There’s an old joke. An urban legend, actually, that originated on the internet over a decade ago. It’s about a computer tech-support specialist who gets a call from a particularly frustrating customer. The customer can not get his computer to work. After a series of questions, to which the customer gives obtuse answers, the computer tech finally finds out that the customer is in a power outage and that this is the real reason his computer won’t work. Not a technical difficulty. The computer tech instructs the customer to re-package his computer and take it back to the store he got it from.
The customer asks, “Is it really that bad”?
“I’m afraid so.” Replies the computer tech.
“Well, all right then, I suppose. What should I tell them?”
“Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.”
If you have never read this, you can find a version of it in its entireity here.
I thought about this story a lot about a year ago.
I loved my digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR camera) so much, I suspect my wife was becoming jealous of it. As those of you who own one already know, one of the biggest annoyances and greatest causes of neurosis on a DSLR is dust on the sensor. The sensor is what used to be a frame of film but is now an insanely delicate small panel that captures the light/image that comes through the lens and records the information as a photograph.
The tiniest speck of dust, nearly invisible to the human eye, can show up as unsightly blackish-gray blobs on the final image. This was not a problem for one happy year of constant use of my camera. I only had two zoom lenses: one for wide shots, one to get closer to the action. I changed them rarely. It wasn’t until I began using prime (which are fixed focal length) lenses that this problem emerged again and again. The only thing worse than dust on your slr sensor is wet dust and, Florida being one of the more humid places in the world, their is nothing dry about anything as soon as you set foot out of your air-conditioned abode.
Every time you change a lens, a big benefit of owning an slr instead of a fixed-lens camera like a point and shoot, you expose it to this potential dust. In a state that is made up of sand floating on an aquifer, dust is inevitable.
The dust became so bad, I finally sent it back to the camera company (no longer under warranty) and they were kind enough to return my camera with a new sensor for the modest cost of $265. Really, why tell your customers they’re stupid when you can charge them $265?
My camera came back so clean and new looking, I first suspected they replaced the entire thing. I enjoyed the use of my like-new camera for…one day. I was at a festival. I was by a lake. It was windy. After photographing people at the event with the zoom I had on the camera’s body, I looked at cat tails and tall grass by the lake and really wanted to take some fine art photograph’s of it with my 50mm/1.4 prime. I wanted to so badly I, you guessed it, switched my lens under the worst possible conditions.
Having twenty years experience as a shop craftsman for my day job, I’ve made pieces like a specialty cabinet or podium, so fine in their detail, so elegant in their design, that they cost major corporations tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve worked on sets and other projects for the themed entertainment and convention industries that have delighted, by now, millions of people. I make my living from working materials to perfection and eliminating the slightest flaws. Certainly I was smart enough to clean my own camera’s sensor.
Wrong.
I tried blowers. I tried wands. Some showed little improvement. Some made the problem even worse. That dust became, to me, that infernal pink ring in Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.
Finally, in desperation, I looked across the room to see the computer owner’s weapon of choice: a can of condensed air. Oh yeah. That would definitely blast that pesky dust off of that sensor. I know you DSLR owners out there are cringing. I know you see that red circle with a slash through it neatly framing my Office Depot can of Cleaning Duster air. Hey, don’t worry. Look back up on my credentials as a craftsman. Just one quick blast and I’ll have the surface of that sensor cleaned good. There’s only one pesky speck of dust left. One quick blast and this terrible problem is gone for good.
Yeah.
What happened was I managed to blast a hair between the sensor cover and the sensor itself.
Yep, that’s right. Second sensor ruined.
That’s when I thought of the computer tech. I could just hear him saying, “You’re too stupid to own a DSLR”.
Ahh, the memory of the look on my wife’s face when I explained that I got one day’s use out of my $265 sensor but that it’s ruined again.
I thought of my first camera and how it was over thirty years old and worked great. I thought about film and how, though it does not have a lot of the conveniences of a modern DSLR, how the look of a film print blows digital out of the water.
I hit EBay and bought three camera bodies and four of the better prime lenses ever made for less than I would have paid for another sensor.
Now I’m making friends with film. It’s a lot harder to use, but it’s worth it. There’s a depth to the photography that digital, much as I loved it, can not capture. My photographs will be better than they ever could have been with digital for a myriad of reasons. Maybe that’s not so stupid after all.
The New Gear
Complete with knitted “lens condoms” courtesy of my wife, Jennifer
April 6, 2009 at 1:29 am |
Found your post as a related off one of mine…nice read. I started out with film (an old, full-manual Nikkormat) before moving to digital, so I definitely hear you about the depth and nuance it brings, especially the super-slow films like Fuji Velvia 50.
But…a big part of film’s superiority in terms of depth, etc, comes from its size. Most DSLRs use an APS-C sized image sensor, which is about 2/3 the size. Some of the higher end models have full frame, 35mm sensors, and seem to capture images that come a lot closer to replicating film.
As for me…I don’t think I’ll ever go back. I love the post-processing and easy archiving of digital too much.