My son took out the old Canon SLR camera during the weekend and started asking technical questions.  He’s been playing around with the Kodak ZR lately, and as part of his school curriculum, they’d be studying photography next year.

 

He’s a late bloomer, as his younger sister has been interested in photography since she was in grade school, and using the Canon.  I’ve retired the SLR a while back and was using a motley group of digital point-and-shoots from Sony, Pentax, Fuji and Canon.

 

To answer his questions I had to go back to the basics of photography:  light, and the capture of light.  After a short discussion where we also connected the Kodak to the TV in order to better see the metering and on-screen info, he started a more thorough study of the manual SLR.  It’s not really a full manual, but in order to explain the relationship of the camera elements, I had to use the manual features.

 

Even with the use of a point-and-shoot and digital cameras, it all boils down to the capture of light and the relationship of the focal length, the aperture, and the shutter speed.  (Admittedly, the ISO rating is slowly losing significance.)  And the best way to explain the inter-relationship of these elements is to use a manual setting.

 

I gave my son an assignment:  to use the old Canon SLR to take some shots and study how to use the controls.  We will, of course, have to buy film for that exercise.

 

I also pointed out the depth-of-field markers on the Canon’s 50mm lens.  It’s quite hard to explain the concept of depth of field if your digital camera has a very deep depth of field, where everything is in focus.  Though it has interesting effects for various shots.

 

During further discussion, I explained that there are some shots where the only option is to use the camera’s manual settings.  And, in fact, there are some circumstances where it would be faster to shot multiple subjects or take multiple shots with the manual settings.  This is due to the auto-focus taking up to two seconds (depending on the camera) to properly read the subject.  I’ve ruined shots because of the auto-focus feature.

 

And I am still not too trusting of a digital camera’s white-balance.

 

On a whim, I took out some old copies of photo magazines and showed him a photo of the regular gear carried by an Italian photojournalist, Ferdinando Scianna.  When on assignment, Scianna carried six SLRs.  He uses  four Nikons with prime lenses,  two of which are full manual camera FM2s.  He uses the FM2s for their mechanical reliability, and besides, these don’t have any batteries.  His other Nikons are a N6006 and a N8008.  The prime lenses on the Nikons were 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 180mm. He also carried a Canon EOS 10S with 20-35mm zoom and a titanium-bodied Olympus OM-4T with a 70-210mm zoom.  That was in 1992.

 

Nowadays, I doubt if there is any reason why a professional photographer would use a manual camera.  Except for the concern of running out of battery power for a photo journalist.