Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/04/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]As far as film usage for me, when I was shooting film on a daily basis at my newspaper, I would shoot between 2 and 12 rolls a day, depending upon how many jobs I had that day. But there are other factors. My film usage went down when we switched to autofocus Canon cameras as I was more sure of my keepers due to focus. However, my Leica M always had had a great percent of keepers for the reasons all you Leica M lovers know. It also made sense for me as I used Nikon. As you may not know, the manual focus Nikon focuses backwards of Canon and Leica. When we switched I could concentrate on just one camera system for focus and thus my keepers improved. I have never used the manual focus option on my eos cameras with the exception of a tweak with the 16~35mm lenses. I never thought about how many rolls I burned up, I always had a ton of film with me. At least 20 extra rolls at any given time. In my mind it was more important to work the subject until I had "the" image of the event. Sometimes, I would be very economical and shoot six assignments on only 2 rolls of film. It all really depends upon the situation at hand. I always have deadlines to keep my usage in check. Today, with shooting eos 1d digital, I go out in the field with four 256mb cards and usually fill three of them on a busy day. At ISO 400 I get about 100 shots per card. Which is around six rolls of film. But the chief advantage of digital is I can erase the dogs before I get back to the office if I need more room. National geographic shooters are on a different plane than me. Their passion is so overwhelming for their subject they nearly live it. Their personal lives have seen a high divorce rate and I am personally not sure if I ever would want that. So we all have compromise and mine is to do community photojournalism. To give you an idea of the good stuff we do here is a link to our scrapbook pages, which load as .pdf files (they are kinda big, be patient). Digital has given us more freedom to do this type of stuff, as the powers that be are always concerned about the bottom line. Our staff loves it because the work flow is faster and that means I can stay at a job longer. http://www.wisinfo.com/sheboyganpress/news/scrapbook/index.shtml Even today, as my Leica Ms are purely a tool of personal expression, I always have at least 20 rolls of Tri-X handy. That way I do not avoid my film cameras. Yes, I am cheap as I use bulk loaded Tri-X. I use a good bulk loader, but I bulk load in total darkness so I can get usable frames to the end of the roll. Just don't trash me for using bulk film, I have heard all the arguments and I just happen to be very fussy how my loaders etc are kept. gck - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html