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photography equipment

Sharon Wren asked:
<Right now I have a Kodak Focus Free 35 mm camera and a Polaroid Fun Flash digital camera. Both are fine for taking pictures of the kids, but will they work for a while for article-quality shots? >

Sharon - the answer depends on what the final use is going to be. You say these photos are for "articles". What kind of publication are they being published in? If it's a glossy four color magazine then you should use transparency (slide) film so that the person preparing the article for press has a good original to work with. A scan from a print will reproduce significantly worse in a magazine using a standard decent quality standard press.

If it's just a newspaper type publication, then you can get away with poorer quality originals. Even prints from the one-hour lab down the street may be acceptable. Of course, is just "acceptable" the level of quality you want associated with your words and images?

So the answer to your question is the ever-ready "it depends". If you want your photos to look good in the final published version, then a 35mm camera with a sharp lens, using slide film, is what you should use. Avoid the polaroid for publishing - your pictures will not be anywhere near as sharp as they need to be and equally as important, you are stuck with the arbitrary fixed aperture & lens setting decided upon by an engineer at Polaroid years ago to illustrate your articles. Your 35mm camera may be ok - I'm not familiar with it. Alot depends on the quality of the lens and whether you can adjust the aperture.

You should also know that you can get a decent used "prosumer" level camera pretty much anywhere for not alot of money, to start with. You may even have a friend with one on the shelf that you can borrow. Prices for used 35mm film cameras in surprisingly good condition have fallen through the floor into the sub-basement as professionals and serious hobbyists unload them to go digital. Even my Hasselblad is worth only a fraction of what it would have sold for a year ago. It's a good time to buy.

Rich Pomerantz


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