1000' of air between my $400 magazines and the ground. I should be able to pick up the first transparencies in about an hour, then will be shooting three days a week for the next three weeks. The Coast Guard crews are great. Your tax dollars are being used to support a good cause, so thank you all for a great flight today! Once everything is running like clockwork, I will take up the Leicas for some special shots between transect flying. Regards, Gary Todoroff Tree LUGger