| I still like real shops |
 I still like real shops
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Aug. 1st, 2009 @ 02:08 pm 
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So, I went back to my camera shop with my tripod in hand.
"I have a problem," I said. "The head of my tripod won't stay on."
"Won't stay on? Hm." The camera shop guy looked at the camera shop woman. "Maybe it needs to be screwed on?" he mused, unzipping its carry bag.
Taking it by the legs, he pulled it out of the bag.
Clunk.
The head fell off, leaving its inner bits exposed.
There was a pause.
"No," the camera guy said. "It's not supposed to do that."
So, he took it into the back and brought out a new one; the borked one will be returned to the manufacturers.
When I got home, Dean said that while she was pleased the people at my camera shop were replacing my stuff so readily when it was borked, she was concerned that they'd had to replace everything. I hastily explained that they've only replaced two things, one of those things being a $30 filter that was in fact perfectly functional, just not actually perfect, and the other being the tripod, which was broken in a way that they'd never even seen before. I wouldn't even have bothered to get the filter replaced had I not been at the shop anyway, for unrelated reasons, and thought to pull it out and show it to them.
And they remain really nice and helpful, and I like their service. In addition to my own experiences, I've overheard things like:
- A customer calling about buying a $2,000 accessory for his camera, to which one of the camera guys, asked by the person who took the call for his input, said: "It's not worth the money."
- A customer calling, and being told by the person taking the call: "No, if you're on your way and we know you're coming, we'll wait for you." This was today - they were about half an hour from closing time, but a young woman had called in desperate, urgent need of film, so the woman at the shop assured her that they would stay open past closing to sell her film. (The shop woman suspected she has an assignment she's left to the last minute.)
Me, I'm going to stay digital for my camera work until further notice, because not having to mess with film is really really nice. I can't see myself using film again unless I become a professional photographer AND can set up my own darkroom.
And even then... digital is better for some things. For example, last night I was working on an ISO speed of 3200, which is *really damn fast*. ISO 3200 is the highest my camera can go (it can fake it higher, but noise issues get serious). This is also the highest speed that you can get in film - except using it on my digital camera is trivial, and ISO 3200 is a nightmare to process.
You can't use a safelight in your darkroom - you have to handle it in TOTAL darkness. Afterglow from fluourescent lights or timer displays will fog the film. If you're taking it through an airport, say, you can't let it go through the X-ray machines. You have to keep it chilled when it's not in your camera. And getting decent pictures in lighting conditions that need ISO 3200 is already tricky.
Digital is my friend. I take pictures in low light, and it works fine. There is some ISO noise - I suspect less than film would produce - but it's auto-corrected by the camera, and if you're scaling down the images at all (which you pretty much have to, with images from a 15.1MP camera) then the slight loss of sharpness this causes becomes undetectable. And that's without taking advantage of all the post-processing you can do with image editing software.
tl;dr: I love my camera.
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