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Re: [OM] To improve, take more photos.. but to improve, take fewer phot

Subject: Re: [OM] To improve, take more photos.. but to improve, take fewer photos?
From: "John A. Lind" <jlind@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 19:16:12 -0500
At 14:49 3/14/02, Jim Brockaw wrote:

I got an MD-2 for motorcycle race pictures... I figured 5fps, I'd just pan along and get great pictures. Nope, didn't happen. I got a lot of 'half-bikes' where the motorcycle is ahead of or behind my pan.

Nearly every one of us with a motor drive or Winder 2 cannot resist the urge to put it on "Rock 'N Roll" shortly after acquiring it. I did it many years ago after buying the Winder 2. Ripped through that 36 exposure roll in no time, with a winder! That was the first and last time. There *must* be some utility for "sequence" mode (Barry Bean's posting), but I haven't experienced it yet. There has been great utility in "single" mode for dynamic and unpredictable situations in which one opportunity can rapidly follow another, or on occasions when keeping the eye firmly planted in the viewfinder between frames is important.

Mike Johnston wrote about "One Shot Charlie" in his March/April 2000 Photo Techniques "37th Frame" column. One Shot Charlie is Charles Hoff who shot sports (and a few other things) for the New York Daily News from the 1930's through the 1960's. Although his most famous photograph is the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst NJ, his sports photography deserves to be remembered much more, primarily his stellar B/W boxing photographs. He acquired the nickname from fellow reporters because he shot so very few frames of film, and for good reason. Hoff used an 8x10 view camera! Next time you're in a large bookstore, look to see if they have the book of Hoff's boxing photographs and browse through it. Consider the logistics required and constraints within which he worked to shoot very fast-moving sports using large sheet film in a view camera. It changed my thinking entirely about "the decisive moment," and how to deliberately, and reliably, capture it. Every time I use the Winder 2 now I think about Charles Hoff and how the winder can be a great convenience, but it cannot be allowed to become a substitute for anticipating a decisive moment and timing shutter release to capture it.

-- John


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