The Photo Essay

I love words. I love images. Together, when combined just right, you get pure beauty. For a wonderful example, find Two Muses on my link list. While Lynn (at Two Muses) makes pure poetry, the photo essay in the strictest sense is a thing of beauty too, a gorgeous knot of words and image.

Whilst bumbling around on Flickr, I stumbled upon a local photographer who back in the late 1970's shot some wonderful images of a special place in San Francisco. Do yourself a favor and check out Xtoid (Tony) on Flickr. Here's a direct link to his Post Manilatown Archive 1978-1980 set. I'll leave it at that and let his words and images do the rest. If you do visit give him an "atta-boy" for capturing something special.

Single Lens Reflex Camera

I love rangefinder cameras. For anything in the 28-90mm focal length it's the first camera I grab. Outside of that, in the macro and telephoto ranges, the mighty RF's usefulness begins to degrade. In those situations an SLR really shines. I own an SLR, and I use it, too. I shoot a fair amount of my kids' sports—soccer and karate mostly. For the soccer, the SLR comes in very handy. Here's my SLR kit:




It's a Nikom FM3A with an MD-12 motor drive. I use a 80-200mm, but the lens pictured here is the 55/2.8 Micro. Clean, huh? I also have a couple of Canons (AE-1 & AE-P) and a Nikon 2002, but the FM3A is my SLR baby right now.

Good deals can be had on SLR's these days. These beauties are being shoveled off for dirt cheap. Everyone is fearing that film will disappear overnight and they'll be left holding a useless lump of metal. So they're looking to sell of their metal to buy a lump of plastic. For a quick perusal of some heavy metal SLR's, the cameras that can literally take a beating and keep on clicking, check out RFF's sister site, DSLRexchange, and specifically THIS thread. We're showing off our kits. Note: You may have to join the site to see the thread.

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The Deepest of Blacks